This site uses audio.
The map for The Republic of Dreams, by Marta Lissowska, uses digital methods to recreate the large, hand-produced maps of Medieval Europe, where whole cosmologies were symbolized alongside recognizable local rural, urban, and geographical features. As mythic devices, these Medieval maps referenced important events, such as The Garden of Eden, Enoch, The Tower of Babel etc. In the case of the map for The Republic of Dreams, all the references belong to the mythology of Bruno Schulz, weaving together his short stories, visual art, an actual place (20th-century Drohobych), and Lissowska’s own interpretation of all three levels. As such, Lissowska’s map is both a snapshot of 19th and 20th-century European life, as described in Schulz’s short stories, but also a stage, populated with the mythic geography of an author’s world. Unlike other illustrated maps devoted to a single literary work, or works (Joyce’s Dublin, from Ulysses, Borges’ Library of Babel, Tolkien’s story maps, etc.), this is the first to merge story references, visual images, and biographical details with organic features, such as lakes, forests, gardens, etc. The effect can only be described as surreal, which is why Lissowska’s map doubles as a navigational device, or portal, allowing us to find our way through the imagined worlds of Bruno Schulz. The audio elements of the map are done by Eli Stine who populated the map's various places with sounds of urban and rural life. Additionally, Stine mixed the music of composer Wacław Zimepl to produce the map's musical background.