I was contacted by Daniel Tucker in January of this year to participate in his map archive. I thought it was a great idea so I offered my Pentagon Quilt #3 map. I received notification this week that the map archive starts its tour for the next two years with the exhibit called Experimental Geography. Here’s the blurb from the website:
EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, land fill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism. This exhibition explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether).The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water-treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer kiosks, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.
The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. For example, Ilana Halperin explores the intersection of personal, historic, and geologic time, as may be seen in the photograph of her stooping at the edge of natural hot springs to boil a small cup of milk. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, examines the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using pragmatic skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, CLUI forces a reading of the American landscape (which includes traffic in Los Angeles, submerged cities, and the broadcast towers in the San Gabriel Mountains) that refamiliarizes the viewer with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.
Experimental Geography is curated by Nato Thompson, curator and producer at Creative Time in New York, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.
Featuring:
Francis Alÿs
AREA Chicago
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)
kanarinka (Catherine D’lgnazio)
e-Xplo
Ilana Halperin
Lize Mogel
Multiplicity
Trevor Paglen
Raqs Media Collective
Ellen Rothenberg
Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Spurse
Deborah Stratman
Daniel Tucker, Organizer, The We are Here Map Archive < --- Hi!
Alex Villar
Yin Xiuzhen
Featured in Daniel Tucker’s We are Here Map Archive:
1. Bill Rankin “My cities” 1978–2004
2. Bill Rankin “The United States?” 2003–2007
3. Counter Cartography Collective “Disorientation Guide” 2006
4. Nikolas R. Schiller “Pentagon Quilt #3″ 2007
5. Ashley Hunt “Prison Map” 2003
6. Friends of William Blake “The People’s Guide to the RNC” 2004
7. Subrosa “Biopower Unlimited” 2002
8. Ecotrust Canada “Statement of Intent Boundaries” 2008
9. NYC Indypendent “Threat to Peace”
10. Repohistory “Circulation” 2000
11. Lize Mogel and Dario Azzellini “The Privatization of War: Colombia as Laboratory and Iraq as Large-Scale Application” 2007/2008
12. Beehive Design Collective “FTAA” 2003
13. Jeffrey Warren “Armsflow” 2006
14. Center for Urban Pedagogy “Cargo Chain” 2008
15. Temporary Travel Office “Contaminating the Preserve” 2008
16. Hackitectura (Pablo de Soto, Jose Perez de Lama osfa, Marta Paz sweena), Indymedia Estrecho and collaborators “Tactical Cartography of the Straits” 2004
17. Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri “Fear is Somehow Our For Whom? For What? and Proximity to Everything Far Away” 2006
18. The Los Angeles Urban Rangers “Malibu Public Beaches” 2007
19. The Los Angeles Urban Rangers “Los Angeles Urban Rangers Official Map and Guide” 2004
20. The Los Angeles Urban Rangers “LA County Fair” 2006
21. The Institute for Infinitely Small Things “City Formerly Known As Cambridge”
22. Amy Franceschini “Silicon Valley Superfund Sites” 2006
23. Amy Franceschini “Intentional Communities in Silicon Valley” 2008
24. Adriane Colburn “Whose On Top (race to the pole, part two)” 2008
25. Bureau d’études “World Government” 2005
26. Grupo de Arte Callejero “Aqui Viven Genocidas”
There will be a catalog for the exhibition that will be published by Melville House Books. I look forward to getting a copy when it comes out.
The tour starts next month and has dates that are still available. I would like for it to come to Washington, DC! 
Exhibition Itinerary
Richard E. Peeler Art Center , DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana
September 19 – December 2, 2008Rochester Art Center, Rochester, Minnesota
February 7 – April 18, 2009The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico
June 28 – September 20, 2009AVAILABLE
October 2009 - January 2010Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
February 21 - May 30, 2010AVAILABLE
June - August 2010
Click on the detail of Pentagon Quilt #3 below to view the rest of the map:
Related Virginia Entries: (more…)
Render A Comment || || Posted One Year Ago: Interchangable Earth
8/2/2008 || 1:59 pm
Merdian Hill Park Hexagon Tessellation
This is the first time I’ve made a tessellation using hexagon as the basis for the pattern. Normally, I simply use a square because its the easiest to tessellate. The last map I made using Photoshop was Clayton Quilt #3, which was constructed using one square tile six times and did not exhibit radial symmetry like most of my other Qulit projection maps.
This time around I used center portion of the source tile that I used for Meridian Hill Park Quilt #4 and to switch things up a bit, I cut out a perfect hexagon from the the tile instead of using the tile’s square shape as basis for the tessellation. With one hexagon cut out, I merely duplicated it and moved it around to create the irregular tiling above. The difficulty was that I had to adjust the hexagon tiles so that they were not overlapping. It wasn’t that difficult per se, but it took awhile to get them all lined up perfectly. I am quite pleased with the result and figure that I will use this process again sometime in the not-so-distance future.
