ArtCarto (represented by Sharon Hayashi, Nick Lally, and Taien Ng-Chan) will present a walkshop at the North American Cartographic Information Society’s 42nd annual meeting at The Depot in downtown Minneapolis.
Mississippi Water-Map: An Acoustic Meander in Minneapolis is a collaborative site-specific walking and mapping workshop exploring the terrain and local knowledge of Minneapolis through experimental sound and sensory cartographic methodologies. Listening to the land and water as well as voices of communities, we will use intermedial mapping practices to foreground reclamations of space, narrative and memory.
The workshop will begin indoors at 9:00am and move outdoors at 10:00am. Bring earbuds/earphones, and wear comfortable walking shoes.
The Commission on Art & Cartography’s online workshop from the summer of 2020, called A Sense of Impending Doom: A Strata-Walk for Turbulent Times, caught the eye of editor Laura Bliss at Bloomberg’s CityLab. As a result, some of the maps from the Impending Doom workshop are featured in the new publication The Quarantine Atlas: Mapping Global Life Under COVID-19, along with an essay by Commission Chair Taien Ng-Chan about her own experiences dealing with the pandemic, the subsequent rise of anti-Asian hate, and the value found in mapping one’s own room. The book was published in April 2022 and can be found here: https://www.blackdogandleventhal.com/titles/laura-bliss/the-quarantine-atlas/9780762478132/
ArtCarto Maps in The Quarantine Atlas
Borrowing from (Xavier) de Maistre’s voyage around his room, we carried out a virtual workshop that took 30 walkers from around the world on a tour of their own lockdown spaces. They brought no luggage but two sheets of paper, a writing implement, and instructions to look at everything with the rambling curiosity of a traveler. The first task, as a sort of barometer of feeling, was for everyone to write down their fears and anxieties, which included everything from dictators, militarization and climate change to “loss of emotional connection” and “overwhelming online work.” On the back of that paper, we asked for their sources of comfort: protest, gardening, nature, reading, art, and alcohol. They then tore a small hole in a fresh sheet of paper to represent their locations in space, walked slowly around their rooms to draw their routes and objects that shaped their surrounding emotional landscapes. “Where are the anxieties located?” we asked. “Where do you find comfort? Reframe your view. Share with us the ground under your feet, the sky outside your window.”
The rough, hand-drawn maps that resulted hint at the rich emotions that fill our own interior spaces. In these maps, I can glimpse the lives of others through the squiggly black lines and rough edges that indicate where their bodies were located, where the windows and quiet spaces are for each. One map details a ceiling stain that speaks to worry, while another map confesses a love of the cardinals who hang out by the cornstalks in the backyard. The last task was for each person to fold, scrunch, rip and crunch their maps – a transformation of their intangible emotions into 3D paper sculptures, an act of catharsis. Some of them ended up a sharp jumble of edges like mine, others meticulously folded like irregular fans or energetically crushed into tight, crinkled-up balls. The maps were then smoothed out again and displayed by their makers onscreen, the shared act connecting us all in the virtual space of Zoom. (Excerpt from Taien Ng-Chan’s “Finding Home in a Locked-Down World” in The Quarantine Atlas, edited by Laura Bliss)
A big thank you to all who took part in the Impending Doom workshop, and especially to Jorn Seemann, Judith Franke, and Jennifer Coates, whose maps are featured.
Mapping Ephemeralities / Ephemeral Cartographies – Workshop organized by the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commissions on Maps and Society & Art and Cartography (Rio de Janeiro, August 21-22, 2015)
The goal of this workshop is to provide an intellectual and creative space to share different ideas and methodologies about mapping evanescent elements such as memories, stories, sensations and perceptions about places, as well as a practical environment to learn how some of these methodologies and technologies can be used and adapted for designing (online) maps of ephemeral phenomenon. This workshop combines academic and artistic presentations with ephemeral data collection activities. One objective of this workshop is to use these data to design an ephemeral online collectively-made map of the ephemeralities of the Maracana neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. The workshop will take place at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) in the auditorium of the cultural department building.
Projection mapping offers exciting opportunities to animate and alter our perceptions of a physical space through light. More often the physical space projected on to is buildings with mesmeric light sequences and often contextual narratives.
Much like Louis Daguerre & Charles Bouton achieved a sense of movement through altering the play of light on a large transparent screen with the Diorama in 1822, projection mapping can create this immersive and moving scene onto any 3d object or screen. Through altering the play of light with large amounts of lumens generated by today’s digital projectors, artists and designers can become the theatrical painters without being limited to dark purpose built venues and opaque or translucent paints, instead projections can be achieved in other lighting situations with custom built screens & pixels.
