Fall 2002

Artist Project / The Other Side

A new world order

Vadim Fishkin

Tunneling straight through the middle of the earth and coming up on the other side of the world is a familiar childhood fantasy. Somehow, we always emerge in some wonderful country whose customs and language we do not know. (For American kids, it’s inevitably China. Where do Chinese children reappear after their interterrestrial journeys?) But in reality, more than four-fifths of the world is ocean and so the chances of one piece of land having a corresponding piece of land on the other side of the globe from itself are actually quite slim. As Vadim Fishkin’s project here makes clear, by far the most likely scenario is that you will emerge at the bottom of an ocean somewhere. Fishkin’s globe, generated by taking every piece of land and mapping it onto the opposite side, leaves in color only land that meets land. Everywhere else fades into the deep blues and greens of water. The great powers disappear into the depths—Russia, China, most of Europe and the United States all find themselves submerged, their once emphatic outlines now reduced to ghostly underwater architecture, a geopolitical system drowned beneath the waves.

Instructions: Cut along each of the 12 segments making sure to leave them connected along the central axis. Doing this correctly will leave you with one piece of paper with 12 flaps. Bring together the tips of the flaps to form a globe, passing a string through the middle as in the diagram above. You can now hang your globe.

Click here to download the project on A4-sized paper.

Click here to download the project on US-legal-sized paper.

Click here to download the project on US-letter-sized paper.

Vadim Fishkin is a Russian artist based in Ljubljana.

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