Jerry's Map: A Procedural Art Project of an Imaginary City

Jerry's Map: A Procedural Art Project of an Imaginary City

Jerry's Map is a lifelong art project depicting an imaginary city, currently comprising over 4,000 individual 8x10 inch panels. The project functions as a two-dimensional virtual world where the evolution of the map is dictated not by the artist's whim, but by a complex interplay of rigid rules and randomly generated instructions from a custom card deck.

Procedural Generation via the Card Deck

The creative process is driven by a custom deck of approximately 100 cards. The artist draws a card and must complete the specified tasks before moving to the next, shifting the artist's role from a traditional creator to an observer of the system's output.

Instruction Categories

Instructions on the cards are divided into several functional categories:

  • Artistic Execution: Includes tasks such as spattering paint across four contiguous panels, creating new seed panels, mixing new paint colors, or screen printing nine contiguous panels.
  • Mastery and Reproduction: Instructions to update the master map element or copy current panels onto label paper for future collage work.
  • Material Sourcing: Directives to use specific materials, such as repurposed cereal boxes, photos from the artist's files, or lumen prints.
  • System Modification: Rules that alter the deck itself, such as adding or subtracting numbers from other cards, retiring cards permanently, or shuffling the deck.
  • Documentation: Requirements to create blog entries, journal entries, or Reddit posts, and calculating the total sales value of the set based on eBay data.

The Artist's Helper

Certain cards delegate tasks to a helper, focusing on the digital preservation and archiving of the project. These tasks include scanning panels for the digital library, sorting retired panels, and updating the archive inventory.

The Governing Principles of Construction

The map's growth and modification are governed by a set of strict principles to ensure consistency and random distribution:

  • Work Units: Each card features a number that defines a "task" as a specific number of one-inch squares to be covered. A single day's work may encompass several cards or only a portion of one work unit.
  • Directionality: The color of the drawn card determines the direction of work: black indicates clockwise movement, while red indicates counter-clockwise.
  • Spatial Expansion: New panels are added when a "new panel" card is drawn or to complete a section. To keep the map roughly circular, the location of a new page is determined by placing a compass point at the center of the parent page and identifying the closest edge of the map.
  • Color Logic: The project uses 42 continually remixed colors. Unlike early versions of the map, these colors are abstract and do not necessarily represent physical topography.
  • Non-Destructive Iteration: New artwork is never applied over existing original work; instead, it is added to a new version of the page.

The Layering System and Lifecycle

Each panel evolves through a series of successive layers, with each new layer replacing its predecessor in a cyclical process:

  1. Base Layer: Progresses from a blank page (paperboard or photo) to bands of painted color, then to 1" paper collage squares, and finally to "city squares" categorized by color and population (Green: 400, Red: 800, Grey: 1,200, Black: 2,400).
  2. The Void: Begins with irregular white collage, followed by 2" black-and-white collage, then 1" grey city squares, and finally 1" black city squares.
  3. The Red Dimension: Characterized by irregular, flame-shaped solid red collage.
  4. Black Ness: Composed of 2" squares of black collage.
  5. The Ziggurat Phase: Features stacked collage squares of decreasing size, starting at 2x2.
  6. The Flood and Re-Birth: The cycle concludes with blue collage (The Flood) and hand-torn kraft paper (Re-Birth) before returning to the Base Layer's paint bands.

Evolution of the Project (1963–Present)

The project has evolved through two distinct eras, separated by a 20-year hiatus between 1983 and 2003.

Feature Era 1 (1963-1983) Era 2 (2003-Present)
Driver Personal schedule and rudimentary cards Strict enforcement via Card Deck
Materials Typing/poster paper, ink, watercolors Recycled paper, acrylics, expanded collage
Scale 1/4" = 200' Abstract (scale less relevant)
Progression Chronological stacking Coordinate-based stacking
Data Tracking Log book (populations, football scores) Spreadsheet (populations, admin/sales)
Versioning Single master set Color printer allows for generations/copies
Color Logic Represented physical topography Abstract and non-representational

Sources