I’ve never been a fan of Flickr. I dislike how photos are lifted from Flickr all the time without proper citation. One of my biggest annoyances regarding my artwork or other people’s work is when it’s posted on-line with no link back or extra information regarding the artist or the circumstances regarding the image’s origin. Instead you get “neat huh?” “Cool photo!” “Look at this!” etc and while it’s great that more eyes are seeing the image, it undermines the artist’s visibility because the citation is not always accurately presented. A good example of this lack of information can be seen at the social image bookmarking website FFFFOUND!. This lack of citation is not the case 100% of the time, but its the main reason why I don’t upload my artwork to Flickr. Since I have ample server space and nearly unlimited bandwidth I’ve never needed another repository for my images.

I also don’t like the stalker ability that comes with having all of your photographs on-line for strangers to look at and download. I won’t name names, but I’ve looked through some Flickr photostreams of some of my friends and have found that the photos offer far too much information about their lives, activities, and friends. You can look through someone’s photos and see their exes, the interior of their homes, and basically just about anything the person decided to place out there for strangers to view. Worse is that you cannot access the information regarding where your photographs are viewed from. Since I have access to my website’s server logs I can find exactly how many times a photograph has been looked at and by what IP addresses. This information is shielded from the Flickr user and dumbed down to a lowly view counter.

With those reservations aside, I decided to play nice and upload one photograph of my Art-O-Matic 2008 exhibit taken on May 9th. I went through and tagged the photograph twelve times showcasing the content that has been placed on top of the Base Map. Since I embedded quite a few links into the notes, I’ll be able to track exactly who clicks on the image and know with a certain amount of certainty how many times the photograph has been looked at and where the photograph is being looked at from– if they click.

Related Art-O-Matic 2008 Entries: (more…)

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5/25/2008 || 12:17 am
Tabvla Temporis [Semidiurni in fignis Borealibus / Australibus]

This is the reverse side of Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula (Amsterdam 1606) which I used in my recent creation A New & Arabesque Map of the Hirshhorn Museum. If you look closely, you can see the reverse of original map that bled through the paper after couple hundred years and some image manipulation. The table shown is similar to an Ephemeris, which is table of values that gives the positions of astronomical objects in the sky at a given time. I would love for someone to sit and explain the way one goes about reading these types of antique charts. I understand a fair amount of what is being shown, but I do not fully grasp how to apply the calculations.

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5/23/2008 || 10:43 am
A New & Arabesque Map of the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden

:: saved at 6,480 x 5,040 ::

To celebrate the new procedure I decided to get around to editing the Library of Congress‘ copy of Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s Nova totius terrarum orbis geographica ac hydrographica tabula, which was published in Amsterdam in 1606. I removed the original map from the center and kept the decorative border similar to Nova et Accvratissima Totivs Terrarvm Orbis Tabvla, A New Map of the Terraqueous Globe : according to the the Ancient discoveries and most general Divisions of Geospatial Art, America as a Cloverleaf, and A New And Accurate Map of the World by John Speed. However, unlike the previous antique map mash-ups, which usually feature the earth laid out in two hemispheres, this map uses a rectangular space (Mercator?). The beauty of this open layout is that I can place any of my previously made maps inside of this 402-year-old template.

A common naming practice I’ve noticed in old map is the use of “New & Accurate” and since I like to play around with words, I changed Accurate to Arabesque to create a visual pun. The source map was about 6,500 pixels wide, I underlaid a rotated 9,000 x 6,000 copy of Hirshhorn Quilt to fit perfectly in the center of the new map. I think it would be fun to actually hand-color the engravings on this map to match other copies of this map which have the various figures colored in. The LOC’s copy is uncolored which means that its actually easier to add color to it than if it were already colored because pigment matching is not needed.

Below I dissect the border of the map:
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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

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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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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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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3/27/2008 || 3:27 pm
Antique Stained Glass Sundials

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3/10/2008 || 9:25 pm
ordered last week: New Blaeu

Originally created last summer as “NOVA ET ACCVRATISSIMA TOTIVS TERRARVM ORBIS TABVLA [2007 Remix],” when this map was published in the December 14th issue of the Christian Science Monitor, the editors truncated the name and simply called it “New Blaeu.”

Last week I decided to update the map slightly by trimming the edges and doing some color correction. It’s being printed at 20″x16″ and preserved behind glass in in an ornate gold frame. I am also planning on framing some of the other antique maps I purchased recently to compliment this map. I think they’ll look really cool all hung together; the real old with the fake new.

View the other detail:
(more…)

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12/14/2007 || 12:42 pm
The art of Map Fest by Teresa Méndez - The Christian Science Monitor

featured: NOVA ET ACCVRATISSIMA TOTIVS TERRARVM ORBIS TABVLA [2007 Remix]

Exactly 9 months to the day after David Montgomery’s article in the Washington Post was published, Teresa Méndez writes a great piece about maps and she includes section about me:

__snippet__[with links added]

They are artists such as Ms. Contro and the 11 others featured in “The Legend Altered: Maps as Method and Medium,” the Carrie Secrist Gallery exhibition. And they are artists such as Nikolas Schiller.

