Last night I took a 42 second fly-through of my Art-O-Matic 2008 exhibit that I recorded on Friday afternoon and stretched & reversed the footage into a 3 minute and 30 second abstract animation. The video starts at the RECORD book, then pans & zooms into Freedom Plaza on Federal Triangle Quilt #4, pans across Nova et Accvratissima Totivs Terravm Oribis Tabvla [2008], zooms up close to Charlotte Spheres, and pans back over to Nova et Accvratissima Totivs Terravm Oribis Tabvla [2008] and ends.
Audio is from two tracks on disc one of Cold Krush Cuts by DJ Food & Coldcut (Ninja Tune 1997). It features a sermon I believe to be from Rev. Billy Graham about the Bug’s eye view versus the God’s eye view.
::::::::::Text of the sermon::::::::::
People who fly have a different view of the world than those who spend their lives on the ground. A very wise man once wrote a poem while he was flying, and he called this poem “The God’s Eye View,” and he said that this view was entirely different than the view he always had on the ground, which he called “The Bug’s Eye View.”
Out there, somewhere, in the air we fly through, exists an old Persian legend much like this poem about a bug who spent his entire life in the world’s most beautifully designed Persian rug. All the bug ever saw in his lifetime were his problems. They stood up all around him. He couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool in the rug to find the crumbs that people had spilled on the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this: that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life inside something which had a pattern. Even if he, this bug, had even once gotten above the rug so that he could have seen all of it, he would have discovered something - that the very things he called his problems were a part of the pattern.
Have you ever felt like that bug in the rug? That you are so surrounded by your problems that you can’t see any pattern to the world in which you live? Have you heard anybody say lately that the world is a total mess? That, my friends, is the Bug’s Eye View, and seeing only a little of the world, me might be inclined to think that this is true.
A better quality version of the video is viewable on Facebook.
Posted One Year Ago: Society is Enriched by Labor :: Socio Ditata Labore
5/11/2008 || 10:07 pm
#006900 Party [that’s Green Party in Hexadecimal Color Code]
At the Art-O-Matic opening night I spoke with someone close to Mark Jenkins about his #000000 POWER t-shirt concept that uses Hexadecimal Color Codes to reference the word’s color (aka BLACK POWER). In this geeky context I thought it would be funny to follow-up this meme by making my own HTML-based t-shirt.
After thinking through a bunch of different permutations, I came up with #006900 Party to represent the Green Party of the United States. I could have chosen from quite a few different combinations for the color Green, but I thought that the number 69 was the most widely understood numerical reference out of the possible permutations, with the exception of the number 42, a favorite number of mine that I found to be too dark.
I will be donating this design to the Green Party of the United States if they want to use it for their official merchandise.
Posted One Year Ago: 2007 Maps, 97 maps so far this year...
5/10/2008 || 12:25 pm
Art-O-Matic opening night
Alfonso & Farrah @ my Art-O-Matic exhibit space
Photo by Alex from There Were Ten Tigers
After working rather hard the last two weeks on getting my Art-O-Matic space ready and operational, I was pleased that the evening went by quickly & smoothly. When I left the building at around 1:00am, the doorman had clicked just under 5,000 people and I’d say I spoke to at least 50 people (about 1% of the total) while manning my little corner space. Since my spot is in an out-of-the-way location (like how this website used to be), I received less foot traffic (aka eyes/visits) than the central spaces and my neighbor wasn’t around to show up and turn on her exhibit’s lights. Neither of those issues really bothered me as much as being harped on about not having promotional materials.
The aim was to save paper and to challenge people into thinking & remembering. Specifically, if they cannot remember my name amongst a thousand other artists, would they remember my art? Well the easy answer, or at least the one that presented itself, was that people prefer to have a token of remembrance and are disappointed when one is not offered. It’s not like the Artomatic floor map in their hands says nothing, rather, it says my name quite clearly: Nikolas R. Schiller. I even own it as a domain name: www.Nikolas R Schiller.com, so the visitors had some generic token, but it clearly was not good enough; it needed to be personalized, beyond the passive note that they could have left in the RECORD book.
