Discovering the Map : City-Making Through Rule & Play

Creating a map is a game of checks and balances. With these examples; map-making becomes an accidental art through the interpretation of information. Systems evolve playfully as they begin lives of their own. Rules take on new meaning as they assume a unique and visual logic.

Balance of Rule & Play

Jerry Gretzinger began his first map back in 1963. He has since become an accidental artist and curiously experimental cartographer. Beginning with a single sheet of paper, his map grew exponentially, spreading from surface to surface and neighborhood to neighborhood. Despite the artistic appearance of Gretzinger’s world, his map-making process has a very structured set of rules. Each move is curated by a somewhat ‘Holy’ deck of cards relabeled with physical attributes and design characteristics. By choosing different cards to 'play’ the world - in turn - morphs, contracts and expands. Gretzinger becomes the translator, a witness as the world unfolds in front of him.

Here is a mesmerizing video documenting Jerry Gretzinger’s lifelong artistic experiment. The mini-documentary is called Mapping the Void, directed by Gregory Whitmore.

Value of Void

A critical mechanism of Jerry’s world is 'the void’. The void card allows for a dramatic change in landscape, which no other card provides. Blank white paper invades cities and countrysides, wiping the land clean as it moves along like a clorox wipe. While the first moves of this void are seemingly antiseptic and destructive, the blank paper subsequently provides for greater freedom and new growth. From the tabula rasa emerges a new city.

Art of the Id

Id (noun) the part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest.

Personally, I found a strong connection to Gretzinger’s work. I’d like to think that we’re both fictional city builders, exploring strange boundaries flirting the line between scribbling and city planning.

In the art of my collective @hitheryon - we adopted a similar strategy where the void became a valuable component to each composition. The four of us Hither Yonians drew exclusively on the same sheet of paper, canvas, mural, digital model. With four hands acting at once we desperately needed to come up with rules that would help create compositions, not chaotic blobs of pen and ink.

For our experimental “Id Drawing” series - we used square grids religiously. Each Id drawing began as a blank sheet of paper with perfectly clean pencil grids of various sizes. Acting with the mindsets of architects approaching an empty plot of land, we filled in an equal area of blank space (between 1 and 64 squares, depending on the size of paper.) Once complete we rotated positions. The process was repeated 6 times around, as we developed an overall composition playing off of other's unique styles and ideas.

“Id Scale IV” is a 70cm x 70cm hand drawing made with pen and ink.

As the paper space is filled in and passed along, an interplay of new thoughts and concepts become realized. The grid-structure allows for borders between your own idea and the next participant, but it also provides the ability to connect and expand on a pre-existing theme. You have the ability to mediate or ignore, expand or contract, allowing the drawing to become a dynamic commentary imbued with pen and ink.

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follow me @voronoi | design collective @hitheryon