ANSTIEG (3/6) Print

„… every map displays a specific world; so does it display the world as it is, as it was, as it will be, as it could be, or as it should be?“ (Christian Jacob: Towards a Cultural History of Cartography, 1996) The British field surveyor Sir George Everest was largely responsible for surveying the meridian arc from the southernmost point of India north to Nepal, which took him almost 40 years. Even though he had nothing to do with the discovery and measurement of Mount Everest itself, the highest mountain in the Himalayas was named after him. Mapping becomes an external reality and archival device for objective knowledge and reality. „Maps are statements about the physical nature of the world, its shape and its limits. They display beliefs or concepts about the nature of the world and how it can be depicted.“ (Christian Jacob) The technique of carving in this woodcut correspond with the so called Perlin Noise, a type of gradient noise used in computer graphics. The so called „fractal landscape“ is a computer generated algorithm of surfaces that imitates the appearance of a natural terrain, which was first introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot in the late 70´s. This woodcut plays with several respective ideas of the predictability, representability and controllability (or uncontrollability) of the world. The image motifs of these maps Osnowski „translates“ on the wooden plate into a simple linear code and manually cuts into the wood: Horizontal and vertical lines in precise, constant intervals form the basic graphic structure. All prints of this series are printed on high quality 240g/m2 ARCHES paper (Velin Johannot) with beautiful deckle edges and watermark. Due to the fine grain texture of the paper the handprinted images become very vibrant and because the actual printing is done manually, without the use of machines or presses, using only a large glass lens.