Locatively Aware

Mosaic Mapping Redux

As you may know, my large project for this program was to create a mosaic map of each city that we visited. The concept behind this came from studying mapping as a process to convey information about a location in my readings during the summmer before the trip. I wanted to think of some way to take mapping to a new level and to find a way to convey more than a traditional street map would about the sense of "place" of a city. As such, I thought actual pictures of a city were a good direction to go, but wasn't sure how to integrate these into a map. My first idea was to make a google earth interface where you link locations to pictures of those locations, but decided that it was a bit lackluster, and people have already been doing that. Then it hit me: what if the pictures were the map? So with some mosaic making software and the help of my class mates to contribute their photos, I went off and created a map of each city, using photos taken within the city.

Each map is composed of 1600 photos, being 40 photos tall and 40 photos wide. However, in order to create a quality image, a library of at least 4000 photos was necesary for each city. As such, I asked my fellow classmates to help me by contributing their photos, as well as using all the photos that I took. After I had collected all of the photos, I used google maps and Adobe Photoshop in order to create a map of the city which lent itself well to the mosaics (by getting rid of many of the smaller streets, street names, etc.). I than used this source image and ran it through MacOSaiX, the mosaic producing software that I used. What resulted was a map of the city, constructed of 1600 pictures from the city.

While these maps are no longer very useful for actually navigating around a city, they develop a new utility. They no longer express the precise geo-locational details that a traditional city street map would, but rather more of a psycho-geographic concept of what the city actually looks like. Also, as the pictures weren't just objective photographs of the city, but rather personal photos of the 22 students on the trip, it reflects all of our experiences on our trip within these cities. In addition to the overall aesthetic of the pictures composing the maps, the four maps are most successful when viewed side by side. When looking at a street map of a section of a city, if you took away the street names, it could look like a map of nearly any large city in the world. However, by taking away the street names and replacing the streets with photographs of the city, I believe that it's now possible to view the overall image, and have a very good idea of what city that you are looking at, even if you don't recognize any landmarks from the images. For example, just looking at the map of Berlin, even if I don't closely examine any of individual pictures, it just looks like Berlin, and has the "feeling" of Berlin, which the other cities didn't have.

Below are all of my final maps, with a link to a high-resolution image below each respective map.

Mosaic Mapping: New York

New York mosaic hi-res image

Mosaic Mapping: London

London mosaic hi-res image

Mosaic Mapping: Amsterdam

Amsterdam mosaic hi-res image

Mosaic Mapping: Berlin

Berlin mosaic hi-res image

.:August

More Crazy German Adventures

Howdy,

It's been pretty crazy with the last week winding down in Berlin and trying to get the projects wrapped up. Even with the final project deadlines looming on the horizon, we've been seeing as many guest lecturers as ever. Although few of them were truly outstanding, one of them did stand out of the pack. On Tuesday we met with Joachim Sauter, a founding member of Art+Com, a new-media installation company. He introduced himself and his company, then began showing projects that they've been doing, starting in the early 90's. I'll just say, they were doing stuff using computers and 3D imaging in the early 90's that I wish I could do today. Throughout the lecture it became pretty obvious that his group was pretty tech savy, but then he dropped the bomb on us. He was telling us how during the years, some of the installations required developing new technologies, some of which became patents. As it turns out, one of these patents is the technology behind Google Earth. So imagine sitting there and having someone say "Oh yeah, I also hold the patent on Google Earth." Yeah... pretty exciting.

As far as the final projects are concerned, I'm finally done with my maps. Doing so required a full day last Sunday, in which I borrowed a digital camera and a 4 gigabyte memory stick and walked around the city for a few hours, and captured roughly 3500 pictures. You can see the fruits of my labors below, in the forms of my finished Berlin and Amsterdam maps. Enjoy!

My Mosaic Map of Berlin.

My Mosaic Map of Amsterdam.

We'll be presenting all of our works to the public in short presentations on Friday afternoon at Tesla, so we should be able to get at least a marginal bit of recognition for all of our hard work the last 10 weeks.

.:August

So Yeah... I'm In Berlin

Heya,

So, we're now done with the ninth week of the program, and kicking it into high gear on all fronts. I will be on a plane to New York in exactly one week from now. That isn't to say that most of the program is already done, though. We still have a ton on our plate.

On Friday we ventured down to Tesla for the evening. Telsa is a new media art house, much like Eye Beam in New York. There we sat down with Andreas (top left) and talked about what we were doing, what Tesla was doing, and then watched a video piece which he was going to be exhibiting at a festival. The video sparked an interesting conversation about what the identity of being an "American" means in this modern period, and how no one really fits the stereotype of an American, but at the same time there is no way to avoid being marked as a part of the whole.

