selfportrait.map

by Lilla LoCurto/Bill Outcault

"After seeing Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map, a projection of the earth on a flattened icosahedron, we began working on the idea of using computer technology to transfer the details of our physical bodies onto two-dimensional surfaces... We conceived selfportrait.map to explore this in a contemporary way using new digital imaging tools."

selfportrait.map looks at the digital reordering of three-dimensional forms through a reshaping of the digitized body and offers an alternate way of representing the human figure by remapping its surface onto a set of simple shapes.

via ubikcan and cartographicperspectives

LIVE TRANSMISSION

MORGAN O'HARA's LIVE TRANSMISSION is attention and drawing as time-based performance.

For more then 15 years, O'Hara tracks the movement of the hands of people engaged in life activity. she transmits the subject's hand movements at the very moment of observation - that is, in real time - to paper on which characteristic flows of thin lines are established.

LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the hands of the DALAI LAMA while lecturing on "The Way to Peace - The Interdependence of All Life Forms" Ca' Foscari, Universitý degli Studi / Venezia, Italia / May 1990

LIVE TRANSMISSIONS are drawn with both hands and with two or more pencils: people talking, working, dancing, reciting poetry, playing music, giving birth, repairing shoes, practicing martial arts. Other signs of life are also registered: movement of leaves on a tree, reflections of light on water, the tail of a pony, the flies on a cow, the movement of the incoming tide, the beating of a human heart. It is a body of work which grows as an international organism, a process of thinking about human life as diversified vitality.

LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the viewing public while walking around ALBERTO GIACOMETTI sculptures in the Museum of Modern Art / New York City / 4 November 2001

LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the hands of conductor RICCARDO CHAILLY while conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Mahler's SYMPHONY NO 4. / first movement / Carnegie Hall / New York City/ 10 February 2000

LIVE TRANSMISSION: movement of the hands of members of the DOWNTOWN ENSEMBLE while performing Philip Corner's work "Circle" / Greenwich House Music School / New York City / 23 May 1995

Born in the City of the Angels, Morgan O'Hara spent her childhood in a fishing village in Japan. She studies Buddhism, psychology, geography, languages, aikido, shiatsu and music. Her work falls naturally into two parts: TIME STUDIES, which she has done on a daily basis since 1971, and time-space work (LIVE TRANSMISSIONS, FORM AND CONTENT, PORTRAITS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY) which has resulted in many interdisciplinary collaborations. Strong links to the international jazz and new music scene. O'Hara lives and works in New York and Italy. via radicalcartography

"Return to Paradise"

What would really happen if London went back to nature? How would it look in 5, 50 and 500 years from now? How would nature take control again?

A scary/crazy/yet trying not to be apocalyptic/fantasy of future - read on

via Do or Die - an ecological direct action magazine - that was occasional published in the UK from 1992-2003

Blue Ponder

William Wegman, who treat found postcards and maps in his art. William Wegman Blue Ponder, 2002 oil and found postcards on wooden panel 24 x 48 inches61 x 121.9 cm

William Wegman Vacationland, 2003 oil and found postcards on three wooden panels 84 x 144 x 2 inches 213.4 x 365.8 x 5.1 cm

William Wegman Train to Jungfrau, 2002 casein, found postcards, watercolor and graphite on paper 22 1/4 x 29 3/16 inches sheet56.4 x 75.6 cm

William Wegman Flying Water, 2002 casein, found postcards, watercolor and graphite on paper 22 1/4 x 29 13/16 inches sheet56.5 x 75.7 cm

Proce$$ing

lennyjpg's works at his flickr album

via plasticpilots

The Zodiac man

Since the dawn of History, man nicknamed constellations in names from the human environment: Characters, animals and objects. The Zodiac has a special place. The twelve astrologic symbols are very popular and their scale of use is an example of the enormous power of Anthropomorphism in daily life.

