As Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski observed in the early 1900s: “the map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” The point, in part, is that maps are representations of places rather than substitutes for reality, which has various physical and philosophical implications. At the same time, though, the flow of data from places to maps is not always one-directional — maps may be representations of reality, but they can shape reality, too. [...]
Finally, in 1744, the famous Cassini family of scientists in France created the first topographically accurate national map. The process was painstaking and piecemeal, and Britain wanted to do the same. Still, the whole-map approach they took wasn’t complete until 1853, 62 years after it was officially started. Then in the 1930s, they did a re-triangulation, to get more granular measurements, which took another 29 years. [...]
Occoquan, Virginia is one of those quiet, historical towns where wealthy middle-aged people go away for the weekend and buy art and BoHo clothing in small boutiques and then stroll along the waterfront, or at least, it was. Artist Lauren Jacobs was excited when in 2015 she won a juried place in a cooperative gallery in Occoquan called The Artists’ Undertaking, both to have an outlet for her work and to be part of a group of other like-minded artistic community. Her earthy, surreal mixed-media paintings and sculptures sold well for a while… until Pokémon GO came to town.
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