Today I am going to drop off some Tacky Flyers that I printed in for North, South, East, Westminster in September of 2006. They’ve been collecting dust in my basement because I got them for free when I ordered the NSEWestminster flyers, and have always thought they were unprofessional and ugly. To subvert that issue, I am going to place a sign above the flyers noting that they are, in fact, Tacky Flyers.
In some ways by identifying them as such, it calls out anyone else who chooses to use those flyers for promoting their business or event. As noted above, they were just collecting dust in my basement and I didn’t have any intended use for them except to use as scrap materials in some future art project. And in the whole “saving paper visit website” context, the use of these flyers *is* recycling. While the 27.5 year-old Nikolas would not have made the same flyer that the 25.75 year-old Nikolas made, I am able to now offer a token of my own personal remembrance– even if it’s in the form of a Tacky Flyer.
Aside from the promotional material requests, I had a really fun time meeting and chatting with people. I have not even attempted to look through the other artwork in the building, but plan on doing a floor-by-floor analysis in the not-so-distant future. It would be interesting to make an interactive map of the entire building, but I don’t think I have the time to do it.
Posted One Year Ago: Stadium category added
5/9/2008 || 1:13 pm
SloMo the Statehood Snail visits Swampoodle
SloMo the Statehood Snail hanging out at the corner of 1st & M Street NE in Washington, DC
On Tuesday evening after I had finished putting the last coat of wheat paste on to my base map installation at Artomatic, I decided to venture outdoors and place one of my favorite cartopomorphic creatures on to a couple lampposts outside of the venue.
The idea was to see if anyone would recognize the SloMo the Statehood Snail when they visited my exhibit space. He’s placed about six times on the base map and on three lampposts outside of the venue.
Artomatic opens tonight and I look forward to seeing if anyone recognizes him when they visit my exhibit space. My null hypothesis is that visitors will not notice the lil bugger.
SloMo the Statehood Snail outside of the Metro exit on M Street
SloMo the Statehood Snail in a Swampuddle!
Posted One Year Ago: Dodgers Stadium Quilt - 2006
5/8/2008 || 6:10 pm
the Artomatic Artist Catalog [PWND] - with updates
Posted One Year Ago: Dodgers Stadium Quilt - 2004
5/7/2008 || 6:42 am
Swampoodle Quilt
I chose this site because it’s where Artomatic is at!
Swampoodle is an old name used to describe a small section of the H Street neighborhood in Northeast Washington, DC. The area was first settled in the 1850s by immigrants fleeing the Irish potato famine. A geographic approximation of its borders would be K Street to the north, G Street to the south, 1st Street NW to the west, and 2nd Street NE to the east. Through the center of it, just east of North Capitol Street, ran the principal branch of Tiber Creek, creating the low swampy ground from which the area took its name.
A few years ago developers created the North of Massachusetts Avenue Business Improvement District, or NOMA and have tried to rebrand the neighborhood to something different.
When making the map I concluded that at the time of the aerial photography’s acquisition, it was still called Swampoodle and not NOMA. The same goes for Google Maps, which shows an even older glimpse (from spring 2002) of the changing neighborhood.
Personally, I think the name Swampoodle gives the area character in name. In contemporary identity, the area is mostly a bunch of warehouses and parking lots that are about to be developed, so I look forward to seeing a Swampoodle map in 10 years. It will look drastically different and I just hope its not called some focus group-approved abbreviation of a geographic region.
View the Google Map of the Swampoodle neighborhood in Ward 6 of Washington, DC.
View the rest of the details:
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Posted One Year Ago: Columbia Quilt #2
5/6/2008 || 4:34 pm
What the 2008 Art-O-Matic venue looked like in March of 2005
My next map will feature the area around the 2008 Art-O-Matic venue. On Google Maps, which currently shows the geography in April of 2002, the location is still a parking lot. Since the venue is located within the 12 mile perimeter of passive censorship on Google Maps you don’t see the construction or completion of the office building.
Posted One Year Ago: Columbia Quilt
5/5/2008 || 1:15 pm
The Base Map Installation @ Art-O-Matic
About a month ago when I was planning out my Art-O-Matic exhibit I came up with the idea to do a time-lapse video as a means to promote & showcase my upcoming exhibit. My friend Brian Liu made a similar styled video and I thought it would be fun to make one that shows both the location of the exhibit and teases viewers into seeing the actual exhibit.
