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Madison Offset
|| 3/5/2011 || 3:48 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
With the protests taking place inside of the Wisconsin State Capitol, I decided to make a map of the area around the building.
View the Google Map of Madison, Wisconsin.
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Washington Circle Parallelogram
|| 9/15/2010 || 9:05 pm || + Render A Comment || ||
I’ve mostly stayed away from creating maps that were not perfectly symmetrical, but this unique map is an exception. In geometry, a parallelogram is a four-sided shape with two pairs of parallel sides. This miscellaneous map builds off of the basic parallelogram shape, but due to the way the imagery tessellates, this parallelogram has a unique repetitive design not found in any of my previous maps.
View the Google Map of Washington Circle in the District of Columbia.
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The Eye of Philadelphia
|| 3/7/2010 || 3:20 pm || + Render A Comment || ||
I’ve started working on a series for next month’s exhibition in Philadelphia. I’m not sure what final scope of the project will end up being, but I’m enjoying the act of making new maps again.
The first in this series is based off of the similarly pattered “eye” series that I used in locations like Kansas City, Missouri and Erie, Pennsylvania. The imagery used in this project is based off of two type of aerial photography from the USGS. This map employs the .75m per pixel spatial resolution that was published in 2004. You can read the metadata here.
While there is newer 2006 imagery at .15m per pixel, there has not been subsequent imagery added to the USGS servers since I made my first generation maps of this city. I found and requested newer imagery from the city of Philadelphia, but was met with no answer upon two e-mails. Therefore I had to follow-up with the older imagery that is slightly out-dated, but just as useful for what I am working on.
I chose .75m resolution imagery for the oblique nature of the imagery. This allows the viewer to see the sides of buildings they would otherwise not see if the photograph was taken directly above; which is the case with most orthorectified imagery. I’m please with the results and look forward to printing it out.
View the Google Map of Philadelphia.
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Malfunction Junction Offset
|| 6/16/2009 || 1:35 pm || + Render A Comment || ||
The other week I downloaded the aerial photography of downtown Birmingham, Alabama to make some maps for a friend of mine. Upon closer inspection of the geography, I found that there was a nicely formed highway interchange close to the downtown area that happened to be colloquially named “Malfunction Junction.” While other cities can also claim in having their own Malfunction Junction, this highway interchange is the first one I’ve read about.
When I started working on this map I intended to render a couple versions and recursively sample them to created a fractal map, but I wasn’t happy with the results, so I decided to go in a completely direction. This map did end up using previously sampled imagery, but it does not conform to that regular quilt projection format of a centralized kaleidoscope. Also, this map is not unlike some of my previous maps, like White House Sunrise or Minneapolis Sunset, however, I chose to name it differently based on the position of the kaleidoscope’s focal point, which is offset in the upper left hand corner. I spent a lot of time adjusting this location and as you can see in the last detail below, I was a few pixels off. Up next I’m probably going to work on the downtown area of Birmingham, but I’m really itching to start mapping Europe.
View the Google Map of Malfunction Junction in Birmingham, Alabama
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A Navy Yard Perspective
|| 5/30/2009 || 1:43 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
While on blogging hiatus, I made this map on May 12th, but didn’t post it. I don’t really have any rationale for not posting it except that I wanted to take a month off from blogging to see where my daily visitor threshold was; as in finding how many people visited my website without daily blogging. So in order to ascertain the data, I purposely withheld this entry.
Following up last year’s Artomatic maps, which also featured the area prior to development, I decided to try something a little different. When making this map I spent a lot of time working with the field of view parameters to create the depth of perspective. In the foreground (the lower half) you have a somewhat close-up view of the area around the Navy Yard Metro station in Southeast, Washington, DC and in the upper half you have a larger field of view that appears to stretch out to infinite. The aerial photography was taken in the spring of 2005 before the stadium and subsequent nearby development had been completed. Even if you look at the current Google Maps of the area, the construction of this year’s Artomatic venue had not even began.
View the Google Map of the Navy Yard in Washington, DC, which features newer imagery
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A Gigapan of Erie Coke Corporation Eye
|| 3/22/2009 || 4:43 pm || Comments Off || ||
After posting the map, I decided to upload it to the Gigapan website in order to add a little more interactivity to the map.
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Erie Coke Corporation Eye
|| || 3:37 pm || Comments Off || ||
After I rendered Erie Coke Corporation Quilt, I sampled a portion of the map to create a derivative tessellation. I applied this tessellation to the miscellaneous projection template I created last year when I mapped downtown Kansas City, Missouri. While the previous version looked more like a human eye made of the highway, this rendition is about focusing in on the pollution coming from the smokestack at the Erie Coke Corporation. I tend to work in perfect symmetries and by centering the plant, this map becomes asymmetrical and somewhat out of balance. I achieved this by moving the center of kaleidescope to the right side, and after a few minor tweaks, I was able to magnify the smokestack without degrading the source aerial photography (see below). Or check out the interactive Gigapan.
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Eye 670 – A perspective of Interstate 670 in downtown Kansas City
|| 12/10/2008 || 3:04 pm || Comments Off || ||
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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The National Archives Cross
|| 10/24/2008 || 1:38 pm || Comments Off || ||
So far I’ve made two other crosses: Mount Pleasant Cross and Memphis Cross. I am pretty sure how to make these now and future maps of this type will be added to it’s own special category on the sidebar. The cross above was chosen out of about 8 different tessellations and within this map is the National Archives at the center of the cross (hence the name), the Federal Trade Commission, the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Navy Memorial- which features a map of the western hemisphere (below), the Winfield Scott Hancock statue, the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial, and portions of the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden and the west building of the National Gallery of Art, which make the vertical and horizontal stripe.
For reference, click here to view the outdated Google Map of downtown Washington, DC.
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Meridian Hill Park Hexagon Tessellation
|| 8/2/2008 || 1:59 pm || Comments Off || ||
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: + MORE
QR Code Tessellation
|| 4/23/2008 || 10:42 pm || Comments Off || ||
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: + MORE
another QR Code mistake
|| || 12:24 pm || Comments Off || ||
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.
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Memphis Cross
|| 4/5/2008 || 5:52 pm || Comments Off || ||
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King and I decided to make a map the area around the site of the memorial. I made a similar cross a month ago using imagery from the Mount Pleasant neighborhood in Washington, DC and another cross-like map in the summer of 2005. Upon comparing the three, I feel that Mount Pleasant Cross looks more like a traditional cross because the reflection on 16th street forms the familiar shape. When preparing the imagery I adjusted the line of symmetry in the source tessellation to create a near perfect stadium reflection. In the current Google Maps imagery, which is newer than this map’s imagery, the dome of the stadium has Fedex Field printed across the top. Fortunately, the illusion of the symmetrical stadium was not ruined by corporate branding.
View the Google Map of Memphis, Tennessee.
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Vassar Quilt Refraction
|| 3/28/2008 || 3:46 pm || Comments Off || ||
Using this portion of Vassar Quilt #2, I made this derivative map of Vassar College using added elements from the Lenz projection. The optics create a very unique sense of depth at the center of the map. I also added four other optical elements that create a fluvial design, almost appearing to flow toward the center.
View the Google Map of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
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Scott + Dupont Circle Quilt
|| 3/18/2008 || 1:07 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||
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.
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