View the Google Map of Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC.
View the rest of the map’s close-up details:
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Render A Comment || || Posted One Year Ago: The Shanghai Map
7/30/2008 || 10:42 pm
Quart Bag: A Community Art Show at the Civilian Art Projects
Screen grab of the front page of Civilian Art Projects website
Features a piece I created called “Without You I am Lost”
On July 21st, 2008 I received an invitation e-mail from the owner of Civilian Art Projects, a Washington, DC-based fine art gallery. The e-mail outlined the concept behind their upcoming group show called “Quart Bag,” which invited local artists to submit a Ziploc® that has been decorated, converted, or redesigned. The uniqueness behind the concept, one that I’ve always enjoyed since I was a kid, is everyone is essentially given a prop and its up to the artist to get creative with it and transform it into something new & unique.
After reading the e-mail a few times over I immediately thought of using some of the maps that I had saved from my Artomatic exhibit. The map scraps were originally a bunch of cut up maps that I used for my Base Map Installation (see below). These maps were originally purchased using DC government grant money that was given to me in conjunction with the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities 2008 Young Emerging Artist Award and I realized that I wasn’t about to throw all those maps away when Artomatic finished. So when I was dismantling the exhibit I saved as many of the maps as I could so that I could recycle them (like last night’s leftovers!) in a to-be-identified project.
With the recycling theme running through my head, I went downstairs to my kitchen, found an unused Ziploc® bag in my pantry (gallon-sized not quart!), and proceeded to my basement to create this unique piece of art. The original idea was to fill the bag up with scraps of maps but after filling it up, I realized that there was something missing. Essentially, there was no message being conveyed and frankly I wouldn’t say a bag filled with scraps of maps means much to anyone, or worth $50/$100 unless of course, you were a collector of discarded maps and/or the maps were really old.
Upon further contemplation, I decided to empty out the bag and add a bit of text to the inside of the bag to give it some depth of meaning through an abstract message. I chose a phrase that combines the unique nature of maps with a subtle, but concise, message of longing: Without You I am Lost. This simple message speaks volumes (about a gallon) about who I am, where I am going, and how I’ve been feeling as of late. There were a few other phrases that I bounced around in my head like show me the way, you are not here, and get lost, but I felt that Without You I am Lost really captured the essence of how I was feeling at the time of it’s creation.
I went back upstairs to my room and printed out the text using the same font that I used in the bloody self-portrait taken after my recent mugging and had the text printed archival matte photographic paper. I then cut the paper down to size and found some clear packing tape to affix the printed text to. To give the clear tape some subtle flair, I used my lighter to burn the edges of the tape and then affixed it to the inside of the bag and filled it back up again with the maps.
This time around I was more precise in how I arranged the maps and placed on one side of the text a detail of the National Mall explicitly featuring the United States Capitol. I chose this location to add a secondary depth of meaning because as a resident of Washington, DC I’m denied representation in Congress. Thus the You could be implied to mean congressional representation and the I implied to mean the residents of Washington, DC and so it could then indirectly be read as “Without congressional representation the people of Washington, DC are Lost.”
Adding to this inferential geographic juxtaposition motif, the other side of the text features an upside-down portion of the Middle East and Africa to imply concept of being lost in the global context. Or more specifically, I am implying that American democracy has lost its way and the world has become lost. After all, the opposite of progress is congress, right? By placing the two locations on opposing sides of the central text, my message expands from a sincere message of longing to a subtle critique on American foreign policy and the disenfranchisement of Americans living in the capital city of the world’s most powerful nation.
A couple days ago I e-mailed the gallery director back indicating that I was interested in participating in the exhibition and attached the photograph of the bag. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to participate because I was using a gallon-sized bag instead of a quart bag. Her response was that she thought it was perfect
Earlier this afternoon, about 30 minutes before I was going to leave my house and drop off the bag at the gallery, I received an e-mail notifying me that the photograph I had sent was currently on the front page of the gallery’s website. Grinning, I checked it out and took the screen grab above. I’m really looking forward to seeing the variety of submissions that will be on display. If you are in the Washington, DC area, you should come & check out the exhibition:
The Quart Bag Exhibition opens on Friday, August 6th from 7pm to 9pm @ the Civilian Art Projects, which is located on the 3rd floor of 406 7th Street NW, Washington, DC
In case you are interested in seeing what the maps were used for before they ended up in the bag in the photo above, in April of this year I produced the YouTube video below for promotion of my Artomatic 2008 exhibit:
Related Art Gallery Entries: (more…)
Render A Comment || || Posted One Year Ago: Jacksonville Quilt
7/29/2008 || 8:00 pm
Geospatial RSS Art & the RSS Monster
Image above links to this blog’s main RSS feed
About a year ago I came up with the idea of making a large scale rendering that uses the iconic RSS logo as a texture on a very large and creepy monster. He’d be a cross between overt information consumption and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Below him would be the caption “FEED ME!!!.”
