What Your City Would Look Like In Tron | CITI IO Stacks of geometric blue shapes represent skyscrapers. Cars become shooting yellow dashes moving across the landscape. Undeveloped land shows up as a neat purple grid, the greenery turned plaid. The map is most salient in the densest cities: Boston, L.A., and New York become pulsing, vibrant stacks of bright blue skyscrapers with cars zooming around like shooting stars, while in low-lying residential areas, development shows up as merely a black background criss-crossed by blocks of traffic. The animated maps were made using Mapzen, an open-source 3-D mapping system. Boston, Tron-ified by the Vector Map Cars become shooting yellow dashes moving across the landscape. Skyscrapers represented by stacks of geometric blue shapes. Staples Center in Los Angeles Chicago’s grid and Tron’s The Grid are nearly indistinguishable. Los Angeles’ notoriously knotted Pregerson Interchange looks like a particle-beam mishap. The Burj Khalifa seen from an angle. Heathrow Airport.
untitled Hyperrealistic Paintings of Children and Animals Exploring Urban Remains by Kevin Peterson Hyperrealist painter Kevin Peterson paints fairytale-like interactions of children and wolves, birds, and bears in scenes much different than the pastoral worlds of storybooks. Instead Peterson places the unlikely packs in distressed cities filled with decaying buildings and urban detritus. Despite the worn surroundings, the young girls in the paintings maintain a sense of innocence while they bravely explore the streets with their powerful compatriots. “My work is about the varied journeys that we take through life,” explains Peterson in his artist statement. “It’s about growing up and living in a world that is broken. These paintings are about trauma, fear and loneliness and the strength that it takes to survive and thrive. The Houston-based artist studied at Austin College in Sherman, Texas where he received his BFA in 2001.
In conversation: Neil Gaiman talks to Shaun Tan | Books I met Shaun Tan for the first time in 1996, at a science-fiction convention in Perth, and only half-remember meeting him. He's quiet, shy, generally unassuming. I got to know him slightly better with each subsequent trip to Australia, and he got used to me introducing myself to him and him telling me that actually we'd already met. He's an artist and a writer and now a director, possessor of a peculiar and singular vision. Tan's vision is intensely personal, but not exclusionary. He lives in Melbourne. He told me once that he began writing after The Rabbits, his award-winning book, started life as a 16-line fax from Australian author John Marsden, which took Shaun a year to illustrate. I had a Shaun Tan painting done on a bottlecap hanging on my wall for a year. Neil Gaiman: A few months ago I was doing a tour for American Gods and I stopped in Seattle for a day. NG: I was the connection! ST: We were dithering for a long time. NG: Your stuff is always laconic. ST: Exactly.