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.”

NEU-YORK

This artfully crafted map by Melissa Gould is a thoughtprovoking experiment – a narrative map, covering a fiercly discussed topic of alternate history: What if the Nazis had won World War 2? An extract from the artist’s comment, available on the project website: “NEU-YORK is a cautionary meditation, suggesting what the local geographical reality might have been like had victorious Nazis succeeded in bringing the Third Reich across the Atlantic Ocean in 1945. At the same time it is an exploration of psychological transport, place, displacement and memory. This re-imagining of the city plays with comparison and misrecognition, exploring the coexistence of past and present, fiction and reality.”

For more information, map samples and an overview see: http://www.megophone.com/neuyork.html

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.

Newton and Helen Harrison Mapping Conversations

The exhibition took place a few years ago, but the cartographic examples developed by Newton and Helen Harrison are still inspiring.

“The Harrisons invoke both aspects of mapping, merging one into the other. The map becomes an aesthetic medium, like a painting, in which rivers, mountains, forests, plains, and areas of human habitation converge in abstract patterns that are nonetheless very familiar to us. The detail of line and brushstroke, of color and hue, is no more or less representative than that of any painting, but, as in the landscapes of Vuillard, again, it is representative of the multitudes of nature.”

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.

Special Issue on Cinematic Cartography

The special issue of The Cartographic Journal on Cinematic Cartographic is now available. If you are interested in maps and cinema, you may want to take a look at some of these papers:

• No Throwing Popcorn! by Field, Kenneth
• What is Cinematic Cartography? by Caquard, Sébastien; Taylor, D. R. Fraser
• Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture by Castro, Teresa
• Locations of Film Noir by Conley, Tom
• Applying the Theatre Metaphor to Integrated Media for Depicting Geography by Cartwright, William
• Connecting Real and Imaginary Places through Geospatial Technologies: Examples from Set-jetting and Art-oriented Tourism by Joliveau, Thierry
• Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography: A Historical Review of Cinematic Maps in Films by Caquard, Sébastien

Elisabeth Lecourt – les robes géographiques

A paper map transformed into a day-dress?  Not wearable, of course! They are made only to be watched. The one on the image and some more pieces. It’s the fantastic work of Elisabeth Lecourt. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art ( MA RCA, London) in 2001, Lecourt (French, born 1972, Oloron Saint Marie, France) is becoming a recognised contemporary artist.

Cartography & Art Book

Parts of the book on Cartography & Art (edited by W. Cartwright, G. Gartner; A. Lehn) are already available through Google books. This book compiles a selection of the papers and art installations presented at the International Symposium on “Cartography & Art – Art & Cartography” (Vienna, Austria, Jan. 31, Fe. 02, 2008). The “austerity” of the cover of book does not really reflects its content. The pieces available through Google books include only few of the art installations.

The map of the world as animals

The “PIECE TOGETHER FOR PEACE” project 01 (Kentaro Nagai) transforms the map of the world into the 12 animal signs of the Japanese zodiac.

This project was generated by an idea that the image of humanity united as one could be built by creating a figure combining “Nation” “Cooperation” and “Peace” with all continents and islands of the world.

Our theme “PIECE TOGETHER FOR PEACE”means that “PEACE” can be created by putting together “PIECE” like a puzzle. It is also a pun with “PIECE” and “PEACE” (MORE…)

Thanks to Tracey Lauriault for pointing us to this project.

Emma McNally’s Maps

In the scholarly essay accompanying Emma McNally’s ‘Fields, Charts, Soundings’ at T1+2 Artspace, Ana Balona de Oliveira provides a list of possible readings of McNally’s drawings. They may be, she suggests, perceived as ‘aerial views, battlefield maps, geological formations, oceanic charts, disease transmissions, animal migratory routes, molecule structures [or] black holes’. The sentence in fact ends with an ‘etc’, leaving the list of potential perceptions of the work open to further elaboration. De Oliveira is right to emphasise the polysemic aspect of these complicated, energetic drawings. But though one’s initial impression may be of maps or other kinds of compressed or abstracted informational forms, in the end these works are fully independent of the types of object they superficially resemble (More)