Instead of going that route, I’ve simply modified a large RSS graphic I found on-line and replaced the white space with one of my previously made maps. I’ve been debating on whether I should expand this concept and make a string of these graphics like I did for the randomly selected banner graphics (see banner above and/or hit reload). For now I’m going to stick with the first design I created, which uses imagery from Boston Financial District Quilt.
In homage of the to-be-created RSS Monster, here’s a YouTube clip from Little Shop of Horrors where Audrey II falls over with hunger pains and says “FEED ME SEYMOUR!”
Render A Comment || || Posted One Year Ago: MyGoogleMaps : Google's Censorship Perimeter
5/20/2008 || 11:14 am
Blue Balls [Hexcode T-Shirt Humor]
Following up my use of Hexadecimal Color Codes on the #006900 Party t-shirt, which was based off of the #000000 Power t-shirt, I made another t-shirt design: #0000FF (balls)
For the last week or so I’ve been thinking about a way to use a non-color word visually and this morning I came up with balls. They are easy to draw and are easily identifiable. Embedded in the t-shirt is a phallic image that is supposed to further add to the humor of what constitutes blue balls.
Render A Comment || ||
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.
Comments Off || || Posted One Year Ago: 2007 Maps, 97 maps so far this year...
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:
(more…)
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4/12/2008 || 5:42 pm
Geovisual QR Code
QR Code is a two-dimensional bar code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is stands for “Quick Response,” and it operates very similar to traditional bar codes, but allows for more customization. QR Codes are common in Japan where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional code. In recent weeks I’ve read about some very interesting uses of the code and decided to make something with it.
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4/9/2008 || 12:30 pm
The first Artomatic prints have arrived
Federal Triangle Quilt #3 with Chinese signature
Using some of the funds from my DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities 2008 Young Artist Grant, I purchased the first set of prints that will be shown at next month’s Art-O-Matic exhibition.
One of Kodak’s newest products is their fleece blanket, which is 100% polyester, machine washable, and frankly, are a very good deal at about $45 each. I’ve been waiting a long time to print my maps on large media cost-effectively and fortunately the size of these blankets match the aspect ratio of my maps (3:2) so I can upload my 9,000 x 6,000-sized maps (one half the original rendering size) without any extra image manipulation. Or so I thought.
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Comments Off || || Posted One Year Ago: Capitol Hill Mandala, first draft
4/3/2008 || 1:28 pm
Remedia Amoris / The Cure For Love by Ovid
Remedia Amoris (Love’s Remedy or The Cure for Love) is a 814 line poem in Latin by the Roman poet Ovid written around 5 BC. The aim of the poem is to teach young men how they can avoid idealizing the women they love and to give assistance if love brings despair and misfortune.
I discovered this poem when I was researching antique stained glass sundials and I came to the initial conclusion that Ovid’s prose is visually interpreted on Blaeu’s world map from the mid-1600s (detail above). Late last night I found both the latin and translated version of the poem, so I decided to do something I wish there was more of on the internet: a side by side layout which shows the original latin on the left and the translated english on the right.
To add a unique visual element to the poem, I made the line number (which came from the Latin text) the color of the english translation. This involved quite a bit of manual coding, but I think it makes the latin / english comparison easier and slightly more visually engaging. By using red & white type face and numerical indention, the layout looks like a crève cœur or broken heart when scrolling. I bolded one section for emphasis related it’s discovery [hint: around line #185].
There are a few translation discrepancies that I’ve found thus far and there are many others which come across slightly convoluted and require more inquiry, but overall the poem is quite interesting. It includes topics like tree grafting (Genetic Engineering Version 1.0), having multiple lovers, travelling, and what to do and not to do when getting over a relationship. It’s interesting how much things have changed in the last 2,000 years, and as cliché as it may sound, how much our emotions have stayed the same. We all face the same relationship troubles and like Ovid, there will always be people telling you how to deal with them.
If you’ve got about 45 minutes to spare, here is Ovid’s Remedia Amoris / The Cure For Love:
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Render A Comment || || Posted One Year Ago: What a difference a year (and an internationally syndicated story) makes!
