At this beautiful new site, Geocoded Art, landscape paintings are geocoded and can be searched with a map interface. Or you can look up a favorite work by artist or title, and find out where in the world it was painted. All works are in the public domain. This is already a rich database which hopefully will continue to grow. This will surely be a favorite for art-history courses, giving context to paintings. However the stated goal is also “to use fine art to illuminate geography”. Found this via Google Maps Mania.
Archive for the 'Map Art' Category
Amsterdam standing on its head? New features for Google Maps (click on a little green vial in top right corner), provide some interesting options, including a rotate button so we can view of the world as the Aussie’s see it. Zoomed in locally, Amsterdam looks more like the city depicted by 16th century cartographers starting with Cornelis Anthonisz.
The new features also include a handy zoom box tool (draw a box around your destination), and a tool tip for plotting the latitude and longitude. Google announced last Friday that Google Maps will be getting more new gadgets, with its own “Maps Lab.”
The exhibition, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center at the Queens Museum of Art (through Sept 23) is a large scale installation by Damon Rich, founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. The New York times reported on the exhibition’s extraordinary centerpiece, an intricate conversion of the museum’s most famous work, the Panorama of the City of New York , to depict the location of foreclosures in the five-borough area. The Panorama is a 9335 sq. foot scale model (1 inch = 100 ft) of Manhattan and all five boroughs made in 1964 for the World’s Fair, and updated in 1992. On top of this 3-D “map”, Damon and his young helpers placed bright pink plastic triangles representing blocks where 3 or more foreclosures have taken place. The result shows the concentration of foreclosures in areas where the non-white population is highest.
According to the Times: ”Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.”
The neighborhoods with high foreclosures, according to the Times, are the same areas where the disastrous practice of “redlining” denied credit to African-American and Latino families until it was made illegal in the 1970’s. The data used in creating the exhibition was also used by NY Times staff to create a great interactive map which allows you to see the growth of foreclosures across the area, and at the block level, since 2005. Frightening!
A recent video, The Internet is Serious Business, created by New York’s Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), explores the Internet infrastructure in NYC, who owns it and why that matters. This awareness-raising film targets schools and youth programs. It was filmed by CUP staff and young people from the City-As-School program and features a wacky alien (extraterrestrial, that is).
Artist Marjan Verkerk made this “map” of her hike in the coastal area near Kayoköy in Turkey. The deserted village of Kayoköy is a UNESCO World Heritage Friendship and Peace Village.
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Searching Google Maps for Kayoköy, I was astonished by the explosion of Panoramio photos. This made me think it would be nice if there were such a site for works of art. It might look like this…
Lund, Sweden was founded sometime between 990 and 1020, and is filled with treasures for visitors today. According to the Wikipedia, it is applying to be a “European Capital of Culture” in 2014, when a Swedish city again has a turn to hold this honor. Lund University has over 40,000 students (though many live in other places). We have just learned that the University offers an online Masters in GIS, free of charge. (How can this be??) We will investigate further.
Other interesting sights near Lund included the new western harbor area in Malmo, Vastra Hamnen, and another new “model development”, Jakriborg. My collage is from Google Earth, including the 3D rendering of Santiago Calitrava’s twisting torso. One surprise after the next.
Two contemporary artists using maps in their work exhibited recently at the Tate Modern in London: Judi Wertheim’s Brinco project was featured in “The Irresistable Force” at the Tate in London. When originally staged in San Diego in 2005, the Argentinian artist ”gave some pairs away, to immigrants trying to cross from Mexico to the United States. She designed her show with them in mind, since it includes a detailed map of the border area on its inner sole, an attached compass and mini-flashlight, as well as a picture on the heel of a Mexican priest, Toribio Romo, who, in the ’70s was thought to be a “guardian angel” for those crossing the border”, according to the San Diego Union Tribune.
Another room was entirely filled with map-covered beds by Guillermo Kuitka, also an Argentinian (coincidence?), whose large-scale works are often inspired by cartography.
A post today on the interesting Free Geography Tools blog provides a summary of some of the great digitized historical map collections. For example, the British Library has a large scanned maps collection, and an oddly anachronistic feature: London: A Life in Mapsfeaturing red google pushpins identifying the point of focus of various antique maps and prints of London.
Another interesting British Library holding is the Christofel Beudecker collection of Dutch maps, purchased by the British Museum in 1861. An example is this charming Leo Belgicus which reminds us that maps were fun even back then.
Cartography met pop culture a week ago when a candidate for Miss South Carolina answered a tough question about American school children’s geographic myopia. She was asked what the reason could be for the fact that 1/5th of Americans cannot locate the US on a world map. (That was the NOTfunny part of the story.) Her bizarre answer included the assertion that “Some… people out there in our nation don’t have maps.” Since then, more than 11 million people have viewed the YouTube video, making in the most viewed video for the past month, and in the top 50 for all time, even after just a week! Embarrassing as it was and is for us “U.S.-Americans”, it is also hilarious, and provoked many delightful responses, especially the website MapsForUs.org, which continues the exploit the merriment (and has a link to the video). Did she win? Came in fourth.
This illustration by Dutch artist Rhonald Blommestijn is a wonderfully ironic illustration of (Bush?) ironing the map of Afghanistan. On his own website, Blommestijn describes himself as: “illustrator of the un-illustratable”. His work is conceptual and philosophical, sometimes informed by Escher and Monty Python. This illustration is reproduced without permission, and it will be removed as soon as someone tells me I should remove it.
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