Made of America

while i was looking for inspirational ideas for a new books case for my new appartement, i stumbled upon the Ron arad's made of America book case.

Made of America: Bookcase Shaped Like the 50 States via 2leep

Artforms of Nature

This illustration is by Ernst Haeckel’s book “Kunstformen der Natur” [Artforms of Nature]published in 1904.

Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), a German biologist, philosopher, physician, who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, as well as the term "ecology". Haeckel traveled far and wide, from Sicily to Ceylon, to the North Sea, and beyond. Sketchpads and watercolors accompanied his microscope wherever he went. His on-the-spot drawings of deep-sea vegetation, aquatic creatures, frogs, birds, and higher animals were turned into more than 1,000 engravings. Kunstformen der Natur High resolution scans of all of the plates are available here. via siongchin

Childhood is a Branch of Cartography

"Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map." sais the writer Michael Chabon and presents his concerns "If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?"

via platial

"Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life. This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.. The traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find his or her own way around it is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. ."

The Constellation of the Elephant

The first of set of imaginary constellations, of which the Elephant is the first by Alexander Beeching. via personism

Daniel Peterson

Daniel Peterson is a Portland, Oregon native living in Brooklyn, New York. He likes to take photographs that communicate how he feels, though since moving to New York he has not been able to produce photographs of meaning. He, alternatively, has been making drawings that use a word or phrase that resonate with feelings or anxieties that he is experiencing. He dives into the feelings and thoughts that are associated to the words while a composition unfolds. via sublettersgallery

Walking Books

Sharyn O’Mara Walking Books..WINTER HARBOR, MAINE / PHILADELPHIA,PENNSYLVANIA detail(3 1/2 x 30) x 5 1/2 inches

ontological road map

"Ontology is a central theme throughout my work because it deals with the nature of existence or being by analyzing concepts about essence, substance, time, location, space, and identity. My work addresses these ideas by building upon physical, temporal, and literal metaphors that are often used to convey ideas about a process as well as a product. For instance, each drawing is not only a finished work that represents a place, but it is also a reflection of the hand of the artist, the act of making lines. Each of these drawings involves a labor-intensive process where much time is needed for construction and development. Once the drawing is complete, it is a picture of time. That is, each drawing reveals the time it takes to make a road map and then each finished drawing actually represents that time. All along, there is a literal play on mapping. Each drawing represents a process (of mapmaking, of creating roads) and a place (a representation of existence that can be either real or imagined). "

Robert J. Walden, Jr. ontological road map, 10" x 10" acrylic and ink on panel 2006

via dataisnature

On Formal Autonomy

sevensixfive geeking out at the abstract textures and hand drawn detail of an old (1926) map of Baltimore. via ffffound

Terra Spiritus

Bea Maddock’s TERRA SPIRITUS…with a darker shade of pale is a forty-metre panoramic drawing of the coastal profile of her homeland Tasmania. The Latin title, meaning spirit of the land or land of spirit, conveys the artists desire to explore the implications of living in a specific place – in the present and with a sense of the past. On fifty-one sheets of paper, Bea Maddock has drawn the bays, inlets, mountain ranges and gullies as they would be viewed at a short distance from the coast. Unable to make the physical journey herself, Bea Maddock devised a method of generating the view from geographical and topographical maps of Tasmania. Each drawing was made as if looking into the centre of the island and there is noconcept of north or south, east or west; there is only the compulsion of lookinginwards. (Bea Maddock)

All Streets

All Streets is One more project by the interesting Ben Fry, who's passion for cartography and organic design have produced many interesting projects.

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image.

San Francisco A detail of the West shows the relative lack of roads in mountainous areas, punctuated by the densely populated Bay Area.

via

ministryoftype

an outside map (view) of Ulleungdo

The following map was made by Lee Gyu-won after his inspection of Ulleungdo in 1882. The name of the map is “Ulleungdo Woido”, and essentially means “an outside map (view) of Ulleungdo.” In other words, the map focuses on the shoreline and neighboring islands, islets, and rocks. Notice how the mountain peaks slant inward, which suggests that you are viewing them from the “outside.” read on

Visualizing the Bible

Interesting Visualizing the Bible project by Chris Harrison is a sort of a biblical social network.

Distribution of Biblical People and Places (detail view)

via kottke

Volumetric Redundancies

were made by a program by JK Keller. the program reads a source text and looks for words that are used repeatedly. The more the word is used, the larger its cube gets. Red cubes are words that are not unique, blue cubes are. I wonder what would the Bible will look like?

Always Coming Home

This Stone From the Serpentine heyimas of Telina-na; by Wordriver

by Ursula Le Guin. {Illustrated by Margaret Chodos-Irvine }

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

He went looking for a road

that doesn't lead to death.

He went looking for that road

and found it.

xxxxxxIt was a stone road.

He walked that road

that doesn't lead to death.

