Info
AuthaGraph consists of prints, objects and video animations, and presents an original concept of the AuthaGraph World Map, a new representation format of the Earth on a rectangular space.
Our understanding of how the Earth looks like has been coined nearly 500 years ago by the Flemish geographer, Gerardus Mercator, who published his world map in 1569. It was a true innovation for that time for it drew the longitudes and attitudes as straight lines and presented the globe on a flat space. The Mercator map however doesn’t show the landmass without distortion: the closer you get to the South and to the North, it becomes impossible to draw a flat surface without elongating the landmass. By doing so, it has shaped our notion of centers and peripheries of the world.
The rectangular AuthaGraph World Map, developed by Hajime Narukawa in 1999, is next to the Dymaxion map by Buckminster Fuller from 1946, another contemporary attempt to represent the globe on a flat surface with possibly minimal distortion.
AuthaGraph World Map is made by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles, transferring it to a tetrahedron, while maintaining areas proportions and unfolding it to be a rectangle. The world map can be tiled in any directions without visible seams. From this map-tiling a new world map with a triangular, rectangular or parallelogram’s outline can be framed out with various regions at its center.
This new perspective reconfigures our notion of centers and margins. Just like every map, it can be used for different reasons: as a sea route chart, for the research of the ozone hole or oil field development, but also for displaying such processes as a continental drift or – which is less obvious – the marginalization of certain historical events and geographical regions and the following uneven distribution of history knowledge and the conventional nature of the so called “objective” history of the world.
In 2015 the AuthaGraph World Map was included for teaching geography in Japanese senior high schools.
The name AuthaGraph comes from the words authalic and graph.
Hajime Narukawa (Keio University, Graduate School of Media and Governance) is a researcher, an architect, a structural engineer, an artist and a designer. He graduated from the Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts, and the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design in Amsterdam. In 2008, he received the Ars Electronica Hornorary Mention for the Corpora in Si(gh)te installation. He established the AuthaGraph Co., Ltd. in 2009.
CREDITS
AUTHAGRAPH MAP
concept: Hajime Narukawa + Masaji Hirai, Takako Kozu, Sota Ichikawa, Yasushi Kajikawa (advisors)
AUTHAGRAPH WORLD MAP (print)
graphic advisor: Masanori Oji
AUTHAGRAPH WORLD MAPS (print)
graphic advisor: Masanori Oji
AUTHAGRAPH COMPARISON WITH PRIOR ARTS (print)
graphic advisor: Masanori Oji
CHRONOMAP 4700 (print)
history content of the original Japanese version: SEKI Shinko (supervisor), Midori Horikawa (assistant), Tetsuya Megro (production support)
draft of the history map: SHINJI Kuboki
English translation and graphics: Mari Homma (special thanks for the students of the Narukawa Laboratory, Keio University)
design assistants of the original Japanese version: students of the Kuwasawa Design School
CHRONOMAP 650M CONTINENTAL DRIFT (video)
original data of continental drift: Dr. Ron Ron Blakey, Professor Emeritus NAU Geology
MAKING OF THE AUTHAGRAPH WORLD MAP (video)
computer graphic production: Tetsuya Hoahi
AUTHAGRAPH GLOBE + AUTHAGRAPH PUZZLE (models)
plexi glass production: Fuminori Imura
AUTHAGRAPH WORLD MAP (handouts)
National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation / Miraikan
Hajime Narukawa
AuthaGraph CO., Ltd
4-47-15-4F, Izumi, Suginami-ku
Tokyo, 168-0063, Japan
phone: +81 (0) 3 6795 8223
fax: +81 (0) 3 6795 8224
email: narukawa@authagraph.com
WWW: www.authagraph.com
skype: hajimebia
Associate Professor
Keio University
Graduate School of Media and Governance
5322 Endo, Fujisawa, Kanagawa, 252-0882, Japan
phone: +81 (0) 466 49 3496
fax: +81 (0) 466 49 3496
mobile: +81 (0) 90 8008 2235
email: nalukawa@sfc.keio.ac.jp