The process involved in making the video was rather straightforward. Back in mid-April I went through my collection of printed maps and picked out a few that I didn’t care for. Then I went to my nearby CVS and purchased about 6 more DC, Maryland, and Virginia maps. I cleared out my dining room and laid out all the maps to see if they would cover the 12′ x 8′ space that I am alloted at Art-O-Matic and once I realized that I had enough maps I began to cut them into roughly 1′ x 2′ sections. After that I went to the hardware store and purchased some wheatpaste and a paint brush. Finally, I contacted my friend Robin who’s done similar videos before and bounced the idea off of him. He thought it was a decent concept and after a few minor delays on Friday, April 25th, 2008 we went to the Art-O-Matic space and recorded the entire installation from start to finish. About a week later I got the raw video from him, last night I edited it in Final Cut Pro, and today I uploaded it to YouTube.
I chose to use the tune “The Dub and the Restless” by Sonic Boom because it’s been a favorite of mine for ages and I felt it captured the essence of the time-lapse video quite well. I have contacted the musician and hopefully he’ll continue to let me use the video without issue.
Tomorrow I am going to the Art-O-Matic space and will be doing some touch-up work to the wall because after my last visit to the site I noticed some of the map’s have become unstuck and I need to make sure they are securely fixed to the wall. Later this week I will be going to the space and putting up my maps over “the base map.” I’ll probably need to get some extra lighting in place and after that it should be ready for Friday’s opening! I have a couple other ideas for the exhibit, but they’ll be shared here when the time comes.
If you are in the Washington, DC area this Friday, please stop by and say hello!
Looks like someone from NOMA gave the Art-O-Matic organizers one crappy raster graphic to use— notice the pixilation on their logo!
Posted One Year Ago: San Antonio Quilt #2
4/27/2008 || 12:31 pm
Taking a break….
I will be taking a brief break until Monday, May 5th. I’m working on a bunch of projects right now and I don’t think I’ll have much time to update this website!
4/26/2008 || 11:09 pm
Boston Common Quilt, revisited
The other week I published two maps of Boston Common on this website. Since then, I’ve had numerous visits to my website from people searching for the Boston Common quilts.
Since I am not a quilter, I did not know that there was already type of patchwork called Boston Common. The real irony is that last week I tried making almost the exact type of geographic quilt design but gave up because it was taking too long to make.
From a visual standpoint, the layout of the Boston Common patchwork design looks very similar to my square quilt projection. I wonder what other quilt design styles I’ve accidentally copied? I’ll find out in due time.
Posted One Year Ago: Park Circle Quilt, Park Circle Quilt - Interactive
4/25/2008 || 8:26 am
North End Quilt #2
Using this portion of North End Quilt, I constructed this derivative Hexagon Quilt Projection map of the area around North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
After rendering the map, while I was processing it for on-line publication on this website, I noticed that the source tessellation was off by one pixel and subsequently, this map has a slight defect to it. This is not the first time this has happened, but it makes me disappointed because the map is not perfect like the rest.
View the Google Map of North End neighborhood in Boston.
View the rest of the details:
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Posted One Year Ago: Vermont Avenue Sprocket
4/24/2008 || 11:00 pm
The Athan Drum & Bass Mashup via YouTube Doubler
The other day I wrote about Brian Kane’s YouTube Doubler. Continuing on the same style of taking a beat track and adding a new element, today’s mash-up is similar to one that I made before using dub reggae back in December of 2004. Unlike the last version, which was created before YouTube even existed, this mashup features the Muslim call to prayer, known as the Athan, combined with a very techy drum & bass mix.
First and foremost, if you are reading this and are offended by my use of the Athan, I apologize. It is not my intent to debase or make fun of the Athan in any way, rather this mashup was designed to expose others to different ways of hearing the Muslim call to prayer. One of the fundamental tenets of Islam is tolerance and I hope you are able to tolerate this mashup. Drum & bass is very abrasive form of electronic music and the Athan is normally sung without any instrumentation, so I feel it’s an interesting sonic juxtaposition.