An image of a 'zodiac man', showing the parts of the body governed by the various signs of the zodiac. via

Illustration of a ‘zodiac man’ John of Arderne 1425-1500

Just as the movement of the heavens was believed to influence the weather, so it was believed that it could influence human physiology. And the microcosm of the human body was thought to contain cosmic relationships of the macrocosm of the universe. Each part of the body was associated with astrological signs:

The Zodiac man, where each astrologic symbol is associated with a body organ, is an example of the varied power of Anthropomorphism. It is possible to determine a scale of Anthropomorphism by the degree of linkage to the human body.

walking on the moon

interactive QuickTime VR Panoramas in full-screen from the 6 Apollo Missions who landed on moon. All panoramas includes original audio clips. and i must say it looks more fictional then real...

via thingsmagazine and kottke

urban surfing

The history of surfing in Munich goes back into the year 1972, when a small group of surfers found this natural and standing riverwave (the Eisbach, which translates to 'ice river', just inside the Englischer Garten in Munich). via (with video)

The Future of the Walk

by Iain Bamforth

"Walking is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to its alternating movement of pedestal and pendulum".

"City walking is the freedom of anonymity, the moment when, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “Street Haunting”, we can “shed the self our friends know us by” and set out in the dusk, as she did, to buy a pencil".

Iain Bamforth is going through the history of Psychogeography and it's spiritual fathers and mothers, poets and writers which were all flânerie lovers.

The Devil's Bible

Codex Gigas (Giant Book) or The Devil's Bible

(89,5 x 49 cm, weighs 75 kg), contains the Old and New Testaments in pre-Vulgate Latin translations, Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, Josephus' History of the Jews in a Latin translation, the Chronicle of Bohemia, written by Cosmas of Prague, etc. The manuscript was written in the early 13th century in the Benedictine monastery of Podlazice in Bohemia, the vellum used having been prepared from the skins of 160 asses. It is called the Devil's Bible after the impressive picture of that potentate. According to legend the scribe was a monk who had been confined to his cell for some breach of monastic discipline and who, by way of penance, finished the manuscript in one single night with the aid of the Devil whom he had summoned to help him. In 1594 the manuscript was acquired by the Imperial Treasury in Prague. When the Swedish army conquered the city in 1648, it was brought to Sweden and presented to the KB the following year.

from The European Digital Library Treasures - The European Library

Snow Globes

Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz snow globes

A Winter Walk, 2006C-print, 39 x 65 inches

via jafproject

mapping the Lie group E8

Mathematicians have mapped the inner workings of one of the most complicated structures ever studied: the object known as the exceptional Lie group E8. The magnitude of the calculation is staggering: the answer, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. This achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge and because of the many connections between E8 and other areas, including string theory and geometry.

Visualizing the E8 root system via jimcaprioli.blogspot

Mental map of London

Tag Maps: Visualizing the Crowd’s “Mental Map” Using Flickr Geotagged Images by Mor Naaman.

In 1976, social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked his subjects to list places of interest in Paris. Milgram then aggregated the results, effectively creating an “attraction map” of Paris with landmark names appearing in a larger font according to the number of subjects who mentioned each.

This paper suggest that the same type of information and visualization be automatically derived from Flickr geotagged images and their associated tags. The idea is simple: By taking a photo, photographers essentially express their interest in a particular place. Individual pictures taken at a specific location act as “votes” in favor of that location’s interest, much like the explicit input of Milgram’s subjects. Further, additional information can be extracted from the tags attached to these photos on Flickr. Tags that frequently appear in images from a specific location but are otherwise rare suggest a topic unique to the location.

The figure above shows a tag map of central London, derived from Flickr’s geotagged photos.

check as well the TagMaps site and Yahoo Research Berkeley

via and inspired by kottke

The Edge of the World

“The Edge of the World” tells a true story of a mapping expedition in the second longest cave in Texas.

When her survey group becomes lost inside the cave, the author uses the experience to propel questions of the duplicity of maps and the ambiguities of human perception, she questions if the blank spaces on maps should really be filled in with new discoveries, for perhaps something is being lost in the process...

