Japan’s “Superflat” Volcanoes

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Japan’s “Superflat” Volcanoes

November 21, 2011

Geological map of Japan’s Nasu volcano.

Art historian Svetlana Alpers described maps in seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture as “lenses” or “glasses to bring objects before the eye.” She wrote: “to an artist like Jacques de Gheyn, who on occasion made both, the map was the obverse of the drawing of a fly.” In the Netherlands, as the art of mapping developed alongside what was then a nascent tradition of landscape painting, the map decidedly rejected claims of objective representation, claiming in fact the opposite: the map enabled man to conquer the once inconceivably vast territories around him by subjectively distorting whatever information it conveyed. It was, in essence, a landscape painting but with a view that often defied the curvature of the earth.

Most of the maps that we actually use today distance themselves from the position of the super landscape painting, the most radically opposite being Google’s satellite map. But when I came across these Japanese geological maps of volcanoes on Wired, I could not help but think that these empirical charts created and used by the Geological Survey of Japan carried with them a strong element of Alpers’ metaphorical “lens.” More after the break.

Geological map of the Miyake-Jima volcano.

Geological map of the Iwate volcano.

The striking visual appeal of these geological maps has a lot to do with their stunning subject matter: aerial photographs of erupting volcanoes have an indisputable organic beauty about them, marked by lava, ash, and rock radiating from a circular center point. But in map form, the specific colors and the amorphous shapes used to represent thousands of years of ash and lava flows share the same flatness seen in Takashi Murakami’s pop art prints and canvases.

Satellite image of Sakurajima, a stratovolcano in the midst of an ongoing eruption.

The sensual dispersion of ink, delineated by thin black lines, illustrates one of nature’s most feared destructive forces as something so unthinkably splendid that it must be tamed on paper. Much like how violence is depicted in the Japanese prints of the Edo period, the topographical carnage of a volcano is likewise inverted into a graceful graphic, pressed into a mere two dimensions.

Geological map of the Sakurajima volcano.