“A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched.” -Robert Smithson, 1968 (1.)

This is a vignette about art and mapping with an emphasis on a particular kind of mapping—topological—and how it informs various artists’ practices, including my own. I have always been interested in how artists conceive and represent the infinitely complex world beyond their own skins. To this end, I will make the claim that topological mapping offers an especially apt mental schema to represent the profound discontinuity and fragmentation of contemporary spatial and temporal experience.