He walked on it awhile

before he stopped,

xxxxxhaving turned to stone.

Now he stands there on that road

that doesn't lead to death

not going anywhere.

He can't dance.

xxxxxFrom his eyes stones fall.

The rainbow people pass him

crossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,

going from the Four Houses

to the dancing in the Five Houses.

xxxxxThey pick up his tears.

This stone is a tear

from his eye, this stone

given me on the mountain

by one who died before my birth,

this stone, this stone.

via and interconnected

Bodymaps

The Body Maps are artworks which were created by a group of women, The Bambanani Womens Group, based in Cape Town, South Africa. They were invited to tell their stories through a community outreach program initiated by the AIDS and Society Research Unit of the University of Cape Town (ASRU) and Médecins Sans Frontières. This program began to document the lives of this group of HIV+ women who were given access to drug therapies. With the help of Cape Town-based artist, Jane Soloman, the participants created Body Maps- life size images tracing the contours of their bodies that visualize the virus and articulate each individual history. Each Body Map image bears the name, the place and the date of birth, as well as the handprints and the footprints of its maker / subject. Read On

http://www.davidkrut.com/bodyworks.php

Sexual Exposure Map

What you’re looking at is a sexual exposure map. To create it, scientists from Ohio State University tracked the sexual activity of an unnamed public high school in the Midwest. Their findings were published in the July 2004 issue of American Journal of Sociology. 832 of the approximately 1000 students were interviewed, and asked to identify their romantic sexual partners over the past 18 months.

Parisian Metro

Antoine+Manuel RATP (Parisian Metro), Carte Intégrale, 2005 related: Am’dam

via ffffound

island book

Maps by Millo Antonio From an isolario (island book) of the Mediterranea... and many of them are Greek Islands, my new passion

[Lesbos and the adjacent coast of Asia Minor] 1590

Antonio Millo, 1590 manuscript Bound sheet. Ms. 31 x 20.5cm

Antonio Millo island of Andri, 1590

Drift

Going away or should i say Drifting to a Greec Island - one of my deepest dreams, a sec before doing that, i'll post here, some findings i made during the last year, regarding mapping, Psychogeography and stories and Drifting...

@

In the spirit of Walter Benjamin, (who advised travelers to foreign cities to learn to lose their ways), drifting, in this issue of rhizomes, becomes something akin to a non-logocentric way of mapping and understanding the world.

Drifters resist traditional cartography’s abstractions and tidy analogies, inventing tactics for appreciating places as something more than literal spaces or pieces of real estate.

Go on reading

@

via

Greek Archipelago, circa 1610(Repro ID: F1946 © National Maritime Museum, London)

map via National Maritime Museum @

Island hopping is a term that has several different definitions as it is applied in various fields. Generally, the term refers to the means of crossing an ocean by a series of shorter journeys between islands, as opposed to a single journey directly across the ocean to the destination.

@

an island hopping illustrated blog. via coudal

@

“Carneteurs”, in other words authors of travel diaries, cannot exist without drawings, notes, photographs, tickets and small curiosities. Unequivocally indefinable (being part artists, illustrators, cartoonists as well as writers, poets and reporters), they have selected this unusual way to describe their expeditions.

Each year, enthusiasts get together at Clermont-Ferrand for a festival dedicated to this unusual form of “art”.

the illustration above is taken from the lovely "road book" on-line project (by 3 french guys-Piero-paintings, Arno-playing the guitar, Benji-on the paino). via bldgblog

@

THE ADVENTURE OF A POET by Italo Calvino

"THE LITTLE island had a high, rocky shoreline. On it grew the thick, low scrub, the vegetation that survives by the sea. Gulls flew in the sky. It was a small island near the coast, deserted, uncultivated: in half an hour you could circle it in a rowboat, or in a rubber dinghy like the one the approaching couple had, the man calmly paddling, the woman stretched out, taking the sun. As they came nearer, the man listened intently. "What do you hear?" she asked. "Silence," he said. "Islands have a silence you can hear." In fact, every silence consists of the network of minuscule sounds that enfolds it: the silence of the island was distinct from that of the calm sea surrounding it because it was pervaded by a vegetable rustling, the calls of birds, or a sudden whirr of wings. Down below the rock, the water, without a ripple these days, was a sharp, limpid blue, penetrated to its depths by the sun's rays. In the cliff faces the mouths of grottoes opened, and the couple in the rubber boat were going lazily to explore them." go on reading

for more calvino treasures

@

This is a diary for the travel, which starts from Edo in a rainy day in 1769, to Tohoku district. (Kano Collection)

Travels to Michinoku. Ed. Senshun Transcribed by Ryoboku. Illustration by Kazumasa Sakaguchi. Transcribed in 1796 (colored).

Vermeer Clickable Map

A map that shows the locations of Vermeer paintings in Europe.

The Allegory of Painting. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum120x100 1666-67