After that conversation, we went to the "open door studio" and talked with one of the resident artists (pictured top right). I forget his name (sorry) but he's working on an urban sculpture which connects several nodes around a city, and in a telephone-game style setup, which then transfer residents' political opinions from node to node around the city. The "open door studio" is a type of residence at Tesla in which the artist works for a several month period on their project, but are required to allow people to walk into their studio space and inquire into the project that they're working on.

After a talk by that artist, we went upstairs to an exhibition hall, where an installation piece is currently being presented. I didn't catch the artist's name, but the piece was about the transfer of text and knowledge. There were three different stations set up, each with 26 terminals, with each terminal representing one of the letters of the alphabet. Each station was somehow connected to his email system, and relayed all his emails, letter by letter, in their own way. The station below had 26 jars, each with a letter in them. When a signal was sent to one of the jars, electricity is ran through the letter, creating a mass amount of bubbles to form around it.

Lastly, I finally finished my London map, and here it is in all its glory. You can expect the Amsterdam and Berlin maps shortly.

.:August

C U Amsterdam, Hi2u Berlin

Hey,

The last few days have had a considerable amount of excitement. My last day of Amsterdam was spent gathering a few more pictures of Amsterdam in order to give me some more to work with for my mosaic map. I stopped by my favorite sammich shop one more time, walked down the canals, and on back to the hotel when the raid started coming down. We finished off the night with a farewell dinner at some Indonesian place hosted by our friends at IES. Although the flesh-eaters seemed to like it quite a bit, there wasn't much variety for the vegetarians, and we were dismayed. We then went home to pack, as the buses left for the airport the next morning at 4:30. I got three hours of sleep after packing, and woke up in time to jump in the bus. In my haste of getting out in the morning, I somehow forgot my digital camera, I think. It still hasn't showed up in the hotel when I had someone ask them, but I'm optimistic that it will show up. For that reason, you'll have to forgive the lack of images in the next post or two.

We landed in Berlin at about 8 or 9:00, and spent the day moving into our new housing and getting the IES introduction to Berlin. Our digs are INCREDIBLE! As John said, "This will probably be the nicest apartment you live in for the next ten years." They are quite spacious four-person apartments complete with a living room and a kitchen! There is no internet in the apartment, although that really doesn't phase me now that I can cook for myself.

Production deadlines are nearing on the horizon, and I have the London mosaic map nearly done, and the Amsterdam one should be done shortly. I was planning on taking a few thousand pictures of Berlin in the next few days in order to get going on my map for Berlin. However, the fact that my camera is less in Berlin and more in Amsterdam, that'll have to wait a little while. You can expect an update with the London map in the next day or two. I'm off to go cook lunch in my kitchen,

.:August

A Walk to Remember

Hey All,

As part of our program, we had to create a unique walk or "mis-steps" project which we conceptualize and enact in Amsterdam. Below is the overview and reaction to my walk.

Title: Bi-Polar Hydrophobia

Duration: 2 hours, composed of eight 15 minute segments.

Concept: For those who don't know, Amsterdam is a city of canals. Nearly every street corner you stop at in central Amsterdam has a canal visible in at least one direction, as you can see by this map.. I was trying to get into the mindset of someone who was completely hydrophobic (afraid of water) and what it'd be like to take a walk through Amsterdam. After further thought, I realized that if I just walked while being afraid of water, I'd just end up far from the center eventually and there'd be no water to be afraid of. To combat this problem, I then put myself into the shoes of a person suffering from multi-personality disorder, wit one personality that is extremely afraid of bodies of water, and the other that is very fond of water and stays near it at all costs. The transition between the two characters happens every fifteen minutes. When the change occurs, I either do my best to get as far away from canals as I can, or ambitiously seek out and follow any canal I can. At the end of every period, I take a series of photos to document how successful I was in either being near or away from water.

Reaction: I have to say, this walk was one of the more eventful and enjoyable walks I've been on during this trip. I started at the Noordermarket about fifteen blocks west of Centraal Station in the role of the personality who loves water and followed the Prinsengracht down for 15 minutes, then switched personalities and started running until I couldn't see water any more.

