| In April 2010, interdisciplinary artist Yu-Wen Wu woke up longing to visit her grandmother in Taipei. A quick search informed her that a plane ticket there from Boston – where Wu still lives – was out of her budget. On a whim, she opened Google Maps and searched for the best walking route to Taipei. She didn't expect to get anything back. To her surprise, Google Maps returned a 95-page itinerary, composed of 2,052 instructions spanning 11,479 miles. Included were walking directions across most of the United States, nearly 37 days of kayaking from the Seattle area to Hawaii, many miles of jet-skiing across various parts of the Pacific Ocean and countless other turns. The hypothetical journey would take her 155 days (and five hours) to complete. Google Maps advised her to "use caution," indicating that the route "may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths." Wu was so amazed by the output that she saved it as a PDF and printed it out for safekeeping.  The first of 95 pages of Google Maps walking directions to Taipei that Yu-Wen Wu printed out in 2010. Credit: Yu-Wen Wu Trying again the next day, Wu was unable to reproduce the glitch, which Google Maps seemed to serve to a few people in the early 2010s. "It is ludicrous, and yet it has served as a source of magical inspiration for so many ideas," Wu says of the incident. As an artist, Wu often looks to data as a launching point for her work. The Poetry of Reason, a commission Wu made for Tufts University in 2022, is a wall structure that connects mathematical and computer science concepts in a metal and plexiglass web. Some of her projects play with cartography, such as Terrain, a 38-foot aluminum sculpture (Wu calls it a "metal drawing") representing fluctuations in the S&P 500 as mountain ranges. The piece was installed at the Harvard Business School in 2016. "We often think of maps as just straight objective representations," Wu said. "But for me, they are, in fact, full of subjective points of view of the world and of current events."  Terrain, at the Harvard Business School. Credit: Yu-Wen Wu Wu's experience of immigrating to the United States from Taiwan at a young age is central to her art. Her 2014 piece Gold Mountain Prayer (San Francisco) uses gold ink on rice paper to visualize changes in the Chinese population of Boston between 1860 and 2010. Wu's interpretation of the Google Maps directions, Walking to Taipei, is currently on display at the Harvard Art Museum. To create the piece, Wu printed all 2,052 instructions on brown and white mulberry paper, cut them out in strips and mounted each one on a roll of acetate 20 feet long and 20 inches wide. Framed on both sides by two acrylic dowels, the result is a massive hand scroll bridging modern materials and traditional Chinese landscape scrolls.  Walking to Taipei, on display at the Harvard Art Museum. Photographer: Dan Watkins The work is the result of 10 years of iteration. Other versions that Wu created over the years include an accordion book with five arms representing different segments of the journey, one of which stretches out to 96 inches. Another one is a massive map, where Wu rendered Google's directions as a trail across the US.  An accordion version of "Walking to Taipei." Credit: Yu-Wen Wu The scroll is on display at Harvard through June 2 as part of the exhibit "Journeys." Every month, staff turn the scroll in order to display different parts of the journey. While it is not possible to see the work in its entirety while it's on display, Wu created it so that viewers would need to physically walk to read every single step.  A detail from Walking to Taipei that includes kayaking instructions across the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Yu-Wen Wu This month, Wu has plans to fly to Taiwan from Boston for the first time in ten years. Coincidentally, as she is traveling, the scroll will be turned for the last time while it's on display. It will show the final stretch of the journey, ending in Taipei. — Marie Patino Map Links | 
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