...."down in the dark, in the black voids of caves, you can truly be the first to set foot in a place...Descending down into a cave is coming into contact with a primal part of your self...You can be caught up in miracles in this twilight zone. It’s easy. Sometimes the light outside penetrates the shadows in shafts, and dust motes float in the silence, flying like fairies . . . or miracles. If you rappel down through the zone you may find yourself suspended with no sensation of moving, and yet feeling strangely that the cave is coming up to meet you...What difference does a map make when you’re lost? Often, not much. It’s like looking up a word when you don’t know how to spell it. A map is just a half repre-sentation of a place, a half truth. It only reveals someone else’s interpretations of the place, not our own...imagine mapping your own bedroom. What would you include? ...What you leave out of a map tells just as much about yourself, and what you value, as what you include.

READ ON

cave maps, Boston Grotto Photo Gallery, more cave photos via coudal

A Love Affair With Maps

From Brian Allnutt charts: a personal history across the changing lines of his home state.

"With a limited knowledge of the world around us, we fall back on empiricism and logic, on maps, to orient ourselves. I may look at the map and think, ‘This is my home, I know this place,’ but in truth I’m only familiar with a fraction of it and that knowledge slips away a little with each day I’m not there to see it change. At some point I have to put it down the map and just drive or walk or stand still and content myself with my own imperfect understanding of where I am. Sometimes it helps to get lost and wander around until I re-emerge in a familiar place. Repeating this process is the only way I can think to orient myself in relation to the real, physical things that surround me, rather than my coordinates. Perhaps by liberating the map from its previous uses I can begin to appreciate it for what it really is: an awkward, unwieldy shape, impossible to decipher."

WEB

"Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web." (Don Delillo 'The Body Artist').

SEARCH

"But what is a body without organs? The spider too sees nothing, perceives nothing, remembers nothing. She receives only the slightest vibration at the edge of her web, which propagates itself in her body as an intensive wave and sends her leaping to the necessary place. Without eyes, without nose, without mouth, she answers only to signs, the merest sign surging through her body and causing her to spring upon her prety. The Search is not constructed like a cathedral of like a gown, but like a web. The spider-Narrator, whose web is the Search being spun, being woven by each threadstirred by one sign or another: the web and the spider, the web and the body are one and teh same machine. Though endowed with an extreme sensibility and a prodigious memory, the anrrator has no organs insofar as he is deprived of any coluntary and organized use of such faculties. On teh other hand, a faculty functions wihtin him when constrained and obliged to do so; and the corresponding organ wakens within him, but as an intensive outline roused by the waves that provoke its involuntary use. Involuntary sensibility, involuntary memory, involuntary thought that are, each time, like the intense totalizing reactions of the organless body to signs of one nature or another. It is this body, this spider's web, that opens or seals each of the tiny cells that a sticky thread of the Search happens to touch. Strange plasticity of the narrator: it is the spider-body of the narrator, the spy, the policeman, the jealous lover, the interprester--the madman-- the universal schizophrenic who will send out a thread toward Charlus the paranoiac, another thread toward Albertine the erotomaniac, in order to make them so many marionettes of his own delirium, so many intensive powers of his organless body, so many profiles of his own madness." (Gilles Deleuze, Prouse and Signs The Complete Text, Translated by Richard Howard, Theory Out of Bounds, Volume 17, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1972)

via The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger (hours of interest or as i like to call IT, these days - a mind expanding place)

Gastronomic Cartography

The Breads of France

via strangemaps and coudal

Visualization of the inherent connections amongst friends.

Geographically located iTunes Libraries.

A total of 14,132 lines make up the image.

a project

by by Caleb Larsen

"I contacted 40 friends of mine and asked them to send my a copy of their iTunes music library file. This is the file that contains all the information regarding the songs, artists, albums, and listening habits for a digital music library. I wrote a PHP program that threw all of the libraries into a database and located each library based on the latitude and longitude of where the person lives. A vague form of the United States can be seen (Seattle in the upper left, NYC on the right). Lines are drawn between the albums that one person has in common with another. Each album is represented by a small dot in the Library graph. The point's grey scale value is determined by the frequency with which the album has been listened, the tone of the line connecting albums is an average of the starting and ending points".

detail image.

