|| 2/10/2010 || 2:19 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
YouTube Videos & Photograph From Last Weekend’s Historic Snowball Fight In Dupont Circle
The video above contains four short video clips I recorded from my Canon SD750 on February 6th, 2010 in & around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. The video clips show the what the snowball fight looked like when I arrived, a dance party, a fallen tree on New Hampshire Avenue, and an SUV pulling a snowboarder. The camera is rather beat up and there is a noticeable dark spot on camera lens– sorry!
This is my favorite video of the snowball fight. It was filmed from a building overlooking Dupont Cirlce:
At least there were no guns.
|| 12/2/2009 || 2:38 pm || + Render A Comment || ||
FRIEND REQUEST: MCA Invitational
I was asked by my neighbor Chuck Baxter, who is a member of the Mid City Artists, to participate in the dynamic group exhibition. I intend on hanging a large 60″ x 40″ printing of Park La Brea Quilt #3 on display. This gorgeous map was originally printed out as a supplement to a book proposal in 2008. After the proposal was rejected and map sent back, it sat rolled up in my closet for over a year, and I’m excited to have it on display for the first time in Washington, DC.
Please attend the opening reception on Friday, December 11th, 2009 from 5pm to 8pm.
Art 17 @ Coldwell Banker is located at
1606 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC.
The exhibition will be up until January 29, 2010.
|| 8/21/2009 || 6:47 pm || + Render A Comment || ||
Photographs from The Phillips Collection After 5 exhibition: “Sensory Remix: A Video-Art Collage”
On Thursday I was given the opportunity to assist my friends Robin Bell, Videokillers, and Dissident Display with the setup of their VJ / DJ exhibition at The Phillips Collection After 5 exhibition: “Sensory Remix: A Video-Art Collage.”
Below are some of the photographs I took of the evening:
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|| 7/17/2009 || 7:16 pm || + Render A Comment || ||
Revisiting the Dupont Lenz Quilt Animation
In August of 2007 I posted the Quicktime Movie of Dupont Lenz Quilt Animation on this blog. I had not joined YouTube yet, nor had I released the contents of this website to search engines, so only recently have I begun to port some of my animations to other websites. Today I decided to upload the animation to Facebook and to YouTube.
The animation uses same layout from my map “Dupont Circle Quilt 2005.” The 30 second animation features two 15 second segments of the same imagery shown from two different perspectives. The modified aerial photography of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC is magnified using transparent glass spheres to create unique cartographic perspective.
Related Animations:
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|| 11/21/2008 || 5:42 pm || Comments Off || ||
YouTube video of the “Reclaim the Streets” demonstration [Summer 2001]
From Wikipedia:
Reclaim the Streets Reclaim the Streets (RTS) is a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalisation, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport.
Since I was being all nostalgic with the Indymedia entry the other day, I decided to post this YouTube video that my friend Robin made. It was filmed in the summer of 2001 and shows the freedoms that protesters enjoyed in Washington, DC before 9/11. While I was out of town in Saint Louis when this took demonstration place, its interesting to see what Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan looked like seven years ago.
|| 3/18/2008 || 1:07 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
Scott + Dupont Circle Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Continuing my current project of mapping the portions of Washington, DC that Google is censoring, I decided use the same process that was used to create Washington + Dupont Circle Quilt. This type of digitally derived double exposure aerial photography creates some of my favorite maps as of late. While I am only touching on the germane juxtaposition of traffic circles in Washington, DC, I’ve been thinking about how I take two completely disparate geographies and create similar styled maps. One idea is to take two of the tessellations I created for the Los Angeles Interchanges Series and create a double exposure highway interchange. Another possibility is to make a Supreme Illusion Supreme by overlaying the Pentagon on to the site of the World Trade Center. I’m not sure how it would look, but I think I’ll try making one of these maps in the near future.
View the Google Map of Scott Circle in Washington, DC.
View the Google Map of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.
View the rest of the details:
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|| 3/2/2008 || 11:43 am || Comments Off || ||
Washington + Dupont Circle Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
I decided to switch things up a bit with today’s rendering. I have become very efficient with most of the processes used to create my maps, which both makes them standardized and sometimes a bit too similar to each other (while paradoxically being different geographies). This map and probably the next few maps are going to be slightly different.
In order to have the most recent maps of Logan Circle, Dupont Circle, and Washington Circle look similar to each other, I would take the first derivative tessellation and overlay it on top of the tessellation that I was constructing. By adjusting the transparency, I can overlay the circles directly on top of each other which makes the subsequent map look nearly identical.
Normally, I simply delete the original tessellation when I have the two lined up perfectly, however in today’s map I chose to not delete the other map. Instead, I adjusted the transparency of Dupont Circle to 51% to show both geographies at once. The result is something that I wasn’t expecting, but am quite pleased with the results. I can see myself using this process again. It’s like a double exposure…
View the Google Map of Washington Circle in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, DC.
View the Google Map of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.
View the rest of the details:
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|| 2/11/2008 || 2:23 pm || Comments Off || ||
Poor Map Design: 5 Guys Famous Burgers & Fries
Inverted scan of 5 Guys poorly drawn map
The other day I was at Five Guys getting lunch and I picked up their to-go menu (below). On the back of menu was a completely blank page with the map above. When I saw it, I laughed out loud and said, “This has got to be one of the worst maps I’ve seen in awhile.” At least my grilled cheese sandwich was tasty..