Dalziel + Pow have moved the play of light onto a physical map where they experiment with different narratives using the terrain of Berlin to abstract and segment their sense of movement. I like the idea that with this being an indoor permanent installation the growth and development of the narratives can evolve and change from the projection mapping unlike many projection mapping spectacles that are single events. It is exciting from a data visualisation point of view to see how they could experiment with this, ‘expect to see dynamic data and live online feeds added in the near future.’ (Dalziel and Pow, 2015).
Dynamic data could be live narratives from geotextual tweets, visual iconography of weather, real time data of subway, air or live visuals with imagery of scenery, architecture that are geotagged within the framed boundaries of the physical map then abstracting into their segments in a realtime collaborative cartophoto-montage.
It is exciting to see how this art form will evolve with physical cartographic representations and their inter-play with light immersing us through digital mappings.
This map is part of a research project initiated and supervised by Tom Cheesman at Swansea University in collaboration with Kevin Flanagan and Studio NAND. Over the course of nearly two years, Tom has collected over 50 translations and adaptations of Othello into German driven by the idea to analyse and compare them in order to find traces and patterns that reveal cultural, historical and social fluctuations.
[…] a first prototype called Version Variation Visualisation in which we helped building a set of visualisation tools for an exemplary corpus of 37 German translations of Othello (Act 1, Scene 3) in collaboration with Kevin Flannagan andSebastian Sadowski.
A beautiful clean design to the map reminiscent of the Stamen Maps Toner maps, it is a great blend of data visualisation, literature and cartography. Differentiating between Books & Scripts the dates on the interactive web based map highlights details of the writers and where that text might have been written, rewritten, published. The creators state this is just a beginning and will no doubt grow, reminds me of Literature Atlas.
A smartphone game where you compete against others to capture territory in your local environment.
Run An Empire is a game where players compete to capture and maintain control of as much of their local territory as possible. To capture somewhere you have to run (or jog, or walk) around it.
The game uses your neighbourhood as an arena for play.
I love this idea of having games in maps, using the local environment to control territory is great. User actions could move beyond just walking to own a territory, could be leaving things at places digitally like geocache’s. This really is the gaming layer on top of the real world.
Ed Fairburn is a Welsh artist, based in Cardiff, whose ability to combine the geography of our facial features with the geography of the earth leads to a startling and compelling synthesis of the two. Fairburn has become known in Europe for his evocative portraits, which produce complex human features from the apparently random patterns found in mundane topographical and astrological maps.
In many ways, we are living a golden age of map making, with interactive, richly textured electronic mapping technologies giving us unprecedented, real time detail. But it is also good to be reminded that, despite the benefits of this Google-era hyperliterality, there is a broader beauty to be found in the ways we visualize our common spaces. Maps can speak to much more than how to get from one place to another.
This is an interesting project which is ‘A series celebrating beautiful video game worlds’.
Considering the advent of interactive technologies such as Augmented Reality and explorations of the interaction between maps and games (see previous post and look up the Dresden ICC worskhops), these realities might not be too far away from merging into our own.
A very impressive ‘Sound Globus’ was developed by Yuri Suzuki, sound artist. He is mapping sound – pieces of typical music found on those places – on a ‘3D globus disk’: Sound of the Earth Project
The Sound of the Earth is a content of Yuri Suzuki`s spherical record project, the grooves representing
the outlines of the geographic land mass. Each country on the disc is engraved with a different sound, as the needle passes over it plays field recordings collected by Yuri Suzuki from around the world over the course of four years; traditional folk music, national anthems, popular music and spoken word broadcasts.
An aural journey around the world in 30 minutes.
Film Story is an interactive online website that charts the history of film geographically.
‘we simply cannot ignore the fact that the public interacts with and learns about history primarily through film. What we can do instead is talk about the events of the past represented in film and use that dialogue as a place of learning.’
This site is a wonderful reference with every entry having a visual poster for each film, along with a short synopsis, year, director of course country. I agree and love their idea of initiating a dialogue with people learning through the films, just feel there needs to be an online method through their site to offer it.
I would love if they could combine their resources with the the Cornerhouse (Manchester, UK) Film Map as their’s has some films linked to footage/trailers as opposed to posters, and in addition to Film Story, has linked cast data, running time & importantly, a tool to instigate a dialogue with a comments section.
I’m sure that interaction can be much more than just comments, polls, video, auditory…. and the relationships could be visualised more such as genres, this site (like it also does with literature mapping really well) could be a good feature for genre http://www.movie-map.com & I would love to know the correlation of where films were set to where they were depicting. http://www.themoviemap.com/film-locations/featured/. For instance if it was trying to represent historic periods in film, where was the location in the modern day to achieve the old, or was it just in a studio fictionally?
I’m sure they could be informed by the work of http://www.literaturatlas.eu/en/ to help realise innovative visual relationships of history, fiction & geography.
ART & CARTOGRAPHY 