+JAY HART BIO

I want to introduce people to the broadscale beauty of large swaths of earth, with perspectives that are fresh and penetrating. In doing so I also want to simplify our view of that big world, so that we can feel at home in a broader sense, becoming inherently less anthropocentric, and approaching each other with a high level of respect for our diversity.

As we trace the paths of our daily lives, we become used to thinking of the spaces around us as linear, routine, even dull. On trips to faraway places, we measure distance in travel time, too often ignoring what we have actually driven through or flown over. We think we know the world we live in - we have a glut of digital information about it - but most of us perceive it only within a confined personal range.

New opprtunities in the last decade have allowed us to explore our surroundings in fresh ways, broadening our horizons in the process. A different form of topographic information has dramatically increased our knowledge of landscapes around the globe. Low cost archives and computer advances have enabled our seeing new visions of where we live, where we wander, where we learn.

During 30 years of map making, I have been made humble by the wonderful variety of earth's landforms. My work has often stitched quilts of aerial photography and satellite imagery across large areas of Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the US. Now, I am focused on developing an art form with the patterns of regional-scale land. For the first time, we are able to see a vast sweep of terrain that covers a thousand miles, yet still incorporates a level of detail that is truly intricate. Scales are just broader than would be the most generous eyeful of human perception (even from a jetliner). The prints are very large so that the viewer will feel small.

I've used strong but respectful colors to show at the same time the subtle terrain changes and the framework of broad patterns. Whatever satellite imagery I’ve overlain has been presented in natural color. I have not used any annotation, because the views need to be as unbroken and unlabelled as the ground itself. While each piece is rendered as a vertical view, true to map, I have often used a rotation from the usual North-up orientation, in order to improve a piece's composition. Even with the many years of practice, it is difficult to predict if any notional composition will ultimately succeed. It is almost as if the views emerge with their own embodied energy - after all, the earth is the artist here, and I am merely the conduit.

What is shown? Some are of places familiar, but many more are arcane, made abstract in their obscurity, and chosen for their beauty of form, for the stories which they tell just by existing. There are myriad ridge patterns and unique drainage geometries, random arrays of villages, the inkblots of megalopolis, dunes of uncommon character, deltas and rivers deserving repute, and many combinations of the recognizable and the mysterious. Plans include the expansion of the collection into the hundreds. The earth is vast, and thankfully for us it can now be more easily explored.

These drainages in Shaanxi Province of north central China comprise about 30% of a vast complex of eroded tributaries to the Huang He river. The soil derives from silt particles blown in through the ages from the Gobi Desert to the north (right). The deposits are called loess ('lurse'), and their extraordinary erodability gives the annual floods on the river a heavy load of fertile sediment. This in turn has made the North China Plain to the east a cradle of agricultural initiative, and a driving force in the development of the Chinese civilization. Two views of the same area show elevation with and without a sun shadow. The long edge is 350 kilometers.

Useful Web Links

The University of Maryland's Global Land Cover Facility has enormous volumes of digital orbital imagery as well as elevation data, available as free downloads so long as each user takes small sets at a time.
http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml

The CGIAR (Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research) has its CSI (Consortium for Spatial Information) facility in Sri Lanka, where they offer up-to-date 5x5 degree tiles of void-filled SRTM data. Their server has recently been vastly improved.
http://srtm.csi.cgiar.org/Index.asp

Jonathan de Ferranti has made it his mission to fill rigorously the radar voids in key mountain areas of the world, and to make his work collaborative and accessible to all.
http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html

Comprehensive access to digital spatial data, sometimes a bit dated, and often at considerable cost, but a great clearinghouse nonetheless.
http://www.geographynetwork.com/main.html

The best US government public giveaway has a difficult interface, and slow response, but is a fantastic integrated resource, limited in terms of volume available per visit.
http://seamless.usgs.gov/

Exceptional airphoto coverage of the entire US on 7.5 minute quadrangle tiles.
http://www-wmc.wr.usgs.gov/doq/

The oldie but goodie place to obtain any US/NASA civilian data going way back in time, often at considerable cost, but excellent for the time series applications.
http://edcsns17.cr.usgs.gov/EarthExplorer/