It Comes in Many Forms
ANIMATED MAP PROJECTION | RISD Museum
It Comes in Many Forms: Islamic Art from the Collection gathers textiles, decorative arts, and works on paper, representing the many facets of the Islamic world. The curator, Tayana Fincher, wanted visitors to understand the geographical breadth of these objects.
There were a couple of interesting challenges in creating this piece. First, we were sensitive to the fact that while being useful, maps also have a darker side. They can be deceptive, present a false sense of surety, and be oppressive tools of colonialism and empire. But this project was not about reinventing the map, and we needed audiences to be presented with a version of the globe that would be at least somewhat familiar. We settled on using the Winkel tripel projection, which is lauded for minimizing the distortions that commonly plague flat maps of the round Earth. I purposefully pixelated its borders to add a slight sense of geographical fuzziness. The sharp angularity also gave nod to the complex geometries and patterning often found in traditional Islamic art.
It Comes in Many Forms: Islamic Art from the Collection gathers textiles, decorative arts, and works on paper, representing the many facets of the Islamic world. The curator, Tayana Fincher, wanted visitors to understand the geographical breadth of these objects.
There were a couple of interesting challenges in creating this piece. First, we were sensitive to the fact that while being useful, maps also have a darker side. They can be deceptive, present a false sense of surety, and be oppressive tools of colonialism and empire. But this project was not about reinventing the map, and we needed audiences to be presented with a version of the globe that would be at least somewhat familiar. We settled on using the Winkel tripel projection, which is lauded for minimizing the distortions that commonly plague flat maps of the round Earth. I purposefully pixelated its borders to add a slight sense of geographical fuzziness. The sharp angularity also gave nod to the complex geometries and patterning often found in traditional Islamic art.
The second challenge arose from the fact that we needed to situate objects spanning the 12th century to the 21st. While we can pinpoint the exact city where the contemporary objects were made, older objects' attributions are much more vague. Some are associated with entire countries, and some with empires that spanned large geographical swaths that disregard contemporary geopolitical boundaries. After some experimentation, I settled on signaling location by dropping a pinpoint at the approximate center of an object's origin, and then having a circular starburst radiate outward from that pinpoint. This served to both highlight the small point on the large area of the map, and also lend some fuzziness to the specificity implied by a pinpoint. In some cases, we had two pinpoints to demonstrate that the artist came from one place and the object was made in another location.
Finally, the objects appear in chronological order, but the pinpoints do not accumulate. The map's purpose was to situate the objects for the viewer, not to tell a geographic narrative.