|| 8/28/2009 || 4:44 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
“NO” – Found Cartographic Typography
I have a quite a few framed maps hanging in my house just waiting to be purchased. In fact, I have more framed maps than I have available wall space. Usually before we have a big party I go around the house and rearrange the framed maps so our guests see different maps each time they visit. The other night when I was walking up the stairs I noticed that the two maps that I’ve had up for a months actually spelled something. The N from N Prague and the torus around Georgetown Lenz #2 kind of spell out the word NO. I wonder if guests saw this? Or if it could have been construed as a subliminal message?
Below are the maps as they appeared in their original blog entries:
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|| 1/19/2009 || 11:59 pm || Comments Off || ||
YouTube videos from the DC Manifest Hope Gallery Party
Near the end of Moby’s DJ set at the Manifest Hope DC gallery Inauguration party, I spotted the security guard first tell another security guard to tell a dancer to calm down, then she starts getting jiggy wid it.
I saw that the crowd was having a good time dancing to De La Soul at the DC Manifest Hope gallery and decided to record the crowd participation.

|| 1/14/2009 || 11:07 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt #5
: rendered at 9,000 X 6,000 :

Its been awhile since I’ve made a map, so I decided to revisit Georgetown. When making this map, I tried to center the focus on the intersection of M Street & Wisconsin Ave. I was able to do this more easily because I started with a smaller piece of aerial photography than I normally work with.
View the Google Map of the Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, DC
: detail :

View the rest of the details:
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|| 9/5/2008 || 11:51 pm || Comments Off || ||
QR Code on display at the Ralph Lauren store in Georgetown
Tonight I went to the Adidas store in Georgetown because my friend DECOY was celebrating her birthday and another friend was DJing. After parking my bicycle down the street (Georgetown doesn’t have many bicycle locks), I noticed the sign outside of the Ralph Lauren store. This sighting marks the first time I’ve seen a QR Code in Washington, DC. I decided to snap a picture of it to see if I could decode on my computer and below the fold you can see the results:
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|| 8/29/2005 || 7:58 am || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
Georgetown Quilt #4
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

Wow! Who would have thought that I could make something so different, yet so similar with the EXACT same source imagery as Georgetown Quilt #3? As mentioned before, the only difference between the two is the location of the reflected seam in the source imagery. Instead of placing centeral seam of the modified imagery on Key Bridge, I inversed the location by placing the Key Bridge on the outside.
When preparing the imagery for a rendering there are four tiles that comprise the geographic tessellation, but only one of the tiles retains the proper orthographic characteristics (ie, its how it should look when looking at a map, the other three are flipped horizontally & vertically). By moving the orthographically correct tile to one of the different parts of the 4 tiled mosaic I am able to create to 4 completely different outcomes. I sincerely feel that this “discovery” theoretically allows me to have 4 different tessellations for each geographically specific area.
That is definitely my next project, albeit one that will take 4 times as long to prepare & render, but I think it’s worth it. I’d love to see 4 different renderings of the exact same geographic area placed side by side!!! I wonder what location I’ll use? I want to make a rendering of DuPont Circle….hmmmm…..
View details:
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|| 8/28/2005 || 5:10 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt #3
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :

Using the new modified ‘square’ imagery in the rendering, there isn’t any distortion of the buildings that was present in the previous Georgetown renderings. I really like how the Whitehurst freeway makes the seams of the center! Since I like this rendering so much, I decided to delete the old White House Sunset zoomify page, and made this new one. Zoomify is sooo much fun! :-) Up next is an another Georgetown rendering, but this one is slightly different. Using the exact same source imagery from the USGS, I created a different mosaic arrangement. I think I’d have to make an animation of sorts to show this concept adequately! While maintaining the exact same spatial resolution and geographic location, the imagery can be flipped and arranged in such a way that there becomes a tessellation inverse. I look forward to comparing the results.
view rendering details:
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|| 7/31/2005 || 7:36 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt #2
: rendered at 15,000 X 10,000 :

This rendering marks a new stage in my artistic development. Through better understanding of my tools, I have switched from using flattened cylinders to using infinite planes. The geographic tessellation can now be projected to infinite without any degradation in spatial resolution. While the old way allowed me to do the same, I like having a new way to make new lines of symmetry.
This means the gigapixel or the terapixel(wha?) barrier can be surpassed, but my digital ceiling is limited to my iMac’s processing power- I need a G5. Some of the renderings from the Abstract Series were created at 20,000 X 15,000 (300 megapixels) but I’ve realized that it takes too long to process renderings that large. I’ve chosen to keep my current ceiling at 15,000 X 10,000 (150 megapixels), this way each rendering can fit as compressed TIFF (usually about 400-600mbs each) on a CD so I can easily back them up and make duplicates.
As for the outcome of this new development, the only drawback that I’ve found thus far is that the center tends to be darker. Due to the location of the radial light source and the artificial construct of infinity, the center appears darker and the edges appear lighter. I’m going to experiment with lighting and adding more lines of symmetry for my next rendering.
I’ve also learned that I need to make sure my modified imagery is an exact square in dimensions before I import it. In this rendering, the modified Georgetown imagery is like 4 times wide as it is tall and I noticed that there is some slight stretching of some of buildings on the ground and I want minimal distortions when possible.
Like Georgetown Lenz #2, I sincerely enjoy the way the Whitehurst Freeway and the Key Bridge make some of the most notable elements of this rendering. The lines of symmetry used were (0,60,120) and with each line of symmetry there were two more reflections from the imagery which created a total of 6 lines of radial symmetry. If you look closely you can see the bee’s wax hexagonal shape- love it!
view rendering details:
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|| 6/5/2005 || 10:17 pm || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Lenz #2
The GWU Hospital makes an interesting center of the rendering. It’s a found circle of life, where the constant flux of existence lies in geometric harmony with its surroundings.
Whitehurst looks damn cool too.
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|| 6/1/2005 || 1:10 am || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Lenz
I think this one turned out excellent. What I like most is the way that M St. is on the edge of the rendering and at the dead center (zoom above) is the GWU hospital. I look forward to making Georgetown Lenz #2 using the same template as with DC Lenz #4!
I just started a commissioned piece, but instead of just rendering it outright, I setup the scene, saved the file, and then began making an AWESOME animation. Once the animation is finished the saved file will get the proper treatment too. Here’s a hint, you’ve never seen Baltimore like I am seeing it now!
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|| 5/30/2005 || 11:30 am || Comments Off || ||
Georgetown Quilt
This is the first rendering I’ve made with Bryce 5.5 and to be honest I really didn’t notice the rendering speed increase I paid $100 dollars for. Hopefully I’ll notice the speed increase in future renderings.
As for Georgetown Quilt, I really like the way the Key Bridge and the Potmac create the diamond shapes in the rendering. My eyes are drawn to them first! This rendering definitely solidfies my Quilt Project, which means that I need to create a new page on GeoSpatial Art to house these prints…. I’m not going to do that today though, instead I am spending my Memorial Day backing up my renderings. I almost have enough backed up to mail to my mom for safe keeping! Call it a geo-memorial day :-)
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