After a while, I realized that it was rather impossible at some areas to go anywhere without coming to a canal, where I decided that it was ok to cross a bridge while in a state of hydrophobia, but I had to do it while running and it had to be in the exact center of the bridge. While this wasn't a problem for the larger bridges because they all had nice big medians between the two lanes, this was a problem for some of the bridges which were one lane and rather long. I tried my to time my run over the bridge to work with traffic, but unfortunately was forced to obstruct traffic twice. Once it was just for the last few feet of the bridge, but the second time I was about 5-10 feet onto the bridge when a car turned to cross it from behind me. It was too late to turn around, as doing so would require me to stand at the edge of the bridge or jump over the car, both of which I was unwilling to do. So I crossed the bridge as fast as possible with the driver behind me quite upset and yelling at me.

Also, on another pedestrian bridge, the very center of the bridge was unfortunately a bike path. Again, I tried my best to time it bikes, but as I was running over the bridge, this bike came out of no where and hit me pretty much dead on. The biker was ok, though rather upset. The collision knocked me over, but after checking myself briefly, I decided that it wasn't harmful, but just shook me up a bit.

This new approach to a walk made me explore the city in a brand new way. The fear of water made me go down many small alleys that I usually don't travel through, and found out that several of them are quite beautiful. Also, while following canals I found some very interesting scenes and aspects of the canals. The most notable scene involved a group of four middle aged men standing in a small semi-circle at the edge of one of the canals. They were all staring down into the canal, where a few feet away from the edge a series of air bubbles were coming up from the bottom. While I'm sure it was just a group of guys coming home from work and noticed some anomaly in the canal producing air bubbles, the sense that I just walked into the scene of a mob hit was just too great, and I resisted the temptation to pull out my camera and just walked past them as fast as I could.

In conclusion I'm very glad that I went on this little walk, as it let me experience many things that I just didn't have the drive or mindset to experience before. Also, if you are, in fact, hydrophobic, I would probably not look into moving to Amsterdam in the near future.

.:August

Mosaic Mapping

Greetings,

As part of the program, all students were charged with designing large-scale projects to carry out during our travels. In an attempt to explore different ways of representing maps to reflect personal experience in specific locations, I will be creating maps of each city which are composed of pictures from those cities. My hopes are that these collection of images will tell more about the city, and more specifically, about the experiences of our trip while in those cities, than a normal map can. Admittidly, these maps also lose functionality as practical maps at the same time, without any legible street names, clear lines of streets, or landmarks. The maps are constructed using a mosaic-producing program, a map of the given city created from several other maps in an attempt to produce a mosaic-friendly source image, and thousands of pictures taken by myself and other students on the trip. Given the lack of printing facilities while on our trip, I'm just using computer monitors as the means of presentation. However, when I get back to Carleton, I would like to print them out, create a map-esque cover for the back, and fold them into little pocket maps as their final means of presentation. The following image is the first finished map, with three more following within the next few weeks. The map displays lower Manhattan and northern and middle areas of Brooklyn, New York. For ease of loading, the image below is rather low quality, although a much, much larger version of the image can be found here.

.:August

Amsterdamish New Media Artists

Hallo,

The last two days we've been visited by two different new media artists from Holland. On Thursday we were visited by Marc van Woudenberg (greatest name ever) of xolo.tv. Xolo.tv (from what I can tell) is a company which videoblogs for large companies. I think he got a bit of a harsh reception, as I think a few in the group saw what he was doing as a bit of selling out. There were long discussions about the progression and use of the internet, blogging, video blogging, and the internet in general. What we concluded was that the internet (from a blogger/scholar's point of view) was just entertainment and not really any solid scholarly content, even videoblogs which were trying to be smart. I think the final conclusion is that the internet is just going through it's adolescent phase of fart jokes and extreme sports.

On Friday we were visited by Thijs de Witte (craziest name ever) of Pips Lab. Pips Lab is a new media performance group based out of Holland that tries to take inspiration from all different artistic disciplines and combine them into a single entity. He showed us several videos, finishing with a video of one of their live performances. What they do is seriously crazy. The performance includes live acting, song performance, video mixing, crazy light technology, audience participation, and so much more. They actually were one of the first groups to design the technology for "light painting" in which you use a source of light and a video camera to save movements of the light and save it as a single image. For example, if you took a flash light and waved it in a big circle in front of you, the program would produce an image of a large connected circle. My favorite part of the show involved Thijs doing some seemingly random actions for a camera, then later these actions were "remixed" to animate to a song. The neat thing was that the remixed video was edited before the show. He used audio cues from a song that was being played by the band to get act his actions at the right times, and then the program automatically edited the video into the new remixed form. I'm hoping to get a video and perhaps an interview out of the people from Pips Lab for my senior project on remixing.

.:August

A Shout-Out from Holland

Hey Guys,

I landed in Amsterdam, spent the night walking around town and finding food, went to bed, and woke up sick. I was pretty much bed-ridden for four days, so I missed a considerable amount of class related presentations and such. After a few good days of rest and decent Turkish food, I was ready to go get'em again.