The Bohemian map

Bohemian: a person with artistic or literary interests who disregards conventional standards of behavior (American Heritage). But you could also say it’s a matter of ‘you know one when you see one.’ Dorothy Gambrell’s maps of the boroughs show where the major areas of ‘bohemian-ness’ exist. she explains her findings here(themorningnews).

The Bohemian Index is determined as follows: [(% of persons 18–24 with some college or associate degree or higher) + 7(% of persons 25+ with a bachelors degree or higher)] / [median household income in dollars] (Data: 2000 U.S. Census)

Manhattan: Bohemian tendencies are seen circling outward from NYU and Columbia, occupying select areas nearby (notably not Harlem or East Harlem, which offer a distinct drop in bohemian-ness from contiguous Morningside Heights).

Compass

Trisha Brown, the most widely acclaimed choreographer to emerge from the postmodern era, first came to public notice when she began showing her work with the Judson Dance Theater in the 1960s. Trisha Brown is known for her work in the visual arts, including improvisational works combining dance and drawing, and collaborations with artists including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Laurie Anderson and Terry Winters. To create each print from this series (in collaboration withGraphicstudio) the artist used her feet to make impressions of a variety of movements onto an evenly coated soft ground plate.

Compass 2006Softground etching with relief roll25 1/2 x 22 inches

Above Town

The building of New York’s bridges, photographed by Eugene de Salignac.

from The New Yorker

Painters on the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, October 7, 1914

De Salignac, had worked for the Department of Bridges (later the Department of Plant and Structures) from 1903 to 1934. Vast reaches of infrastructure were laid down in those years, and his job was to provide a record: he shot the construction of the Manhattan and Queensboro Bridges and the Municipal Building; subway tunnels, trolley lines, and ferries.

Chinese Study of Celestial Phenomena

Chinese Divination Studies, 1580

Scholars in ancient China studied the natural phenomena of the sky to determine their effects on human destiny. The illustration on the right depicts an eclipse, indicating bloodshed and fighting in the country and the future overthrow of the top official (emperor). In contrast, the illustration on the left, showing a rabbit in the moon (rather than a man, as in European folklore), is a good omen. A bright moon indicates that prosperity is at hand.via

SCRATCH ATLASES

of the Society for the North American Cultural Survey 1974 (Volume 1)1977 (Volume 2) These Scratch Atlases were working documents for a proposed Altas of North American Cultures.

A loose-leaf collection of xerox copies of almost 2,200 maps from books, articles, and manuscript files, they represent a survey of the scholarly literature on cultural geography circa 1977.

These atlases (which are for download both ) were individually copied and distributed to interested geographers for their personal use. The atlases were never meant to be published, cited, or deposited in libraries or bookstores.

The fruits of the Survey were eventually published as This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas of United States and Canadian Society and Cultures, John Rooney, Wilbur Zelinsky, and Dean Louder, general editors (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1982). via radicalcartography

Every man is an island

From The Odyssey to The Beach, islands have been one of the most powerful and magical inspirations to writers... Islands work as social laboratories, says John Harding.

"an extraordinary amount of fiction has taken place on islands, for reasons that are both psychological and practical. In Jungian dream analysis, the sea represents the unconscious mind, and it has been suggested that the island symbolises the ego or the conscious self. Indeed, some psychotherapists ask patients to draw their own island, with the result examined as a self-portrait. It's impossible to be beside the sea and not feel the tug of elemental forces, the kind of forces that gave rise to the earliest stories." going through the Odyssey, Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and others the writers claims that every novel seeks to create its own world and entice the reader into it. "On a fictional island, the writer has complete control, and if one of the main motivations of art is to make order from chaos and so make sense of the world, the opportunity is here in spades....Islands are places to escape to, not only for writers freeing up their imaginations but also for their characters and readers.....perhaps most interesting today as an early example of sci-fi, an island genre that had some currency in the 19th century, before writers discovered outer space . ". " The idea of the island as self. That's another thing about islands. Take a trip on one, and keep going long enough, and you will always end up back where you began".

read all

Alan Davie. Island Map, 1997 via artcritical

Out of the box

the artist Dushko Petrovich (yet, i couldn't track any art of his so far, but did reference to some of his art critics.)call for 'a practical avant-garde.'

