International Cartographic Conference – Nov. 15 – 21, 2009

The ICA “Art & Cartography” working group is organizing a couple of activities at the ICC2009 in Santiago de Chile:

• A meeting of the working group in order to discuss future ideas, projects, perspectives in the promising field of art & cartography – Wednesday, november 18th: 14-17.30pm in R1 (room);
• A special movie screening: A selection of scenes dedicated to “Maps in Movies” (wednesday, november 18th at 18:00 through to 19:00, Main Auditorium);
• Two technical sessions (presentation of paper) (Saturday, November 21st).

Please feel free to distribute this message among friends and colleagues who will also travel to Chile and might be interested in topics concerning “Art & Cartography”.

Ian Hundley. Quilts Made of Maps

Bierbergen Oedelum Black 2006 cotton, wool, silk & linen 80 x 80 inches

Awesome large-scale quilts are made by Ian Hundley, a Brooklyn-based artist, using maps as an inspiration and transforming them into these special patchwork pieces. (More images here). In this video (Cool Hunting, 2006) Ian Hundley discusses his work and inspirations.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Xabi Zirikiain for being so informative!

Map cuts by Karen O’Leary

American artist Karen O’Leary reimagines the map as an exchange of negative and positive space. Deftly cutting maps of New York, Paris and London with razor precision, she leaves delicate webs of streets as land and water are cut away. Negative space demarcates land, while meandering grids of paper represents streets.

There is an interview with the artist here.

More information about this work:

http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/11/hand-cut_maps.html

http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2009/11/karen_olearys_c.php

 

 

Google Earth Art

Evert Schut uses “Google Earth as a source of inspiration” to paint landscapes and to address issues related to the environment. I am not sure Google Earth, and virtual globes in general, can serve to stimulate the revival of lanscape painting as Evert suggests, but it has certainly stimulated the emergence of new forms of hybridations between cartography and art.

This blog is literally all about a new perspective for landscape painting: looking down on earth from a satellite up there in space! Google Earth has made it possible for anyone with a computer and internet to roam the Earth like a birds or even an astronout. For an artist like me this has become a huge new source of inspiration. Is this the revival landscape painting needs?

Symposium “Monitoring Scenography 3″

The symposium “Monitoring Scenography 3: Space and Desire / Raum und Begehren” (October 8th to 10th,  2009), will take place at the Institute for Design and Technology (idt) in Zurich.

In the 3 day symposium MONITORING SCENOGRAPHY 3: SPACE AND DESIRE, artistic and academic researchers in the visual arts, architecture, theatre studies and art history discuss the existence and textures of spatial languages, choreographies, mise-en-scenes and spatial representations of desire.
The scenographies of desire are both site-specific and global, artistic and commercial, real and virtual. Success stories in popular culture, advertisement and marketing rely heavily on a carefully designed analysis of desire and its translation into product-specific scenographies. In the staged and mediatised lives of the 21st century, the spaces of desire take on many forms. Inscribed onto them is the desire for uniqueness, inimitability and immersion – as both service and response to the spectacle.
MONITORING SCENOGRAPHY 3: SPACE AND DESIRE is the third in a series of annual symposia curated by the members of the Doctorate Program Scenography, a practice-based research unit between the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Vienna. Its members are a diverse and international group of emerging and established artists and academics engaged in expanding the discourse on scenography toward the intersection of architecture, media, theatre and exhibition.

Podcasts from the previous symposium on Space and Truth are also available from the web site.

Aquil Copier

In the context of the exhibition ‘The Importancy of the unimportant’ (20 September – 30 November), at the Hudson Museum (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) we will find the work of the artist Aquil Copier. Oil, airbrush, photoprint and acrylic for painting (should we say mapping!?) landscapes. Enjoy!

Oil and airbrush on canvas (diptich). 200x150 cm. 2008

I started my first paintings of aerial views in 2003 when I was travelling very often by airplane between the south of Europe (Italy) and Holland. During my flights I was fascinated by the striking differences between the landscape views from my country and Italy. When you are travelling above Italy you see a very different landscape then in the Netherlands: this is of course because Holland is a flat land, and Italy has a great variety of altitudes (there are alps, mountains, hills, etc). When you see Italy from above, you do not have the perception of clear structures. You rather see plots of streets and countryside -urban and natural landscapes strangely intermingled. (Aquil Copier)

Oil and airbrush on canvas. 30×30 cm. 2008

“Aerial photographs” by Ross Racine

Heavenly Heights is the title of this picture, which it isn’t actually a picture  but a drawing. It doesn’t exist any real image beneath this one, just Ross Racine’s digital paintbrushes for designing non-existent aerial  scenes like this.  Enjoy!

All Streets by Ben Fry

Here you are a “deductive-image”. It depicts the Appalachian mountain range by using only individual road segments. Expressive result taken from “All Streets“, an  interesting project by Ben Fry.

“All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.”

Mapping the Little red riding hood

This video is not really about maps… Or may be it is, just like it is about geology, urban planning, aerodynamism, nutrition, design and many other things. But mostly it is about mapping out the fairy tale Little red riding hood and it is just great! Thanks to Amelia Bryne for pointing us to this video.

Emotional Cartography by Christian Nold

I have been fascinated by the bio mapping project by Christian Nold for a few years now. The idea of combining a GPS with a lie-detector in order to “measure” the emotions associated to places is really appealing. So I was quite intrigued by the “Emotional Cartography” book that has just came out of this project. This book is downloadable for free which is definitely an asset. What is even better is that it provides different critical perspectives on this project and more generally on the overall development of the relationships between geospatial technologies, the body, the emotions, the private sector and the State. Among the different pieces, I really enjoyed “A Future love story” by Marcel Van Der Drift: stimulating, entertaining and frightening. Overall, I had a very good time reading this book, even if I would have liked more concrete examples of the use of the bio mapping tool in different contexts; may be in the next volume.