The Map: Art and drawings representation and the human condition.

What is a map?

A map is ever changing and suitable to the persons identifying it. A map to a certain field of expertise is one thing, different to another field. What is a map in a creative field and how do we represent our ever changing surroundings through this map in the form of art and architectural drawings.

Before the 20^thC representation was really a two dimensional idea. Artists and architects portrayed what they could see or what they wanted to see. Depictions were three dimensional; however the way the stories, life and architecture were conveyed was simple and conventional for the time. Although artists and architects sought out to show the city and its people changing socially and politically, techniques that were harnessed were subtle in their deployment, still adhering to the conventions of the time.

At the turn of the century these ideas of representation evolved and became more complex, techniques that were used became more and more unconventional. It was with the modernists, however that the world of representation came crashing down. Representation evolved and became three dimensional.

It is towards the end of the 20^thC that representational techniques become harder and harder to convey ideas about an ever exponentially growing city, post mass consumerism we have now reached an age of mass communication, globalization and technological advances never felt before. Representation has now become fourth dimensional, adding to the representational ideas of the 20^thC it has now become not only, what we see and how we see it but also the effects that these things we are seeing through the city are having on us, our human condition. Technology has become smaller and smaller, now invisible. It is the effects of the city on us that we now have to represent fourth dimensionally. It is the effects of technology that we now have to see. This is our human condition.