|| 12/23/2008 || 6:00 pm || Comments Off || ||
Timelapse Photography of the Apotheosis of Saint Louis and the exterior of the Saint Louis Art Museum
After publishing the Saint Louis Art Museum Quilt earlier today, I was reminded of a series of photographs that I had taken when I had visited the museum last. It was New Years eve 2003 and Forest Park was open to highlight the start of the bicentennial anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase and the centennial anniversary of 1904 World’s Fair. While I didn’t know it at the time, the statue that I was taking photographs of was the Apotheosis of St. Louis.
According to the City of Saint Louis website:
“Apotheosis of St. Louis,” the statue of Saint Louis, King Louis IX of France, was the original symbol of the City of St. Louis.
The original plaster model of this statue was cast in 1903 by Charles H.Niehaus and stood at the main entrance to the 1904 World’s Fair, where the History Museum now is located.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company decided to have the sculpture cast in bronze and presented to the City of St. Louis as part of the restoration of Forest Park after the fair. They approached Niehaus, who offered to cast it in bronze for $90,000, a price so high that the project appeared to be over. A local firm, W. R. Hodges, proposed to complete the project for $37,500.
The commission accepted Hodge’s offer and the statue was replicated but Niehaus protested and sued for ownership rights. Seven months after the dedication of the gift, Niehaus was awarded $3,000 in payment and the stipulation that the pedestal be inscribed “designed by C. H. Niehaus.”
The statue was unveiled Oct. 4, 1906. It is inscribed on the north base, “Presented to the City of St. Louis by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in commemoration of the Universal Exposition of 1904 held on this site.”
Below are the rest of the photographs I took on 12/31/03 using my old Canon S200 and a mini-tripod stand:
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|| || 12:12 am || Comments Off || ||
Saint Louis Art Museum Quilt
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I recently read about the proposed expansion of the Saint Louis Art Museum and was reminded of all the hours I spent there when I was a kid. From school field trips to miscellaneous enrichment visits with friends & family friends, the museum was an integral part of my upbringing. My mom even has a VHS tape of me that was recorded there when I was 8 years old (1988). If my memory serves me right, I was enthusiastically talking about the notion of living in Egypt two thousand years ago, being a pharaoh, and the pyramids. Its been nearly 5 years since I set foot inside the museum and I wonder how much different it will look with the new wing? Probably not as awesome as it looked during the 1904 World’s Fair when it was the Palace of the Fine Arts, but I digress. Times do change and when I visit family during the holidays I’m going to inquire about the location of that VHS tape. I’m also going to look into my digital photo archives because I believe I took some nighttime time-lapse photos of the exterior of the museum in 2002. They’ll be a good follow-up entry.
View the Google Map of the Saint Louis Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri
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|| 12/20/2008 || 2:55 pm || Comments Off || ||
YouTube Video of Saint Louis Buy Nothing Day 2002 by Aaron Michaels
Earlier this week I decided to add this archived video to the repository known as YouTube. I’ve had it for 6 years now and decided to finally upload the video because I could not find anywhere else on-line. I still feel the message that we were delivering then is the same as now: don’t go into debt buying presents for others during the holiday season and if you must give presents, try making them first.
The article that was published in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch regarding this demonstration was the first time my name appeared in newspapers. The story behind this video goes like this….
On October 2nd, 2002 I created a Yahoo Group dedicated to the planning of Buy Nothing Day in Saint Louis. After a few planning meetings and e-mail discussions, the members of group decided to create giant credit cards that we’d drag around the malls in the Saint Louis area. We also produced & handed out fliers with suggestions on how to avoid going into debt during the holiday season.
This video by Aaron Michaels highlights the news coverage we generated and documents the message we were advocating. The first part is a music video featuring a modified Christmas carol sung by Sara Lucas spliced with footage from the news & us dragging the cards and handing out fliers. The second part of the video features news clips & interviews with participants highlighting why chose to demonstrate. I show up around 4:35 into the video.
I haven’t gone out of the way to purchase gifts for my family this year. Its nice that we’ve stopped doing the gifts for nearly 10 years now. I am going to
Colorado next week to visit some of my family and I feel my presence will be the best gift I can give to rarely-seen family. Interestingly, I think yesterday’s commissioned map follows closely with this video’s messaging because the client was asking me to make her a gift. It wasn’t like client decided to hitup Walmart for the gift that millions of others might get, rather she went for something that’s truly one of kind.
Related Adbusters Entries:
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|| 12/10/2008 || 3:04 pm || Comments Off || ||
Eye 670 – A perspective of Interstate 670 in downtown Kansas City
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Using this portion of Kansas City Quilt #2, I created this derivative map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. This map is a unique map because it features aspects of the Lenz Projection and the Quilt Projection combined to create what looks like a human eye. By combing what it looks like with the location, I-670, the name of this map becomes a play on words.
View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri
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|| 12/9/2008 || 2:42 pm || Comments Off || ||
Kansas City Quilt #2
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Using this portion of Kansas City Quilt, I created this derivative map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. When making this map I tried a few different variations but settled on a Diamond Quilt Projection map.