Wednesday morning we made a trip out to the Waag Society in central Amsterdam. The Waag society is based in the oldest building in Amsterdam, I believe so anyways. It was either the oldest building or the oldest public building. In any case, it was built as a gate-house a very long time ago. It had changed its purpose many times over the years, ranging from a gate-house, to a center for the different guilds in Amsterdam (such as the masonry guild, with evidence of their craftsmanship at left), to a building used for medical experiments (more on this later), to the new digital media house it is today. The Waag society itself is a very diverse group who work on many different facets of new media, ranging from documentaries, to urban games, to setting up live video conferencing. Our hosts Floor and Sam (left to right above) were very, very happy to see us, and were quite excited to hear about what we were doing. Before we left for lunch, they charged us with the task in using the Waag in any way we could think of to make our own little new media projects.

A little detail which I intentionally left out above was that the sketches and painting of Rembrandt's famous Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp were created there. As such, much history and fame of the building surrounds the creation of one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings. A group of roughly 8 of us though that it'd be fitting, what with the new media focus of the building these days, to recreate the image with a more modern look. We arranged ourselves as closely as we could to match the people in the original painting, but with the "corpse" of an old computer substituting the corpse of the original. Once the photo was taken, the project was then in my hands, as I ran it through Photoshop in an attempt to get it look a bit closer to the original. You can see the comparison of our final product with the original below.

.:August

C U London

Hey Guys,

To wrap up our visit to London, John invited this fellow named Simon Davies to come and give a little talk to our class. Simon a member of Privacy International, a human rights watch-dog group that tries to keep tabs "on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations." (As quoted from their information page) Simon is somewhat of a professional scholar. What he seems to do is try to find out as much as he can about what governments and corporations are doing to restrict privacy and infringe on various rights, and raise awareness of them. He started the class with a 45 minute lecture of what he does, which I assume he gives everywhere he goes. He was quite good at convincing me that big brother is coming to get me. After his initial schtick, it became a class discussion in which we tried to see his view on different aspects of privacy in surveillance. This is a pretty hot issue in general in England, as London is the most heavily surveilled city in the entire world. You don't notice it at first, but there are literally one or two CCTV cameras at nearly every corner in central London. He through statistics at us saying that CCTV doesn't actually deter crime by any considerable margin, and that if not stopped there won't be anything that we do in our private lives that the government won't know. While this may be a bit of an exaggeration, that's where he was going I think. It was all and good, and for the most part I believed what he said. The most impressive aspect, however, was how forceful and concise he was in his speech. I can see that he's quite good at what he does.

After that we had the next day and a half to ourselves to do whatever. I spent the time to go get some last minute gifts for my friends and family while I was still in England, and went to packing for the flight to Amsterdam. Apparently, the airline restricts each passenger to a single bag that can't weigh over 44 pounds, or else you get fined rather strongly. In any case, we had a pretty nice farewell dinner hosted by our friends at IES. I had a vegetable curry that was pretty tasty, and it was followed up by a delicious fruit sponge dessert (pictured). Well, London was a load of fun, but it's time to move on. I'll write again when I'm in Amsterdam.

.:August

Museum: Revisited

Hi2u,

So this post will just be a kind of photo essay of my trip on Sunday. Having recovered from the exobarant amount of museums I saw in New York, I thought it would be fun to mill around the British Museum and see what all the fuss was about. Apparently, all the fuss is about one of the largest natural history museums in the world. The size of the building was simply staggering. Even with five hours devoted to seeing its exhibits, and keeping rather fleet of foot the whole time, I missed entire wings. It was equally, if not more, impressive than the Met in NYC. While I am a sucker for Greek and Roman sculpture and vases, the British Museum's collection of Egyptian and African art was very compelling. Without further ado, here's some pictures.

A shot of the exterior entry of the British Museum.

A section of the frieze from the Parthenon, in Greece. The fact that the British Museum has it, and not the Greecian government is the topic of much debate. More about it can be found at the wikipedia page here.

A mask used by Gladiators in ancient Rome. I thought it was nifty.

A couple of mummified cats. Creeeeeeeepy!

This one is really, really interesting. This is an Egyptian mummy, but wasn't mummified like the most well-known ones. This unfortunate dude was trapped under very hot sands for a few thousand years, and preserved his body very, very well. Definately one of my favorite exhibits.

Here are one of the statues from Easter Island. They look very impressive in person. Not quite sure how the British Museum lawfully aquired this one, though.

And what would a trip to the British Museum be without a little Ganesh?

.:August