It's said that nobody is an island, and everyone on earth is connected in one way or another. If we can think of nothing else, we definitely have the earth in common. And if you zoom out enough, and hover above it all, the dividing lines become less apparent.
Welcome to Hovertown, a show about maps and how they help us understand our many-faceted world. Cartography allows us to put places in context -- our cities, our natural resources, our homes and workplaces, ourselves, our neighbors, and our needs -- and understand why things are the way they are, even how we can make things better. Hovertown is about spotlighting places in the world and layering various attributes visually in beautiful and accessible maps, to enhance our understanding not only of what's around us, but also of how things work -- or don't work -- and the patterns and forms that make up the tapestries of our places on earth.
Human society, despite all its chaos, is beautiful. The natural world it exists in, despite all that threatens it, is wonderful. It's all worth visualizing, and what shouldn't be celebrated should still be examined. Cartography has long been one of humankind's favorite tools for visualizing our places in the world, and for projecting what lies beyond. Draw a cool dragon if you don't know, and then chart a ship and go find it. Draw your own hometown street by street with color and lovely labels, and then go home and sleep in your bed. Maps have always been important because everyone has always been somewhere, and have always known that there are many 'wheres' where one could be. And when you make a purposeful map that asks a question about a place, and you draw data with accuracy and clarity, you get layers of information that then yield patterns. Then you can see the relationships between places in your city, and your city and the next city, and these cities with the geography under and around them. The map begins to answer the question, and possibly generate more.
So we can begin to see if the city needs a new library, or if an area should be given historic preservation status, or how economic and racial demographics tend to distribute here. Is there a place especially vulnerable to a potential flood, and who lives there? What could be the reasons that crime is worse over here, than over there? Is there a place that doesn't exist at all anymore? Why is that, and who used to live there?
Although there are limitations to information and to how much a map can say, there will always be more we can use maps to visualize about our world, at all scales. At Hovertown we will produce maps that truthfully and beautifully represent data on a wide variety of topics, asking many kinds of questions about many different places, and then we'll talk about them. We'll curiously examine civilization from the smaller scale of regional architecture and cultural phenomena, to the bigger picture of geological and large-scale infrastructural elements. We'll also present articles about the art of cartography, as well as a gallery of other kinds of design work.
Let's travel around and spotlight places on earth for what makes them beautiful, and try to find and solve problems along the way. Everywhere is Hovertown. We'll glide from place to place, looking down and exploring the world through cartographical lenses, considering how we live on the earth we have in common, and visualizing the places we call home.
Follow Hovertown on social media and keep an eye out for out next adventure!
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