The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Saint Paul Quilt
|| 9/29/2008 || 11:42 am || Comments Off on Saint Paul Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Saint Paul Quilt

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve made one of my signature quilt projection maps. On one hand I haven’t been inspired lately to make any new maps based on this technique. On the other hand, there are only a few American cities that I have yet to map, and Saint Paul, Minnesota was one of them. I was originally going to make this map during the Republican National Convention, but was sidetracked due to other work. Unlike the previous quilt projection maps that I have made most recently, which involved at least one recursive tessellation, this map employs the original style of my hexagon quilts.

This coming Saturday I will be in New York City for the New York Map Society’s monthly meeting. In preparation for my talk, I don’t expect to be blogging much this week because I intend on spending much of my spare time preparing my notes for the talk. If you are in New York, I hope you can make it!

View the Google Map of downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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Kiss My Art, Just Kiss It
|| 9/26/2008 || 4:05 pm || Comments Off on Kiss My Art, Just Kiss It || ||

Kiss My Art - Featuring Super Dome Quilt 1st Derivative Number 2

A couple weeks ago one of my housemates had some of her friends over for dinner. Near the end of the evening one of guests got out their camera and started taking some random photos. I found the photograph above on their photobucket page and decided to repost it here because it made me smile. On the left is gnome mooning everyone, in the back center is a gallery wrapped 32″x48″ print of Superdome Quilt First Derivative #2, and on the right is musician Sean McArdle. I don’t know why the gnome was making an appearance at the dinner party, but at least he decided to show his sincere disdain for proper decorum by mooning the guests. I’m told not many gnomes are not that nice.

As for the title of this entry, its a play on words of a slogan from a Washington, DC-based car insurance company’s television commercial series. And marginally related, there is an event taking place in San Francisco this weekend called Arse Electronica, which is a play on words for Ars Electronica. Consider this photograph decided to all three :-)

Related Humor:

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Ordered Today: New York Public Library Quilt
|| 9/15/2008 || 11:11 pm || Comments Off on Ordered Today: New York Public Library Quilt || ||

In conjunction with my upcoming presentation at next month’s meeting of the New York Map Society, I decided to order a copy of the map and will be donating it to the Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division at the New York Public Library. It will printed out quite large at 60″ x 40″ on HahnemÃ¼hle Fine Art Pearl 285gsm paper and should be a splendid addition to their permanent collection.

Geospatial RSS Art & the RSS Monster
|| 7/29/2008 || 8:00 pm || Comments Off on Geospatial RSS Art & the RSS Monster || ||

Image above links to this blog’s main RSS feed

About a year ago I came up with the idea of making a large scale rendering that uses the iconic RSS logo as a texture on a very large and creepy monster. He’d be a cross between overt information consumption and the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. Below him would be the caption “FEED ME!!!.”

Instead of going that route, I’ve simply modified a large RSS graphic I found on-line and replaced the white space with one of my previously made maps. I’ve been debating on whether I should expand this concept and make a string of these graphics like I did for the randomly selected banner graphics (see banner above and/or hit reload). For now I’m going to stick with the first design I created, which uses imagery from Boston Financial District Quilt.

In homage of the to-be-created RSS Monster, here’s a YouTube clip from Little Shop of Horrors where Audrey II falls over with hunger pains and says “FEED ME SEYMOUR!”

This week is the four year anniversary of my geospatial art
|| 6/27/2008 || 5:27 pm || Comments Off on This week is the four year anniversary of my geospatial art || ||

Random geospatial art from somewhere on this website

This week marks the fourth year anniversary of when I started to publish my geographic designs on a this website. In the time since, which feels like only yesterday, I’ve published over 750 different creations on this website, which amounts to nearly 2,500 different image details. At first I started creating them partly as a quest for self-discovery and partly as a reaction to the fact that I was not able to graduate from college due financial circumstances. I wanted to document what I had learned, produced, researched, and published while on permanent sabbatical. After witnessing how my old housemate had to deal with on-line strangers on her now-defunct blog, I decided to do something that no other blogger had ever done before, I chose to keep the contents of my website hidden from web crawlers and subsequently, most strangers. This kept this website off the map of the internet for nearly 4 years. Only recently in March of this year, exactly one year after an internationally syndicated article was published about this website, did I open my website up to the dreaded robots. I don’t know where this year will lead me, but I’m glad I’ve made enough maps to point me in the right direction.