View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri
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|| 12/8/2008 || 2:19 pm || Comments Off || ||
Kansas City Quilt
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It’s been over a month since I’ve made a map and to knock the dust off of this website I’ve decided to make a map of city that I’ve never sampled before. For over two years there was a licensing issue that prevented the imagery used in this map from being placed into the public domain. I don’t know when it was finally released, but I’m happy they did. This map features the downtown area of the Missouri side of Kansas City and when I was tessellating the source aerial photography I made sure to include something I remembered from when I was a kid. When we’d drive to Colorado from Missouri, we’d drive through downtown Kansas City and I always thought it was cool that there was a portion that created a tunnel that cars drove under. While I didn’t know it at the time, this building is the Bartle Hall Convention Center and I placed it at the exact center of this Octagon Quilt Projection map.
View the Google Map of downtown Kansas City, Missouri
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|| 4/8/2008 || 3:46 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
Saint Louis Lenz Animation
Using the same tessellation that was used in Saint Louis Quilt #5, I created this animation featuring a fish-eye-like glass sphere hovering over the imagery (see Lenz Projection). The sphere’s optics create a +200% magnification of the imagery, so as the sphere moves around in the animation the abstract geography is revealed below in close-up detail. There is a new on-line mapping service in Japan that features this visual element, but I am proud to say that I’ve been making similar maps for nearly 5 years now. My animation’s style features more angular refraction within the sphere to give a sense of roundness to a flat surface. My animation also slightly suffers from over-projection within the sphere but I personally like the pixilated effect that is created.
Click here to watch / download the animation.
|| 4/6/2008 || 11:48 am || Comments Off || ||
Saint Louis Quilt #5
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This map of downtown Saint Louis, Missouri is the first to use imagery from 2006. I have now made maps of downtown Saint Louis that show the downtown area at three specific periods in time in the last 6 years. In the near future, I might made a montage of how the geography has changed using familiar portions of these maps. It think it would look very interesting. As I mentioned before, I like the way that I’ve been able to capture the Busch Stadium’s progression over time.
View the Google Map of downtown Saint Louis, Missouri.
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|| 4/3/2008 || 4:26 pm || Comments Off || ||
Saint Louis Quilt #4
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Unlike the previous three maps of Saint Louis which use imagery from 2002, this map uses poor quality imagery from 2005. I really like how the old Busch Stadium shows up and the new Busch Stadium is still being constructed. Up next will be another map of downtown Saint Louis, but will feature better quality aerial photography from 2006 and the new Busch Stadium. The 2006 aerial photography was used in my Geospatial Natal Chart that I made in December, as well as the two most recent maps of my childhood neighborhood in Ballwin, Missouri.
View the Google Map of downtown Saint Louis, Missouri.
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|| 1/19/2008 || 4:35 pm || Comments Off || ||
syndicated in Taiwan, San Francisco, Saint Louis, Austin, Little Rock, and Lincoln, Nebraska
A little over a week ago I noticed that Teresa Mendez article from the Christian Science Monitor had been syndicated in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and ABC News.
Today I found that the article was syndicated again on December 30th, 2007 on quite a few NPR affiliates, including the one I used to listen to when I was young (KWMU 90.3) and, curiously, even in Taiwan.
Screen grabs below:
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|| 12/26/2007 || 2:58 pm || Comments Off || ||
Ballwin Quilt #3
|| 12/25/2007 || 1:38 pm || Comments Off || ||
Ballwin Quilt #2
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My memories of Christmas will always be defined by the time I spent growing up in the Burtonwood Manor Condominiums in Ballwin, Missouri. The map above is of the 1,500 foot radius around childhood bedroom on the second floor of 148 Apartment G, Cumberland Park Ct. I remember helping my mother move out of the apartment in 2003 and now only the memories remain. This Christmas I am hanging out in DC without the family, so today’s map is a reflection on times past. After looking at Google’s imagery and comparing it with my imagery and it’s meta-data, I believe mine imagery is slightly newer. I am basing my theory on the apartment’s rooftop coloring. In Google’s imagery the rooftops appear to be multiple colors, which indicates the installation of new roofing shingles. In the USGS imagery, all of the buildings around my former apartment have the same colored shingle, except my old apartment which is darker. This means that either my apartment was the first to be re-shingled or Google is using imagery that is older than April 2006.
View the Google Map of Burtonwood Manor Condominiums in Ballwin, Missouri
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|| 12/15/2007 || 6:16 pm || Comments Off || ||
Clayton Quilt #4
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Using the tessellation from Clayton Quilt #3, I made a Hexagon projection version. There is a nice hexagram in the center.
Read more about Clayton, Missouri here
View the Google Map of the Clayton, Missouri
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|| 12/14/2007 || 8:46 am || Comments Off || ||
Clayton Quilt #3
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This map was manually constructed and is different than most quilts. Specifically, it does not exhibit radial geometry. I find this map pleasing to the eye simply because I’ve used radial for so long that this map marks a true deviation, like the Shanghai Map. The next map will be very similar, using the exact same imagery, but will be projected radially.
Read more about Clayton, Missouri here.
View the Google Map of the Clayton, Missouri
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|| 12/13/2007 || 3:56 pm || Comments Off || ||
Clayton Quilt #2
