Marriage and Divorce: Is the Evolution of Landscape Paintings Ending in the Fields of Topographic Cartography and Graphic Design?

Abstract

The transmission of geospatial facts is a crucial necessity since creatures move in space and need to communicate. We can observe the collective communication behaviour of insects, which has been brought to perfection during evolution and is highly effective for these creatures. Beside gesture, verbal or dance-based communication, traditional human artefacts for a visual description of space go back 8000 years.

Whereas oldest preserved maps show very large scales, topological relations or religious infiuenced descriptions in Europe, the late middle ages come up with grandiose techniques of 3D landscape paintings trying to transmit a real as well as fantastic world. Refinements of presentation methods for the third dimension showed up the high potential for military purposes soon. From that point onwards the happy couple of art and graphical description of space seemed to have filed for divorce. Military purposes aimed on developing high information-density and appropriate scales. In the end information extraction with these maps asks for enormous cognitive load. On the other hand landscape painting became more artistic, fantastic and as far as degenerated art in order to attract, unsettle or criticize.

Nowadays a wide range of topographic maps uses highly developed semiotics for specific media with the aim to document, visualize and archive geospatial information. As long as a map is created and methods for archiving exist, the task of cartography seems to be fulfilled. The question for and work on impact, individual understanding and progressive linguistics barely occur. Thus the evolution of pictorial landscapes seems to have reached its end.

This contribution faces the question if there is still a perspective for landscape painting in cartographic science – or have we really reached the end of pictorial landscape evolution in cartography. How open is the science community to expand the traditional understanding of a map? If the community is open-minded, are there further perspectives for the pictorial landscape evolution especially with latest technologies? Where are potentials for pictorial landscapes, or should it be called virtual cartographic environments? May cartography come to a marriage with graphic design again? Answers, thoughts as well as remarks on these questions will be given with strong relation to history, present scientifi c work and outstanding examples in graphic design.