Above are just a few details from Amy Schissel’s massive installation, Silent Cities. The monumental work combines traditional cartography with internet mapping to create the dense imagery seen above.
The museum’s information on the artist and her work-
Increasingly, as we go about our twenty-first century lives, we try to bridge the gaps between spaces we see and navigate in both the physical and online worlds. Given augmented reality, every physical, geographical space is interpenetrated with information, so all physical spaces are now also informational spaces. Silent Cities is a melding of notational systems taken from traditional cartography and internet mapping to explore new dimensions of our twenty-first century world. Schissel specifically examines how physical location, set against the ability to be everywhere at once via net-space, presents contradictions of identity in geopolitical relationships: interpretations of personal and collective history are reshaped by the onset of digital information technology, offsetting our sense of civic legibility. While addressing the progressively dematerialized quality of our data-driven culture, the conflation of traditional and cyber mapping systems seeks out new social cartographies and presents fantastical meta-narratives of analog and digital worlds colliding in this large-format world map where boundaries between countries, states, and even continents disappear. Inevitably a hybrid visual language is embodied, emphasizing junctures where physical, factual cartography melds with effervescent, informational traffic, within the time-honored strategies of drawing.
Schissel’s drawing process is twofold. It records physical and imaginary journeys of the contemporary body through the simultaneous spaces of the physical and cyber, marking out “new world” terrain. Here, historical truth and accuracy in traditional cartography meet the ever-fluctuating, boundary-dissolving, architectures of cyberspace from the viewpoint of a female navigator, plotting, measuring, and tracking. Schissel seeks to pinpoint herself within rapidly shifting spatial relationships through a labor-intensive and process-oriented practice; her daily recording of repetitive mark-making becomes embodied and cerebral, drawing out expeditions in a never-ending atlas. Secondarily, she incorporates the use of a large wall-hanging X-Y axis pen plotter compatible with open-source software. After drawing layered cartographies by hand over the entire working surface, she digitally photographs fragments of them, then manipulates the images using bitmap imaging software, finalized as JPEG and DXF vector files. Using an open-source software program (written in Java), she continues to manipulate the files on the X and Y axes using simple coding instructions to generate new images to feed to the large-format pen plotter. While the plotter moves over the work, she also moves the paper around and masks areas to interrupt the machine-assisted interpretation of her initial hand drawings. This creates fine linear webs over portions of the drawing, further adding to the density and amorphous nature of the work. In the end, Schissel works along with the machine, drawing with pen, Sharpie, and graphite.
A been-there graphite smudge on a white flat-land surface becomes an instruction manual for how to build simultaneous worlds encapsulating the contemporary experience of being here, there, and everywhere, reflecting an ever-shifting identity as a physical, female in an ultra-dynamic hyper-world.