A Typographical Map of the Silk Road
Several years ago, I heard Yo Yo Ma perform with his Silk Road ensemble. He was appearing at the annual TED Conference in Monterey so he also spoke about the ensemble and its inspiration, the ancient Silk Road. His talk inspired this map. What I found particularly interesting was that to imagine the Silk Road you have to stop thinking about countries. They simply did not exist at the time. So I decided to investigate what defined the routes of the silk road as it made its way from the Mediterranean Sea to the Yangtze River in today's China. As I traced the routes in an atlas it became clear that the routes were defined by geography... primarily mountain ranges and deserts punctuatted by lakes and the occasional oasis. The geography becomes particularly clear in the mountain ranges surrounding the Hindu Kush. There the Silk Road traces its way through a knot of mountains and passes, including the infamous Khyber Pass. The Silk Road was not one route but many. One of the reasons for this is that certain routes were prone to bandits and crime. As word of this spread among travellers, they would switch to an alternate route. Yo Yo Ma referred to the Silk Road as the Internet of the ancient world. It fostered a vast exchange of ideas, goods and culture. The Stradivarius cello that he plays is itself a product of the Silk Road with the ideas and materials for the instrument coming from all over the Silk Road. While working on the map, I researched some of the Silk Road towns online. Many of the thriving trading and oasis towns of the Silk Road are shadows of their former selves... some no longer exist. But on the Internet they have a special existence. Not only do they exist in the form of thousands of links to pages describing their history but many are un-corrupted by the commercial side of the Internet. Interest in the towns is dominated by historians and not companies so you can explore the town without fear of being sold something. My Silk Road Map explores two themes... maps that are defined entirely by text and maps of places the no longer exist. Maps exist somewhere between images that we view and a document that we read. When I was a graphic designer, I created several maps that were produced as silk screens. This process required that I separate the map into separate screens for each color. In doing this, I noticed that the screen containing all of the type was still quite readable as a map. You could see the layout of the streets, parks and rivers entirely from just looking at the words. It inspired me to try and design maps like this one with the specific intention of just designing the words. The Silk Road is also a map of a place that no longer exists. In this way it is like my map of the Town of Kensico, NY. The political side of maps means that there are places all over the World that have been settled by one population and then invaded, colonized or replaced by another. This results in place names that are a mix of indigenous and colonial names. Some places (see my map of Sakhalin) go through multiple evolutions of naming. Other places names (Peking, Bombay, Madras) were renamed under colonial domination only to be changed back at a later date. The themes of my Silk Road Map... bold color, typography as geography and the politics of place are what interest me most. While I find it easier to find ideas and create my more traditional maps, I am more interested in pursuing my typographic maps.