3/7/2008 || 1:12 pm
Friends Don’t Let Friends Drink Starbucks
Today on one of my favorite DC blogs there was a posting about the new pedestrian safety ads (above) that are now being featured on Metro buses and trains. Before I began reading the comments, I was thinking that this graphic would be fun to photoshop. Specifically, I was interested in making fun of the fact that person being hit had been drinking what looks to be a Starbucks coffee. Using the old PSA message “friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” combined with an unfortunate crash scene and a phrase on old pen of mine from an independent coffeeshop in Saint Louis, Missouri, I was able to subvert the message.
If I wanted to spend more time on this graphic, I would have downloaded the exact same font that was used in the original flyer, but I am happy with the ironic result of 25 minutes of image editing.
Click the above graphic to be taken to www.delocator.net which is a website dedicated to helping you find independent coffeeshops around the world.
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1/5/2008 || 1:35 pm
Cities & Nature is now available
I look forward to seeing my copy when it arrives! The book cover uses my map of Central Park in New York City. From the screen grab above, the final design looks a bit greener than the original map, but I won’t know until I see my copy. Regardless, I genuinely look forward to reading it instead of fussing over the colors. What’s inside is what counts!
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9/17/2007 || 1:06 pm
My first album cover: Thievery Corporation - “Supreme Illusion”
I am very honored to have my first album cover be from DC-based, international recording artist, Thievery Corporation. They have been nominated twice for a Grammy Award for best package design and I personally feel that this album cover uniquely showcases their “outernational” style. Record cover features Lower Manhattan Quilt and Pentagon Quilt
Comments Off || || Posted One Year Ago: Al-Jazeera VS. CNN on Banksy's show in LA , Salt Lake Tribune covers the D.C. Colonist
9/10/2007 || 3:36 pm
Geospatial Art Palettes
I recently discovered a web application that allows you to upload an image and it returns a palette of colors based on the colors in the original image. The idea behind this application is that designers are quickly given color codes that will compliment the image’s color scheme. The cartographic aspect that I discovered is that a mapmaker using an aerial or satellite image as their basemap can design their map so that the colors of subsequent layers correspond harmoniously. Simply take a portion of the basemap and upload it to the website and copy the output for future use.
Below are two more examples:
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8/13/2007 || 2:31 pm
Adams Morgan Earth
Click on the image below to download the .kmz file [11 mb] for Google Earth:
I am quite impressed with this creation. I believe it’s the first ever geographic tessellation created for Google Earth.
Continue reading:
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Render A Comment || || Posted One Year Ago: UCLA Quilt #4
8/2/2007 || 10:13 am
The Shanghai Map
A little over a month ago a Chinese friend of mine moved from DC to Shanghai, China. While we were chatting on-line I asked her if she’d be able to send me some text in Chinese so I could use it on some maps. The first use of this text was the banners I made a couple weeks ago and today marks my first use of the text on an actual map.
The map was created from a Terra satellite image taken of eastern China on April 4th, 2004. The text simply says “map,” and with the location & text combined, you get the title, “The Shanghai Map.”
Unlike any of the quilt projection maps before this, I decided to use only one tessellation rotated 45 degrees. This switch-up is because I’ve never used Simplified Chinese before on a map and wanted this one to be completely unique. With the colors, text, and type of tessellation, I am quite pleased with this map and I look forward to using the text she supplied me for future maps!
View the Google Map of the area around Shanghai, China.
View Details:
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7/20/2007 || 2:35 pm
random banners now greet you - continued
In March of this year I created 15 banners that are displayed randomly each time the website loads. Earlier this week a friend of mine in Shanghai, China sent me my name in Simplified Chinese. She also sent me some useful words I plan on adding to some future maps. I’ve decided to make another batch of banners using this text. There are now a total of 34 different banners.
View the new banners after the fold…
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Comments Off || || Posted One Year Ago: my internets are down
7/19/2007 || 4:40 pm
Socio Ditata Labore - Revisited
Discovered & translated in May, this engraving is now on the splash page of my website- an interactive Atlas Nouveau so to speak.
There are now over 1600 different images that randomly showcase the cartographic labor involved in the creation of this website. Just hit reload to cycle through them.
Related:
• Enriching Results
• Socio Ditata Labore : Society is Enriched by Labor
from the Lost Series
Comments Off || || Posted One Year Ago: San Juan Quilt #2
6/29/2007 || 6:40 pm
Geography & the Humanities Symposium Program Cover
A couple weeks ago my former boss at the Association of American Geographers called me up asking if I would be interested in having some of my maps displayed at their Geography & the Humanities Symposium (which took place last weekend). I exitedly responded by sending him a listing of the framed maps I had available for hanging. They selected RFK Quilt and The Modern Geographer and the following day I was asked if I’d give them permission to use the The Modern Geographer for the cover of the program. Above is the final version of the program cover. Click here to view the entire program [PDF].
Comments Off || || Posted One Year Ago: Cathedral Quilt - Signed
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