Geographia, Paragraphs 1-6

150-color screenprint with acid dye on silk dupioni | 8’ x 8’ x 15’ (installation) | each panel 6′ h x 4′ w | 2013

In this piece, the oldest surviving treatise on cartography, Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography (2^nd c. AD), is encoded on six panels. Rectangular “bars” are used to stand for the words in the text which is hung to create a reading-like experience as one walks through and past the piece. Using a set of dye formulas from the archives at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, I mixed 150 colors equally distributed across the color spectrum. Each panel uses 1/6^th of those colors, assigned to particular words by their lexical and syntactic properties. Taken together, the six panels represent both the excerpted text from the Geography and the idea of cartography as an attempt to encompass the whole span of the world.