"The avant-garde isn't what it used to be. In the 20th century, artists thought incessantly about the future, but so far the 21st century seems more invested in the relatively recent past. Emerging artists are described as the love child of so-and-so and so-and-so, and everybody gets called "neo" this or "neo" that. So modernism's major movements are reborn -- as neo-expressionism, neo-Dada, neo-minimalism -- but what that tricky prefix actually refers to is a lack of innovation. Not that we need a new "ism" exactly. It's just that looking back has gotten old......Legions of culture workers produce wall paragraphs, catalogues, and magazine blurbs to confirm young debutantes. Collectors are thus invited to speculate on promising futures, but the art objects themselves look remarkably retro. I am a painter, and I want to be practical about the situation. This means starting with a very simple definition of the avant-garde. I stole it from Fairfield Porter, the great midcentury painter and critic, who said the avant-garde was always just the people with the most energy. The question for us is what should these energetic people do now? What kind of art does the future deserve? How should we advance? "

"To answer this question, I am going to talk about rectangles."

via

glennbach

Les Globes du Roi-Soleil

Offerts par le cardinal d’Estrées à Louis XIV, les globes réalisés en 1683 par le cosmographe vénitien Vincenzo Coronelli, offrent une représentation synthétique de la Terre et du ciel. Offerts par le cardinal d’Estrées à Louis XIV, les globes réalisés en 1683 par le cosmographe vénitien Vincenzo Coronelli, offrent une représentation synthétique de la Terre et du ciel. Le globe terrestre présente une cartographie complète du monde et de ses richesses telles qu’elles s’offraient au Roi-Soleil au faîte de sa gloire.

Offert par le cardinal d’Estrées à Louis XIV et réalisé en 1683 par le cosmographe vénitien Vincenzo Coronelli, le globe céleste invite à un voyage dans le ciel au milieu des constellations arrêtées au jour de la naissance de Louis XIV, le 5 septembre 1638.

Le globe céleste

Le globe céleste est inspiré du système de Ptolémée. Au centre du globe, la terre, immobile est au coeur de l'Univers, tandis qu'autour d'elle tourne en 24 heures la sphère des étoiles fixes selon un mouvement qui va de l'orient à l'occident.

detail

via

Ad Usum Delphinorum

Painting is a hungry ghost

Is the name of artist Tomasz Kowalski series, i just can't resist these art works titles!

Tomasz Kowalski. Autoportrait with Spiders Painting is a hungry ghost 2006, 150 x 190 cm, Oil on canvas

Tomasz Kowalski. Untitled Painting is a hungry ghost 2007, 190x150, Oil on canvas

Benny Dröscher: Speaking Sofltly about important issues(7), 2006. 90x90 cm.

Benny Dröscher: A Goofy Picture of a Magic Moment(2), 2006. 40x40 cm. Mixed media on paper

HATE MAPS

Active U.S. Hate Groups Map in 2005. All hate groups have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.

The MAP shows each state hatred distribution.

The map, the most popular feature on the Center's website, identifies 762 active groups in 2004. While that number represents only a slight increase over the 751 groups identified in 2003, it continues an upward trend in the number of U.S. hate groups, according to Intelligence Project director Mark Potok. read more

Portraits

by Hellen van Meene

France opens secret UFO files

via Yahoo news

France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

The website itself -- which crashed host servers hours after it was unveiled due to heavy traffic, and still not working...remains to seen...

MIT sponsoring contest to solve Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology hopes to mobilize the world's brainpower to solve one of its most troubling problems: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. MIT officials are inviting individuals or teams from any country to participate in its "Just Jerusalem" competition. The contest aims to find a way to make Jerusalem just, peaceful and sustainable by 2050 so that Palestinians and Israelis can live side by side in a city both consider their capital.

via haaretz and Google "IPCRI News & Views" group

72 Views of the Tower of Babel

In Manuscript Illustrations

Building the Tower of Babel, from Egerton Genesis Picture Book, circa 1360 via socialfiction

Landfall

projects by artist shawn lani via kirchersociety

an interactive piece in which a spherical landscape of sand is shaped and reshaped as it rotates.