What I like most about the Athan video is that it features mosques from around the world. So not only do you get to hear the beauty of the call to prayer, you are shown the beauty of Islamic architecture as well. If you are interested in seeing/hearing a different Athan, check out the call to prayer being sung inside of a al-Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca. It’s the holiest site in all of Islam.
Posted One Year Ago: profiled by Iconoculture
4/23/2008 || 10:42 pm
QR Code Tessellation
While the QR-Code mistake wasn’t exactly what I was hoping to create earlier today, this design turned out exactly as I originally envisioned. The plan was to take one QR Code and plot the code as a very large tessellation. Like the Geovisual QR Code, I wanted to make the embedded code something self-evident so I chose the text to be “QR Code Tessellation by Nikolas Schiller. Created on Wednesday April 23rd, 2008 in Washington, DC.”
For this design I rotated the code 45 degrees to create a diamond shape and after the rendering was finished I cut out 4 of the squares and added an enlarged QR Code in the lower right-hand corner. In all, it’s a very simple design but at the size of a billboard it would be very interesting to see it displayed.
View the rest of the details:
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|| 12:24 pm
another QR Code mistake
The other week I attempted to hack the QR-Code to see if I could visually embed a censored aerial photograph of the Washington Monument to create “Geovisual QR Code“. While I was unsuccessful, I enjoyed the process of experimenting with this type of visual code.
Today I tried to make a second QR Code design based off a QR Code tessellation. I was able to make the tessellation without a problem and when I was finished I saved the new QR Code as a GIF. When I imported the GIF into my rendering program I noticed that something was awry. Instead of being shown in black & white I was seeing bits of color. I assume that this happened because the program does not take GIF files well. This might have happened because I saved the GIF as an interlaced file and when the program was deconstructing the GIF it created some type of visual static. Instead of casting the mistake aside, I decided to see what the final result would be, and frankly sometimes even mistakes can look quite cool.
Up next will be the intended QR Code design.
View the rest of the details:
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4/22/2008 || 1:41 pm
NBC Universal is co-opting the Green Party of the United States this Earth Day
This Earth Day I am calling out corporate greenwashing being employed by NBC Universal . The calculated lie (below) is that they are not forming a new “Green Party,” rather they are subverting the existence of one of the few 3rd parties in American politics.
When this week is over, I sincerely wonder how many times will NBC Universal feature the Green Party’s presidential candidate on any of it’s stations? That is less of a question and more of a challenge. My null hypothesis is that there will be no mention of the Green Party of the United States, rather lots of tips on living green instead of empowering people that they have the option to vote Green in November.
NBC Universal is 80% owned by General Electric and this type of greenwashing is designed to help distance people’s concerns about General Electric’s nuclear reactor business operations. It’s ironic that it was protests against nuclear energy that helped propel the German Green Party into the political spotlight.
View the modified screen grab:
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Posted One Year Ago: San Antonio Sprocket #2
|| 12:28 pm
North End Quilt
Continuing my series of maps of downtown Boston, Massachusetts, today’s map features the North End neighborhood. Settled in the 1630’s, it’s the oldest continuously inhabited portion of the city of Boston.
View the Google Map of North End neighborhood in Boston.
View the rest of the details:
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Posted One Year Ago: San Antonio Sprocket #2
4/21/2008 || 6:00 pm
Visual Trace Route - I’m 42 hops from Google
For nearly four years (May 2004 to March 2008) this website was a digital experiment how people find content on the internet. By withholding the contents of this website from search engines I was able to create my own digital island that could be found only by those who knew me or when I would selectively release specific content. Last month, exactly one year after an internationally syndicated article was published about me and my website, I concluded the experiment by lifting the electronic Berlin Wall that prevented search engines from accessing the content on this website. For the last month or so, I’ve begun to watch how people are able to find my content through search engines, and frankly its been nothing short of amazing. In the not-so-distant future I will have a more detailed pre & post search engine analysis posted here.
While this website was unlisted and before the article was published, I used to look at my website IP logs every morning. I would manually trace the IP addresses of every visitor to this website and obtain a decent guesstimate of how the person found my website. This IP analysis would give the location and hosting provider of the visitor, but what it did not give is the digital path that my content traveled.
