Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas Of Contemporary Cartographies, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist

There was at least some enjoyment in reading this book, though not as much as one would get from a competent and non-alternative atlas of various kinds. There was a point, though, when this book began to lose me, and that is when one of the contributors to the book made some sort of clumsy map and said that they had to do something because they had been asked to be a part of the project. That is not to say that this book was without pleasure altogether–it would be hard for a book of maps, no matter how incompetently done, and this book certainly has a lot of incompetent maps that seem to exist just for the sake of being alternative, to be without any sort of enjoyment to someone who enjoys cartography as much as I do. Still, there is a lot that could have made this book better, that is for sure. Perhaps a project that was more focused on the diversity of maps in general that can be made, or maps that combine cartography with as many other fields as possible, would have made for a more interesting read. As it is, this book seems to have been published for the edgy population of alternative cartographers who hate America and the world as it is and who want to portray a world of their own imagination, with generally less than impressive results.

This book is a bit more than 200 pages, but a lot of it (mercifully) is empty space that is designed to puff out the book so that it looks like it is as big as most books are, rather than being small and sparse. The book itself is divided into five sections. The first section contains redrawn territories, some of them schematic in nature, some of them generally artistic, in ways that look at different aspects of the lands from which we originally see them. This is followed by a section that charts human life, which looks at issues of health and other concerns. This is followed by a section on natural science, which includes a fair variety of mostly fairly simple drawings of the brain or of geological ages or related subjects. After this comes a look at invented worlds, which includes maps of an imagined technological world, which is not quite as creative as it could have been but still at least somewhat enjoyable. The last section of the book is made up of the unmappable, which ends up being mostly drawings but not quite as unmappable as advertised, it could be well imagined, appearing as it does in at atlas. The book ends

Still, even if this book was a major disappointment, the book does at least hint at ways that the book could have been better. One thing that I figured that someone would have done, but no one did, is to create an imagined world of music genres, to go along with the imagined world of technology that fill this book (and that are some of the more enjoyable efforts here, at least). Alternatively, people could have tried to map out their own psyche, to show the way in which their thoughts and behavior have shaped the terrain of their own minds. No one was creative in that fashion, though, and that was a disappointment to me at least, because those are the kind of maps I would like to see. Even efforts like literature maps mostly consisting of authors I have never heard of was at least some effort to broaden cartography to the study of genre, and it was to be appreciated on that level even if the artwork and design were so rudimentary I could have done so easily. This is a book that promises something more interesting than it delivers, but if you like maps there will be at least some enjoyment here, if not as much as could have been the case otherwise.