Jerry's Map -- perennial art

Jerry Gretzinger is a mixed-media map-artist that I've been following for about 13 years. He's been working on the same piece for sixty years! (sort of...)

In the summer of 1963 Jerry began drawing a map of an imaginary city. The work started as a doodle done in the spare time he had while working at a tedious job. He continued to add to that map through the years until, in 1983, he set it aside to put his free time to other use.

So then it sat in the attic for twenty years and he picked the project up again and has been going at it ever since.

[ulr=https://www.jerrysmap.com/process]He uses a custom deck of cards to tell him what to do[/url] to the map each "turn", so it's sort of analog-procedural art that evolves over time.

https://www.jerrysmap.com/











He posts regular imagery from the project to Reddit and Facebook, at least.

And he sells artifacts (original panels, cards, etc) from the map at his Etsy store (he used to use eBay too), but there hasn't been anything there for a couple of weeks, so I'm not sure if he's on vacation or he's stopped or what.

I dug out my modest collection of Jerry’s work including three original panels and two cards. (The rest is freebie and advertising stuff.) The price of his work has increased quite a bit faster than my income has, so I’ll probably have to stop with this.

After I started following Jerry's Map, the idea took hold in my brain that it could be a collaborative process with gamelike elements. I drew up some notes in the Story-Games forum which doesn't exist anymore and started "playing" where each tile was a standard post-in note. Once I got another player, that changed so that we were passing a Powerpoint file back and forth. But it really only lasted for about a month and the map ended up pretty light before we gave up. But it did act as a proof-of-concept and lead me into a much more sophisticated second try later on.

The second attempt was wildly more successful and played in Google Docs and the now defunct social media platform Google+ between 2014 and the platform's closure at the end of 2018. 28 players took 1287 turns building this fantastic map as well as a few other maps (the moon, the underground, etc) and a bunch of lore in text documents. The scope and scale of this project is still rinky-dink compared to Jerry's project, but it was a lot of fun for a long time and I'm pretty proud of the whole process and history -- the event more than the final map.