Let me explain:
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|| 9/7/2007 || 9:06 am || Comments Off || ||
Dupont Circle Quilt 2005 #2
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
After making yesterday’s map, I thought it would be interesting to expand on the “sister circle” concept and make a similar version of Dupont Circle. The process involved in making this map is something I have never done before. I took the source tile from Logan Circle Quilt #2 and reduced it to the original 3,000 x 3,000 size and opened up Dupont Circle Quilt 2005. Once the opened, I overlaid the source location on to Dupont map and tried my best to place it on the exact same location. This involved an attempt to overlay the circles on top of one another. The assumption was that they were the same in size, so by adjusting the opacity of Logan Circle, I was able to fit them on top of eachother. Of course it wasn’t exact, but what it allowed me to do was to copy the same location and create a very similar tessellation. I know it wasn’t perfect because the circle is slightly truncated when overlapped. You can see this (below) in the way that the fountain does not show up properly. Regardless, I am really pleased with the way the new process turned out.
View the Google Map of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.
View Details:
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|| 8/7/2007 || 9:46 pm || Comments Off || ||
Dupont Lenz Quilt Animation
Click on the screenshot above to watch the 30 second animation of Dupont Circle. [12 mb download]
|| 7/17/2007 || 8:20 am || Comments Off || ||
Dupont Circle Quilt 2005
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
In continuance of my current task of mapping the areas of Washington, DC that Google has chosen to censor, I decided to revist my favorite circle.
View the Google Map of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC.
Related Maps:
View Details:
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|| 1/1/2006 || 5:18 pm || Comments Off || ||
Dupont Circle Quilt #2
: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :
As I learned before, its always better to over-project than to under-project, however there is a caveat to over projection- that being my computer can handle files that are below about 25,000 pixels. I have gone higher, but in the end, I can’t fit the final compressed output on to a CD easily. So why make something so large that I cannot feasibly back it up? Tha’s why I’ve chosen to stick to the 18,000 by 12,000 file size. The trick to the over projection process is to make sure that the tessellation (source imagery) appears in the scene the appropriate number of times, and if not, I scale the scene so that the final product will be as close to 1:1 as possible. Alas, I really like this map, and I think the next one, which uses the already rotated source imagery, will look great!
View Details:
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|| 11/17/2005 || 7:32 am || Comments Off || ||
Dupont Circle Quilt
: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :
I used one of the smallest tessellations yet to make this. The source imagery of the tiled Dupont Circle was only 2,600 pixels, but I made the right calculations to keep spatial resolution very similar the final product the same as the source (I counted how many times I saw the full tiled go across and multipled by 2,600). I like how it turned out, but I wish there was more merging of the circle itself, as in the circle itself would become a larger circle around the center. Up next, I am going to make one using nothing but imagery of GWU.
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|| 8/16/2009 || 3:01 pm || 2 Comments Rendered || ||
The sign I posted outside of MTV’s Real World DC house is transcribed in today’s Washington Post
Last month I posted the photograph above in my entry about adding some political commentary to the area around the Real World DC house in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC. This morning a friend of mine left a somewhat cryptic comment on my Facebook page telling me to check section E6 in today’s Washington Post. I ran downstairs, opened the paper up, and let out out a hearty laugh.
Transcribed near the end of Dan Zak’s article, Neighborhood Watch: MTV Is in the House, and Everyone Else Just Wants to Be, is the text of my sign:
In the next section of the article there is choice quote from some teenagers from Maryland:
(underline added for emphasis of the Congressional lack thereof)
While I was not identified as the creator of the sign, even though a simple Google Search would have brought the author to my website, and the author only mentioned that there was one sign (there are 8 still up last time I counted), I’m very pleased that my sign was mentioned in today’s article. In that respect, the ten dollars spent making those signs & purchasing the wheatpaste was completely validated— my message made it into the Washington Post. But the real question is if the message will make the cut and be mentioned in any of the episodes set to air on MTV in 2010?
Since the sign(s) has been up now for just about a month, I figure its time to remove them and put up something new. I already have the next flyer made, but I’m debating if I should put them up or not. The flyer is a bit over the top, but well, umm, so are most of the people mentioned in the article. But unlike the ones who actually give two shits about the show, my aim is not to get in the house or hang out with the cast (I really could care less about that), but to use their presence in Washington, DC as a vehicle to get out the larger message of DC residents being second class citizens denied representation in Congress.
Click on the screen grab below to read the last page of the article:
What’s interesting about the text on-line versus the text in the printed article is that there is extra space between lines of the poster in the on-line version captured above. These extra line breaks actually make the point of the poster appear more important on-line than it does in the print edition, which does not feature extra line breaks. But since the print edition of the Washington Post is not delivered outside of the Washington, DC area, this typographical difference carries significantly more weight on-line than in print. In that respect, I must thank the web editor at the Washington Post for giving the text of my sign a little bit more emphasis than it would otherwise have received if it were identical to the print edition.
UPDATE – After I posted this entry, I went back to the Washington Post website and found that the poster was briefly shown at the beginning of the video portion of the article: