Thesis Abstract
Small fictions can reveal larger truths. Cartographers use the term “ground truth”: when drawing maps from aerial photographs, they send someone to walk the terrain, to confirm and clarify their analyses of remote sensing data. A finished map adds together large- and small-scale observations. A broader kind of ground truth guides my thesis investigation. My work builds awareness of the general, attends to the particular, and connects these two vantage points with interpretation. Aerial photographs play a large role in my work because they demonstrate the process perfectly: they lack meaning until someone interprets them, and looks deeply.
In my view, graphic design resembles the writer’s craft. Both trade in large works built from small parts, and both intend to communicate. But the strongest parallel appears in their working methods: the graphic designer, like the writer, gathers material, organizes unconsolidated information, and presents the new whole in a way that engages the intellect and excites emotion. Yet designers customarily present someone else’s ideas. What could happen if the designer, like the writer, also defined the ground for his investigations?
I test this vision of graphic design by applying it to landscape history – a study of the ways in which people use land, how those uses have changed, and how the changes reflect shifts in society. Much like graphic design, landscape studies requires attention to large- and small-scale conditions and to interpretation. There are stories embedded in even the most ordinary landscapes. Physical evidence exposes some; others, fictional narratives, weave their way in among real threads. Yet these individual cases only gain significance when the designer connects them to larger patterns and attempts to interpret this new combination’s meaning. Factual and fictional narratives form part of the environment, for landscapes only become places when they acquire a sufficient patina of stories. By gathering and presenting these stories, the designer can intensify the shared understanding of landscapes and awareness of place.