Except Mr. Schiller hesitates when asked to define what he does. Is the young D.C. resident, profiled earlier this year on the cover of The Washington Post Style section, an artist? Is he a mapmaker?

“I make pretty maps or artistic maps,” he says, searching for the right description, “or boutique maps.” He finally settles on “conceptual cartographer.”

Schiller takes US Geological Survey aerial photographs and plays with them.

“The Quilt Projection” – which his website (www.nikolasschiller.com) calls “A Journey Through Geometric Geography” – is his most prolific series. It consists of 350 images that look less like maps and more like something you might see peering through a kaleidoscope.

There are the “quilted” neighborhoods of Mount Vernon in Baltimore, Md., and Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. There is George Washington University in D.C., which Schiller attended for a time, and the University of Texas at Austin. Look close enough and you can identify familiar landmarks: streets, parks, a monument. But step back and the tessellation makes for a wonderfully abstract mosaic.

Schiller’s work is a way to see the world anew, to be an explorer when nearly every corner of the earth has previously been combed.

“With the world already charted and mapped,” he says, “geospatial art allows you to discover it all over again.”

Schiller is something of a curator of maps. He can point one to websites of antique maps, industry maps, and calendars detailing map exhibits around the world. The Internet, it would seem, abounds with cartograms. Twice, he mentions the Waldseemüller Map.

Also included on the Christian Science Monitor’s website is a 90 second audio report filed by the author. She talks about my Lenz Projection and how it was developed.
(more…)

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7/9/2007 || 2:15 pm
NOVA ET ACCVRATISSIMA TOTIVS TERRARVM ORBIS TABVLA [2007 Remix]

I updated the Library of Congress‘ version of Joan Blaeu’s “A New and Accurate Map of the Entire World” (1664?) with NASA’s Blue Marble satellite images. Unlike the previous version, I decided to use a different satellite image for the eastern hemisphere so that the tip of Brazil does not overlap.

View the Interactive & Original version:
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5/29/2007 || 1:52 pm
A New Map of the Terraqueous Globe : according to the the Ancient discoveries and most general Divisions of Geospatial Art

Worked on this “New Map” nearly all Memorial Day… took 12 hours to complete!
It’s a 269 year enrichment, errr, a cartographic memorial? Continue reading:
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5/14/2007 || 9:20 am
Quadrant Map of DC - Translated into Latin - “Novus Columbus Quadrans”

Legend:
• New Columbia - Novus Columbus
• North West - Septentrio Occidens
• North East - Septentrio Oriens
• South West - Merides Occidens
• South East - Merides Oriens
• Anno Domino MMVII - Year of Our Lord 2007
• Signature written in Arabic

This is my first draft of this map. I’ll probably make another with a different color scheme. I feel that there is a lot to be added to this map, but not sure where to start. It’s my first time using Latin as a main focus of a map. I got the idea after looking through the old maps yesterday that it would be funny to label the quadrants of DC in Latin (and future maps with historic samplings). Being that some feel Washington is the modern day Rome, I felt this lexical motif works well. It’s partly educational, partly humorous, and it crosses a few lingusitic barriers that I’ve never approached. Moreover, I am well aware that the water in the area of DC I live in has lead in the water, just like the Romans!

The choice of New Columbia as the title is a reference to the name that DC residents chose to-be for the state of the District of Columbia. I’ve honestly never liked the name “New Columbia” for the state’s name, it’s too old. There is nothing New about naming another state New. Plus, as for abbreviations, NC is already used by North Carolina! So after DC becomes a state, would it be called New Columbia in name but still go by DC or Washington? Or all three?

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5/12/2007 || 4:22 pm
Society is Enriched by Labor :: Socio Ditata Labore

“Antique Home”

Today I finally got around to looking through the David Ramsey Historical Map Collection. Like Archive.org, there was a lot to discover…

The above image is an assembled detail of a beautiful engraving on the title page of Atlas Nouveau, which was published in 1742 in Amsterdam (original cover after the flap). The detail contains the Latin phrase, “Socio ditata labore” and shows a scene of exploration. There is a slain dragon on the right side and on the left are soldiers bringing a woman to the new land. I couldn’t pass up this engraving! I do need a Latin translation, anyone know it? (A friend of mine was able to get a translation for me - below)

Behind the engraving is a tessellated detail from Home Quilt #5, which features the row house I’ve been living in for the last 3 years. The house was built around 1889, a 147 years after the Atlas was published. The source aerial photograph was taken in March of 2005, published in February of 2007, and revisted on March 29th, 2007, and finally today, a 265 year enrichment.

I also made a pop-art style tile that features the engraving in different colors.

From an e-mail:
Here is the report from my classicist friend in LA:

as for the latin, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as it stands - ’socius’ is a friend, companion, (father in law in some contexts) - so it could be some sort of dedication, as in: ‘for my father in law, with enriched labor” - which, as I say, makes no sense. if, however, ’societas’ has been mistaken for ’socio,’ then it can read, as you say, ‘society is enriched by labor.’

Title Page & Notes:
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11/11/2005 || 3:51 pm
latin quote of the week…

“mars gravior sub pace latet”
translated: A more serious warfare is concealed by seeming peace.

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