Data does not travel through the internet in a geographic path of least resistance (like as the crow flies), rather data bounces around the world from server to router to user in a path that can go in multiple directions and routed through multiple servers before finally reaching your computer. A trace route is a means to see what servers the content passes through before reaching you. By clicking on the image above you can explore how content travels to your computer using the Google Maps interface to see exactly where the content travels. For example, data from www.Google.com makes 42 unique hops before finally reaching my computer. A fun experiment would be to trace how content from this website arrives on your computer screen.
Watching the route trace itself looks much like a sped up version of “The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming,” which is a cartographically interactive story told through the Google Maps interface. Each stop becomes a new chapter in the information’s delivery. How many stops did this blog entry take to get to you?
Posted One Year Ago: San Antonio Sprocket
4/20/2008 || 8:11 pm
Boston Financial District Quilt
Continuing my series of maps of Boston, Massachusetts, today’s map features Boston’s Financial District. Using the same Quilt / Lenz hybrid that I first employed in Rochester Quilt #2, I placed a magnifying sphere over the center of the map. This magnified geography in the center of the map features Boston’s Government Center, Faneiul Hall, and the nearby Faneuil Hall Marketplace. As your eye moves away from the center the rest of Boston’s Financial District is revealed.
View the Google Map of Boston’s Financial District.
View the rest of the details:
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Posted One Year Ago: Columbine Quilt
4/19/2008 || 3:26 pm
Of (the Tartars) manners both good and bad (around 400 years ago)
1732 Map of Great Tartary by Herman Moll
Obtained from the David Rumsey Map Collection
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Today’s entry follows up my successful layout of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris / The Cure for Love and employs the same side by side Latin / English text. Below you will find Chapter 5 of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation - Volume 2 published 1598-1600 in London, England.
Richard Hakluyt was an English author, editor, translator, and personal chaplain to Sir Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, principal Secretary of State to Elizabeth I and James I. A great history of his life and works can be found in his Wikipedia entry. Most notably, he was one of the biggest advocates for English colonization of Virginia. Some of his other exploration-related works include the Discovery of Muscovy, Voyagers Tales, Voyages in Searth of the North-West Passage, and numerous similar volumes related to The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation (Project Gutenberg lists a total of 12 volumes altogether). In the chapter below he describes the manners of the people of Tartary. This antiquated geographic name was used by Europeans from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century to designate the great tract of northern and central Asia stretching from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean (see map above). Inhabited by Turkic and Mongol peoples of the Mongol Empire who were generically referred to as “Tartars”, the present day geography includes the current areas of Siberia, Turkestan (including East Turkestan), Greater Mongolia, and parts China. In many ways the book reminds me of how an antiquarian National Geographic article might have read. The aim of this book, and many of his other works, was to consolidate what others had written about different regions around the known world and in doing so help spread the diffusion of geographic & ethnographic knowledge. Lastly, in regards to the transcription below, I did not modify the original Project Gutenberg text, so when reading please note that there are some typographic differences in the old English and contemporary English. Remember to change the lowercase V to a lowercase U and in some cases, change the I’s to J’s. I did consider updating the text to modern English, but in some ways I feel that it would be better to keep the text in it’s originally transcribed format. Unlike Ovid’s Remedia Amoris / The Cure for Love, I did not include the line numbers because they were not given in the original text. I did, however, separate the text into easy to read paragraphs. If you are reading this entry via Google Reader, the chapter can be better read by hiding the sidebar that shows your subscriptions by clicking the small arrow on the left separator or by pressing “u” on your keyboard to switch to wide screen. |
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did:
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Posted One Year Ago: Oakland Quilt, Oakland Quilt #2, Oakland Quilt #3, Oakland Quilt #4, Oakland Quilt #5, over-projection after three derivatives
4/18/2008 || 1:29 pm
Boston Common Quilt #2
Using this portion of yesterday’s map, I constructed this derivative Diamond Quilt Projection map of the area around Boston Common and the Massachusetts State House.
View the Google Map of Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts.
View the rest of the details:
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Posted One Year Ago: Roll Call's Photo of the Week features the DC Colonist
