Stunning Subjectivity: Paula Scher's Obsessive Hand-Painted Maps by Maria Popova An irreverent, artful antidote to GPS appification, or what the NYC subway has to do with tsunamis. Iconic designer Paula Scher is one of my big creative heroes, her thoughts on combinatorial creativity a perfect articulation of my own beliefs about how we create. Since the early 1990s, Scher has been creating remarkable, obsessive, giant hand-painted typographic maps of the world as she sees it, covering everything from specific countries and continents to cultural phenomena. This month, Princeton Architectural Press is releasing Paula Scher: MAPS — a lavish, formidable large-format volume collecting 39 of her swirling, colorful cartographic points of view, a beeline addition to my favorite books on maps. I began painting maps to invent my own complicated narrative about the way I see and feel about the world. (Cue in cartograms.) Cherry on top: The cover jacket folds out into her legendary colorful map of the world. The World, 1998 China, 2006 Africa, 2003 Shock and Awe, 2005
The Web 2.0 Summit Map - The Data Frame We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more. Welcome to the 2011 edition of the Web 2.0 Map. This map showcases the incumbents and upstarts in our network economy, gathered around various territories that represent the Web 2.0's Points of Control. We've removed last year's acquisition mode to make room for a newly minted data layer. Pan and Zoom to explore the map, and click the icons to get some insight about each player and their position. Then, turn on the comments view or data layer to discuss the map with others and add your own ideas! Also, bring the conversation to Twitter using hashtag #w2smap. New! Get details on the creation of the data layer on the Web 2.0 Summit Blog. Please jump in, the water's fine! Click an existing comment bubble to join in, or click 'Start New Discussion' to start your own! Click the spot on the map where you'd like to place your new city. Click the logos at top right to turn the movement layers on and off.
Rectangular subdivisions of the world Eric Fischer, who continues his string of mapping fun and doesn't even do it for his day job, maps the world in binary subdivisions. Each bounding box contains an equal number of geotagged tweets. The best part is that Fischer is actually doing some problem-solving, trying to figure something out, so it's not just a pretty picture. The actual motivation behind it, by the way, was to figure out an approximately optimal set of bounding boxes to query for in APIs like Picasa's, where if you ask for the whole world, you only get a few, very recent, results, but if you query for small enough bounding boxes, you can see further back in time. Here's the image zoomed in on the United States. As does the view of Europe: More maps from Fischer here. [Binary subdivision of the world via @datapointed]
Mapping Stereotypes Project by alphadesigner Get your copy on: Amazon US / Amazon UK / Amazon DE / Amazon FR / Amazon IT / Amazon ES / Amazon Canada / Amazon Japan / Amazon India / Amazon Brazil Atlas of Prejudice: The Complete Stereotype Map Collection The Google Map of the 19th Century - Megan Garber - Technology It seems like the quintessentially contemporary phenomenon: the pedestrian, walking along, distracted from his surroundings by the glow of the map in his smartphone. But there have been some oblivious palm-gazers, it turns out, since long before Steve Jobs came along. In London, during the Great Exhibition of 1851, the merchant George Shove designed a ladylike accessory that would allow its wearer to navigate, discreetly and easily, the fair's Hyde Park environs. The proto-mobile map! Alas -- for both ladies of London and for fans of quirky tech -- "as far as we know, the glove was never produced commercially," notes the UK National Archives's Andrew Janes. The "handy map" idea lived on, though: In the early 20th century, some especially sprawl-y cities began to publicize their geographical wonders with maps that were, wittily and a little bit weirdly, drawn on hands. Images: The UK National Archives.
untitled ^^ Communist World, 2011 by Theo Deutinger & Catarina Dantas [Mark#30]. <Communism is still alive. Although capitalism won a victory when the Berlin Wall went down, communism is triumphing as nation states continue to bail out banks in the wake of the recent economic crisis. Global capitalism is hugely unorganized and has no interest in a comprehensive plan for the future of the world – and, if it did, it would not know how to go about achieving such a goal. Global communism, on the other hand, has a clear idea about the organization of the world but does not know how to maintain competition, preserve individual freedom and generate public enthusiasm. vs. ^ McWorld, 2006 by OMA/AMO, Theo Deutinger & Bea Ramo. ^ Avoid the Center, 2008 by Theo Deutinger & Theresia Kohlmayr [Mark#15].
Quand les Net artistes hackent Google Maps Loin de n'être qu'une cartographie numérique de la Terre, Google Maps et ses bébés Street View et Google Earth sont aussi une ressource au service de la créativité des artistes. Comment les artistes détournent-ils les outils du web ? Silicon Maniacs inaugure une nouvelle série consacrée au braconnage artistique sur Internet. Aujourd’hui, les hacking de Google Maps, Google Earth et Google Street View. Depuis la seconde moitié des années 1990, des artistes utilisent le web comme un matériau à part entière. Sites Internet, moteurs de recherche, réseaux sociaux ou mondes virtuels : ils détournent les outils que nous utilisons quotidiennement sur Internet pour questionner nos usages et nos représentation du réel. La cartographie n’a jamais été une opération neutre et objective. Issu du collectif Frères Ripoulin, Claude Closky travaille autour des supports immatériels et du numérique. Mardi Noir est un artiste issu de la scène graffiti rennaise.
Book review: The Map as Art, Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon with essays by Gayle Clemans (available on Amazon UK and USA.) Princeton Architectural Press writes: Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. Sarah Trigg, Frame 3, 2003 The British Library in London is running until mid-September Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art . Today's cartography is far more composed, and eager to present itself as objective. Artists play with both the material and the content of the map. Lars Arrhenius, A-Z Map As Art is a well-documented, surprising and fascinating book.
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