Mark Bradford working in both paint and collage, Bradford incorporates elements from his daily life into his canvases: remnants of found posters and billboards, graffitied stencils and logos, consolidates all these materials into a pixelised eruption Bradford offers abstraction with an urban flair that’s explosively contemporary.
Mark Bradford Kryptonite 2006mixed media collage on paper 249 x 301 cm
The Dada Millennium Map of the United States, 1999 (by Dr. David "Jim" Nemeth )
as appeard at the The California Geographer (1999, Volume 39 )
"What might be the outcome of bending the traditional rules of cartography in favor of chance? Our answer is "something Dada." What does chance have to do with cartography and Dada? Taking the last first, Dada is a recent expression of the ancient absurdist spirit of relativism which, as an antidote to rationalism... As a protest movement against the excesses of a rational society, Dada mushroomed briefly in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. It arose among French and German intellectuals out of their sheer moral exhaustion and nausea over that War."
Dr Nemeth and Dr Kaplan, Department of Geography and Planning University of Toledo
Dada was more generally a protest against the hypocritical values of an arrogant self-satisfied world that preached aesthetics and progressive thoughts while squandering life.
map detail
map detail
"the text and images constitute a critique of socio-economic and environmental conditions across the United States on the threshold of the second millennium. The deliberate irrationality of our Dada map negates the laws of beauty and organization in traditional mapping. Designed to be mailed instead of filed, framed or referenced, our absurdist cartography partakes in an interdisciplinary, international, and largely underground correspondence art movement whose members most likely would be amused instead of outraged by the emergence of an anti- or parallel cartography. And, as a mailed item, our Dada map "corresponds" to the world in an ambiguous sense of the word, by refusing to correspond to the Establishment's traditional perceptions of what constitutes an acceptable representation of the real, or a cartographic truth. In its typography, layout and philosophy, the Dada Millennium Map of the United States defiantly violates all the conventions of good taste in cartographic publishing. In conclusion, we began by asking "What might be the outcome of bending the traditional rules of cartography in favor of chance?" One outcome is our Dada Map, a product of an alternative cartography that is appropriate to serving—not another War Machine—but serving as everyone's own doormap to the end of the millenium. Look to your mailbox soon for the Dada Millennium Map. Unfold it. Behold it. Wipe your feet on it."
New Scientist is carrying a report that a computer can learn mapmaking: Walter Bischof and Jun Zhou, computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and Terry Caelli from the Australian National University in Canberra, created the new computer program, which learns to detect and track new features such as roads on standard aerial photographs.Initially, a human mapmaker proceeds manually, using mouse clicks to trace a road on a photograph. The computer program tracks the operator's steps and compares them to its own analysis of the aerial image.It's interesting that the report calls what is essentially digitizing "mapmaking"! Whatever happened to all the other aspects of mapping, such as design, projection choice, scale, generalization, etc, just to name a few of the technical issues?Also, if maps are essentially propositions, as John Krygier and Denis Wood argued at last week's NACIS meeting, can a completely computer-made map still be a proposition? A little devil's advocate question for Halloween!
via ubikcan
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