Joe Hamilton is a map maker, but you can’t traverse the territories he covers by plane or by boat. You might recognize fragments of the whole, maybe you think you’ve been there before. But you haven’t, because these pieces only look like places you might have been. Then again, you’ve actually been to all of these places whether you knew it or not. You’ve been traveling through them since time began.
Hamilton traces the geography of the virtual, building new worlds out of reproductions of spaces that never knew each other in their geological stasis, and imagined plains whose proximity to others appears contextually out of place. Below this visual defamiliarity there is a battle of intended associations—infinite chains of signifieds clashing in the apparent nonsense of the textual mishmash pointing to them. And yet, the strangest thing about Hyper Geography is how natural it feels. The images he chooses fit together like a jigsaw, and it’s easy to see the textural and ecological continuity in his collages, but there’s also something else going on here. The video above is not just arctic-forest-desert. The inconsistencies that defer total consistency share less in historical or genealogical affinity, and more in their collective relations as satellites circling something(s) that lies outside, or in between Hamilton’s maps. Virtual situations that have yet to be articulated in a single image.
This video and others are now showing at 319 Scholes in Bushwick. Hamilton’s tumblr, Hyper Geography, has been going strong for awhile now and I’m still going back for more. At the top of the feed he has included some arial view images of those strange Chinese mystery structures, so you know he’s still posting new stuff.
