Jerry's Map Interactive

Most maps capture a moment in time. Jerry's Map has spent more than sixty years doing the exact opposite.

Jerry's Map is the life's work of artist Jerry Gretzinger, who began drawing an imaginary city in the summer of 1963. What started as a simple doodle gradually expanded into an immense fictional world. Today, Jerry's Map consists of more than 4,000 individual 8-by-10-inch panels arranged in a giant circular formation. Together they form a sprawling imaginary world that sits somewhere between a city plan, an abstract artwork, and a living organism.

Jerry's Map Interactive allows you to explore detailed snapshots of the map as it existed in 2013, 2014, and 2015, providing a fascinating opportunity to examine one of the world's most extraordinary long-running cartographic art projects up close and in detail. It allows you to zoom deep into the map's intricate geography and compare how different areas evolved during those three years, revealing a landscape that is in a constant state of transformation.

The interactive viewer was built using the Leaflet web mapping library, repurposed as a deep-zoom image explorer. Rather than displaying geographic data, the application serves high-resolution scans of Jerry's Map as a set of tiled images, using the same technique employed by online mapping platforms such as Google Maps. The artwork is divided into thousands of image tiles organised by zoom level, allowing users to pan and zoom smoothly across the map. A Vue.js-powered slider switches between tile sets captured in 2013, 2014 and 2015, effectively creating a time-lapse view of Jerry Gretzinger's ever-evolving imaginary world.

What makes Jerry's Map particularly remarkable is that Jerry surrendered much of the creative decision-making to a custom deck of instruction cards. Rather than deciding directly which part of the map to work on next, Jerry draws a card from a deck of around 100 cards. The cards determine everything from which panels will be modified to the direction he moves through the map and the type of changes he must make. The process combines strict rules with randomness, making Jerry less the author of the map and more its caretaker.

r/JerryMapping - a subreddit dedicated to creating maps in the style of [Jerry Gretzinger