4 posts tagged “map”

Two days before my actual birthday, a quite handsome UPS man delivered a package from SAN DIEGO to my door. Although I had to pay 55,94 pounds of bloody taxes to bail it out, I was simply in ecstasy when I opened it.
The sender, Mr.Jason Moore, was able to put together in only one present my love for maps, my addiction to electro/experimental/anticon music and my desire to own BOSE QC2.
My man is awesome and I am a lucky motherfucker I know...
UUUUUuuuhhhhh happy birthday to me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!       

Music Included:

Tape/Luminarium
Near The Parenthesis/L'Eixample
Eero Johannes/Eero Johnannes
Dosh/Wolves and Wishes

In his last years my father would sit on the porch of his Long Island nursing home looking out on the sea, and between long silences he would speak. “You know, sometimes I see a little dot way out there, and then it gets bigger and bigger and finally turns into a ship”. I explained that the earth was a sphere and so forth. In his 80 years he had never had time to sit and watch the sea. He had employed hundreds of people and made tens of thousands of coats and shipped them to towns and cities all over the States, and now at the end he looked out the sea and said with happy surprise, “Oh. So it’s round.” (Arthur Miller)

Centred on Zürich, this site provides real-time positions of Swiss trains based on their schedules. Yes, the icons freaking move! making the Earth look like that super expensive electric trains set you have been asking for so long and Santa never got you.  “The current view is based on the Swiss train timetable, and does not show the actual GPS-positions of the trains yet. But, as Swiss trains are almost always on time, most of the time the position is accurate".  Clicking on a train moving on the map, and then clicking in the unfolding menu on the button "Follow", you will have a bird's eye view via satellite images of the moving train. Shortly the developers of Swiss trains will also be adding the real time position of the trains based on the delay-information and this tracking tool will be even more accurate. (it is sooo diminutive to call it like that)

I have already mentioned before how much I love maps and cartographic practices. On this argument recently I read a very interesting article by Anne Beyaert-Geslin where the French semiotician investigates the contribution of certain mythical values to the construction of the image of the Earth seen from the sky.  According to her hypothesis, these existential values are based on our need to celebrate the beauty of the territory and they work together with (but they end up taking over) programs of actual use of aereal images (to orientate ourselves, to document a piece of land, to know at what time a train will be at the station x, etc.). These two sets of things construct aerial views differently, elaborating distinct plans of expression and at least a plan of correlation to translate those “celestial values” into something which is relevant to the user at the ground-level -and that perceptive routines consecrated.

 

Beyaert-Geslin’s study demonstrates that aerial photography today assumes a double conception of the truth: a referential and an iconic one. The conclusion she draws is that the meaning of aerial photography is rather tautological: it means what it designates. “When it describes, it does it less well than a map. When it recounts, it does it less well than a diagram. Aerial photography makes sense integrating itself with different practices, most of all to an aesthetic practice. Beyond attributing mythical values, this fact would also allow, very simply, to open the aesthetic imaginary offering a new point of view on the world.

Tuur Van Balen is my age. He has already got a Master of Science in Industrial Design of Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. Not happy with his (cum laude) thesis project for the National Dutch Museum in Amsterdam, he decided to go for another Master of Arts at the Royal College in London. His new project is called My City=My Body and just had an interim show at the RCA.

This "preview" is part of his "ongoing research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our environment". For this occasion, Van Balen decided to start exploring the city of London from its river. "The Thames is London's largest 'drinking water and wastewater service company", he says.
 

This installation/performance is an attempt to create a map of the city based on biological material found in the urine of its habitants. At the preview show at the RCA, the artist offered tap water (from the Thames) and asked the visitors to donate a sample of urine. Once the urine is tested and data is analyzed and displayed on a map,  social and economical relationships between the people and the environment are expected to be unveiled.
By gathering urine samples, he says "I want to make people think about how their biological waste contains information. Pissing in public might become like leaving your digital data up for grabs, spitting in the streets like leaving your computer unprotected on the internet".