Check the aggregate listings: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.

New York Public Library Quilt
|| 6/25/2008 || 7:50 pm || Comments Off on New York Public Library Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
New York Public Library Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

This fractal octagon quilt projection map was recursively rendered four times before the final result above. It took approximately two hours for each rendering to complete and then each tessellation was sampled while maintaining the source spatial integrity. Altogether this map took about 12 hours of rendering time and post-processing time to complete. I intend on printing this out for the upcoming lecture.

View the Google Map of the area around the New York Public Library in New York City.

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Madison Square Garden Quilt
|| 6/10/2008 || 6:17 pm || Comments Off on Madison Square Garden Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Madison Square Garden Quilt by Nikolas R. Schiller

Using my new procedure, I pre-rendered 2 tiles to create this third derivative map of Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan. It looks very similar to Hirshhorn Quilt (they are both circular buildings) but they are composed of aerial photographs taken at different spatial scales. The NYC imagery has been downsampled to 2ft per pixel compared to DC’s imagery which is at 6 inches per pixel or a difference of about 16 times less detail (I think). Up next will probably be the New York Public Library, which was actually in the first tessellation, but dropped from the second.

View the Google Map of Madison Square Garden in New York City.

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Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridge Quilt
|| 6/7/2008 || 6:12 pm || Comments Off on Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridge Quilt || ||

Yesterday I went through all my 2008 entries and began to compile this year’s maps like I’ve done for previous years. However, this year I decided to expand the listing to include designs & animations that I’ve made.

The rationale for this expansion was rather simple: if these yearly listings are to be aggregates of my creative work, they might as well include everything. I’m a bit tepid about going through the previous years to find creations that I might have missed, but I imagine that I’ll get around to doing it. Also, since this website has gone public, I’ve found myself sharing content that I did not create and this makes it more difficult to decipher what I’ve created and what I have found on-line & decided to share here.

Today’s creation is the start of a new series of New York City maps that I expect to make in the coming days. This morning I discovered that the USGS has released newer imagery of New York City that was taken in March of 2006.

However, as with other imagery, I’ve found that the older imagery is of better quality. Its not that this new imagery is fuzzy or not as sharp, but rather I found the coloration to be more subdued. The 2004 imagery, which I used to produce all of my previous New York City maps, is more vivid and the colors just look nicer. With that issue aside, I’ve made a few different tessellations that I’m going to be using for the next set of maps of New York City.

This map shows the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as a tiny portion of Brooklyn and a larger portion of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I tried a few different Quilt projection shapes and finally settled on using the Diamond Quilt Projection because I like the way the bridges create a square box within the diamond layout. I have made a derivative tessellation of this map, but I think I’m going to use some of the other imagery first.

View the Google Map of the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridges.

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View the rest of the map’s close-up details:

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

: detail of the planet Goddess Venus :

Across the top (left to right) you have the planet gods:

Luna guiding ships at night
Mercury holding his Caduceus
Venus with Cupid
Sol riding a Quadriga
Mars being lead by the dogs of war Phobos (Panic) and Deimos (Dread).
Jupiter with lightening bolts in his hands
Saturn holding a scythe

Drawn within each of these engravings are the signs of the Zodiac that the planets rule:

Moon rules Cancer
Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo
Venus rules Libra and Taurus
The Sun rules Leo
Mars rules Aries and Scorpio
Jupiter rules Sagittarius and Piscies
Saturn rules Aquarius and Capricorn

Below I dissect the rest of the border of the map:

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Hirshhorn Quilt
|| 5/21/2008 || 10:22 am || Comments Off on Hirshhorn Quilt || ||

: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
Hirshhorn Quilt

Following up on my new procedural idea from last week, I made this derivative map without publishing the intermediate maps. The unseen steps involve the rendering of a pre-Hirshhorn Quilt, sampling a portion of that quilt, and projecting the imagery again to create the map above. The result, as with all derivative maps, is a more symmetrical, arabesque map. This technique will be used again.

View the Google Map of the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Ward 2 of Washington, DC.

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Hello! Thanks for stopping by! My name is Nikolas Schiller. I am an American citizen currently living in New York City and working remotely to support structural change in Washington, DC.

This blog is my online repository of what I have created or found online since May of 2004. I've been on hiatus since 2018 but plan on contributing more content in the not so distant future.

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