Shanghai Metro Flow Till Nagel & Benedikt Gross

With Shanghai Metro Flow we present an artistic visualization exhibit providing three plus one perspectives into the complex system of a metropolitan subway network. It consists of an animation, and an accompanying infographic poster. The animation is composed of three visualization scenes: i) introductory scene with overview and detail, ii) transitioning between geographic, schematic and linear views, and iii) an animated small multiple view. The static poster shows details on the subway lines. Each visualization combines established techniques with an highly aesthetic form in order to attract people to observe and dwell on different aspects of urban mobility, and reflect on their individual perception of our environment.

Culture Code City Cells Chris Henrick

In the last several decades cultural production has shifted from being shaped primarily by geographically separate places to a world that has become continually influenced by interconnected networks. The pivotal factor being that mobile devices and the web now mediate how many people experience their lives. In response, the data generated from these devices and shared across the web are informing how users of the technology view the world from their constant connectivity to email, social media and instant messaging. Thus we may choose to work from about any location at any time. We learn about events as they are unfolding. Time is now experienced in milliseconds rather than large hourly blocks (what's on my Twitter feed vs. how has the news progressed since last evening?)

In this map the shape of the continents has been created from geotagged photos on Flickr. Nations and states / provinces are shown as Voronoi cells, also generated from Flickr user data (in a given place do Flickr users think it's administrative area A or B?) Ten minutes of geotagged tweets collected on September 4th are shown in their temporal sequence that contrast with standard time zones which highlight on a mouseover. This map is an attempt to ask if we should rethink how we define time and place. Just as time was standardized following the advent of telecommunications and the rail roads, our computerized networks suggest the future of time is not what it used to be.

The room would be good enough for the time she had to stay Office for Creative Research (OCR)

The room would be good enough for the time she had to stay is a dynamic data portrait of the modern hotel. The project imagines the narratives of well-known characters from famous pieces of literature if they had stayed in the various hotels.  By inserting a human layer, the data narrative attempts to understand the hotel as a lived experience.

Commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery for the Grand Hotel exhibition, an exhibition that explores the evolution of the hotel from a utilitarian structure to a cultural institution.

New York, NY ocr.org

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Curator's notes

That Way Idil Kizoglu

As digital technologies involved into our lives, our experiencing of the urban areas passed through a transformation. Communication technologies evolved as one of the figures that describe and underlie the dynamics of the cities. Our navigation habits; thus our behaviors and experiences are also influenced by this shift. That Way approaches to the phenomenon, with a focus on google maps’ walking route suggestions. Visualizations represent the google maps’ walking route suggestions, in a central region in Vienna. For this purpose, various locations that cover the region are chosen. Google maps’ walking route suggestions among the locations are searched and overlaid, while reflecting how often they were recommended. Visualizations may be explored at least in two aspects. They may give insight on whether the most recommended streets reflect the dynamics of the city. The question invites us to consider our navigation preferences and habits in the city, in comparison to the decisions of a smart system. They may also provide a critical look into how a digital tool may shape our experiencing of the urban places. Are there less or never recommended areas in the city that start to be invisible to us?

linz (at) / berlin (de) / istanbul (tr) thatway-info.berta.me

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Curator's notes

Verb Mapping Rebecca Bayer

Verb Mapping refers to the articulation of 'action moments' or 'verbs' that come from sensing and observing a place.

It is a series of art and design explorations which concentrate on interrelationships and being-in-space. For this exercise participants trace observed associations involving the senses, movement, and change.

Verb Mapping indicates fleeting instances specific to a particular place, where one energy or entity is coming together momentarily with another entity or energy. Participants indicate these moments in a playful, open way using simple and familiar tools: the five senses and writing/drawing utensils.

A 'fleeting instance of intersection' could, for example, be the movement seen as a bird drops into a pocket of wind, a sound heard as a force intersects with plastic tubing, or textures felt on legs as they move through tall grass.

These observations are indicated using written language (with emphasis on verbs) and are then translated into quick gestural sketches. These sketches are then reproduced by participants on a large base map. Each Verb Mapping session produces another base map.

Weatherproof 'signs' are also made of the participants' gestural sketches which are then installed in the same location as their observations originally occurred.

Vancouver, B.C. tenfifteenmaple.org

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Curator's notes

1 OpenStreetMap: Every Line Ever Alan McConchie  

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a crowdsourced map of the world. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed to the project since 2004.

OpenStreetMap: Every Line Ever uses historical OSM data to visualize the growth and evolution of the map over time. We draw every version of every linear feature present in the OpenStreetMap historical data. The map displays all features, even deleted ones. We draw every line at 1% opacity. Areas with many linear features, or where varied versions of a single feature exist, produce darker marks.

The result is a map that is strangely familiar and readable. Freeways appear more prominent than city streets, which are in turn darker and more visible than alleyways. This hierarchy is not derived from any attributes associated with those features. A natural hierarchy emerges as OSM contributors change and refine the map over time.

2 Quasi Political Maps  Ross Kelly

A political map shows lines defining countries or territories. Its purpose is to to assert which areas of the earth are claimed by whom. It is, at the same time, a document that denotes exclusion and unification and it sets out spatially, a nation state’s relationship with its neighbours. But the painstaking order displayed in these maps does little to explain the complex interrelation of the societies they depict.

The de facto reality is that our neighbours on a map may not be our neighbours in practice. In our globalized world, the spatial relations set out in traditional maps may not help us understand the social, cultural or financial interconnections that exist between us. Advanced technology and transportation have perpetuated the mass diffusion of culture and ideas, and events in recent years has starkly shown that economies and even sovereignties are far more interdependent than previously thought.

The quasi-political map maintains the basic building block of political mapping: the state boundary. Traditional maps arrange nations and states adjacent to each other in the way they exist in physical reality. The quasi-political map tries to preserve this structural framework but arranges the blocks one on top of the other. In this way the borders penetrate each other, they intersect and intertwine – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes sharply and abruptly. These maps attempt to bring into relief the complex interrelationship of culture, commerce and politics that is all-too easily concealed by the conventional political map with which everyone is so familiar.

Vancouver B.C  rossckelly.com 

3 The Refugee Project Hyperakt and Ekene Ijeoma

The Refugee Project is an interactive map that uses UNHCR refugee data and UN population data to tell the histories of refugee movements over time from 1975 to 2012. The map visualizes the size of refugee diasporas from dozens of unstable or repressive nations each year. To give a deeper understanding of the trends in refugee statistics, The Refugee Project also includes over 80 stories that give political and historical context to the major refugee crises of each year. By shedding light on these global patterns, we hope to empower aid workers, governments, academics and citizens to seek compassionate solutions for some of the most vulnerable populations on Earth.

4 All 9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands Bert Spaan

All 9,866,539 buildings in the Netherlands is an online interactive map showing all buildings in the Netherlands shaded according to the year of construction - buildings built before 1850 are red, while buildings built this century are dark blue.

For centuries on end, the Dutch have built their towns along rivers, canals and lakes - on this map the land and water are both black, but the map clearly shows the importance of water throughout Dutch history. At this exhibition, four sections are shown:

Haarlem. This section shows the medieval city of Haarlem with the river Spaarne running through it. In the west, connected with a single road through the dunes, lies the seaside town of Zandvoort. In the east, one can see the canal surrounding the polder of the Haarlemmermeer.

Stadskanaal. In the beginning of the 19th century, a canal was dug from the city of Groningen to the bogs in the south-east of the city. The canal was used for peat transportation, and along this canal typical linear peatland settlements like Stadskanaal were founded.

Almere. Now the 7th largest city in the country, Almere was founded in the 1970s, and lies on reclaimed land in the former Zuiderzee. In the south, one can see the old sea coast and the fortified town of Naarden.

Amsterdam. Amsterdam was founded in the 1200s around a dam in the Amstel river. The city expanded in the 17th century when the canal rings were built around the city medieval center. Amsterdam's harbour used to be located on the waterfront just north of the old city - these days, people live there in modern apartment buildings and the harbour has moved west of town. 

Waag Society, institute for art, science and technology, develops creative technology for social innovation. The foundation researches, develops concepts, pilots and prototypes and acts as an intermediate between the arts, science and the media. The map was made using only open data and open source software.

5 The (In)Visible Night Sky Martin Pulicar

The limits of a human eye allow us to see only a tiny fraction of the real wonder of the night sky. We stare directly at billions of stars every night, yet we can really see only few thousands of them. Night sky is a deceived reality happening right in front of our eyes.

This map works with that very principle. It shows some five thousand stars observable by the naked eye. Nothing new, you say? Exactly. Many star charts show us only what we already know, what we can already see. But there is much more...

When lit upon by UV light, this map reveals vast sea of tiny dots. Those are more than 250 000 additional fainter stars. They sit right there in front of our eyes, but without using assistive technology, they are invisible. Just like with the real sky. Although the map under UV light crowds dramatically, the scene is a mere fragment of all the stars in the Milky Way. In fact, there are four hundred thousand times more stars in the galaxy than we can see here. Many of them vastly larger and much different than our Sun.

6 Metrography – London Tube Map to large scale collective mental map Benedikt Groß & Bertrand Clerc

Nowadays our orientation is seldom based on the actual geography and their landmarks alone. There are a myriad of alternatives, from street numbers to GPS routing in our smartphones, to guide us to a destination. The feature that all of these wayfinding devices have in common is that they abstract the real world spatial arrangement. For us, the implications of this abstraction are two-fold: First, the simplification of geography translates into a filtering of information and context and second, the longer we rely on these wayfinding devices, the more we become accustomed to a curated geography. This is most prominent in public transit maps which distort the spatial dimensions of a city into comprehensible nodes and lines. These distortions have a major influence on our perception of a city's geography, often times defining our own individual mental maps of space and thus becoming the collective representation of the real world's geography.

Metrography attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.

7 The Big Atlas of LA Pools Joseph Lee & Benedikt Groß

The Big Atlas of LA Pools is a collection of books commenting on the process of mapping and map-making in the contemporary context of big and open data, crowdsourcing, and citizen science. As a “two-person army”, Benedikt Groß (DE) and Joseph Lee (USA), located and drew over 43,000 pool- and manmade- water boundaries—features which computer vision could not adequately demarcate.

Throughout their project, the two exploited the idea of “crowdsourcing” to process and validate their dataset using third-party services and then mashed together additional contextual layers—LA’s registered sex offenders, crime events, and opponents of same-sex marriage—in such a way that might suggest surprising or intriguing spatial relationships about LA’s social and physical landscape.

The project tells a bittersweet story about scientific and artistic discovery and expression in an increasingly data driven world. The project attempts to highlight on one hand the emerging and powerful role of non-domain experts in the discovery of scientifically and socially relevant information and on the other hand seeks to emphasize the darker, creepier, and more ethical issues surrounding data processing and exploration. The authors use their maps of Los Angeles’s swimming pools to springboard a discussion about contemporary issues surrounding data privacy and ownership and ethical computing.

The Atlas is tangible evidence of the processes—of globalization, cheap labor exploitation, big data processing, and abusing data—that motivated this project, rather than a standalone collection of books and posters.

8 Walking Loops Sarah Nordean  

Walking Loops is a cartographic exploration of repetitive action through place, considering how habit and ritual can shape our everyday lives. Made with coloured pencil and acrylic on frosted drafting film, the work is comprised of several layered and repeated shapes.The drawing references an aerial view of the path of the artist’s regular daily walk, an activity that has become a ritual of sorts for her. Using data generated from a Global Positioning System device, the shape is a representation of the artist’s walked path - a loop that begins and ends at her front door. Like the walk itself, the mark-making style of the drawing is consistent and repetitive. The repeated arrangement references the Rocky Mountain landscape of the artist's hometown of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and considers the effect of making work that builds up over time and reveals complexity through cumulative gestures.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada sarahnordean.com

9 Sharjah CityMap Lize Mogel, Alexis Bhagat, Natasha Jen

This map of Sharjah City in the United Arab Emirates was created by surveying 500 people who live and work in the emirate, and additional interviews and research. Survey participants were reached via the InfoCart, a mobile information kiosk which was deployed in outdoor public spaces and shopping malls (which are defacto public spaces) in Sharjah during January/February 2011. The cart operators —who were of different nationalities so that we could reach the multi-national population of Sharjah— passed out a questionnaire and had conversations with more than 500 people who provided information about the city and about places that are important to their daily lives and to their community. Much of the information in the CityMap was determined by their experiences.

80% or more of the residents of the UAE are from other places, mainly South Asia and the Gulf region; and almost none have citizenship rights. The CityMap was printed in six of the main languages used in Sharjah: Arabic, English, Urdu, Malayali, Bangla, and Tagalog. It is a functional map that contains local knowledge as well as subtle commentary on life in Sharjah. This project was commissioned for and first exhibited at Sharjah Biennial 10.

Full credits Artists: Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat CityMap Design: Natasha Jen/njenworks Project Coordinators (Sharjah): Petra Matar, Ammar Savliwala InfoCart Design Team: Enayatollah Javad Ghaedi, Heba Helmy Hammad, Saeid Abdolaziz Khezri, Wasib Mahmood, Naji Muneer Mah'd, with Professor Kevin Mitchell InfoCart Logo: Yasmin Mohammed InfoCart Operators: Mahesh Tharrakal, Lany Juan, Marife Falculan, Lama Iskandarani, Anete Kollanur, Bissan Joudah, Shekar Debnath.

10 The Limited Accessibility of Public Transport Julia Griehl, Patrick Stotz, Achim Tack

Taking the tube or suburban railway for your daily commute is quite comfortable if you live in a city with a well developed public transport network. But as so often in life we quickly take things for granted and tend to forget that such amenities are not accessible for everyone - and we're not referring to people living in cities without efficient public transport but those who are, due to limited mobility, not able to use parts of the public infrastructure. Even though there have certainly been many improvements in the accessibility of public transport stations during the last decade or two, there are still far too many stations in almost any bigger city which are not accessible for someone who is for example in a wheelchair.

We think it's useful and necessary to remind 'the public' about the limitations of 'public transport' from time to time. In order to do so we chose to remap the public transport network in Hamburg, London and New York.

Our approach was to take open licensed versions of transportation maps and remove the name of every station which is not marked as wheelchair accessible (according to information given in official maps - knowing that each city might have a different definition of accessibility). The results are maps which show how thinned out those networks suddenly look from the perspective of a handicapped person.

11 Green Maps from Around the World Green Map System Submitted by Wendy Brawer & Isabelle Duvivier

Using mapmaking as its means of leveraging social change, Green Map System supports inclusive participation in sustainable community development. This New York-based nonprofit provides a globally recognized iconography and adaptable tools for creating print, interactive and experiential maps that are utilized locally to create Green Maps highlighting nature, culture, social justice and green living resources. As an award-winning promotion service for the hometown environment, the ever growing network of Green Map projects has impacted over 900 cities and towns in 65 countries. Explore the diverse outcomes and get involved.

12 Phenology Clock Natalie Jeremijenko

The phenological clock displays when local organisms bud, bloom, emerge or migrate on a Jan thru December clock face. These observable seasonal events are arranged in concentric annual circles, one for each species: perennial flowering plants in the innermost circles; the insects, butterflies, bees and moths that are dependent on these are in the next surrounding set of circles; the birds, dependent on insectivorous resources are next; and then local trees and their large biomass and habitat provisions are positioned as the outmost annual rings. For instance, when a flowering perennial plant buds, leafs out and flowers, these events appear in the same circle, the color of which is characteristic of the organism.

This clock re-presents time as the dynamic coordination of diverse and interdependent organisms rather than as the mechanical movement of gears, pendulums or quartz in conventional time pieces. These are the actual material biogeochemical processes that define time, create micro-climates and produce the vivid natural systems on which we depend not only for food, and nutrients, but also air quality, water quality, and health. Phenology is our most sensitive indicator of climate destabilization and understanding this will inform the creative collective work of reimagining and redesigning our collective relationship to natural systems. In the time of a pollinator crisis, threatened ecosystem collapse and climate destablilization, the temporal structure of the ecosystem is a valuable way to represent organisms and coordinate our collective attention toward the workings of natural systems.