
Vargic's Miscellany of Curious Maps: Mapping the Modern World
Slovakian artist Martin Vargic rose to international fame in 2014 when his “Map of the Internet 1.0” went viral. Using old National Geographic maps as inspiration, he drew a striking and meticulous map of the most visited websites in the world, portraying Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple as sovereign countries; the eastern continent as the “old world” with originators like Microsoft and IBM; and at the most southern tip, a forgotten wasteland of outdated and obsolete places of the past like You’ve Got Mail and Friendster. The extraordinary “Map of Stereotypes” is a cartogram based on a westerner’s stereotypical view of the world that assigns more than two thousand labels and pop culture references to cities, states, countries, continents, oceans, and seas on a large-scale world map. Visually stunning and remarkably clever, both artworks generated notice worldwide. Beautiful, unique, and packed with intricate and brilliant details, Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps showcas