Think Arts #9 Ciudad y cartografía

Un placer participar en el muy recomendable Think Arts organizado por Irene López. Aquí debajo la charla.

En las últimas sesiones de Think Arts se han repetido ciertos leits motivs asociados a la reinterpretación del espacio urbano. De esta manera, se ha hablado, tangencialmente, de la cartografía como forma de subjetivación y de construcción de relatos alternativos. En esta sesión novena de Think Arts queremos profundizar en proyectos que inciden en la creación de mapas y políticas espaciales que construyen otra forma de aproximación a la realidad, mas política, subversiva o estética y que tratan de ofrecer un relato diferente a lo normativo.
De esta manera, nos acompañaran diferentes artistas y teóricos que han trabajado en proyectos relacionados con esta temática para debatir ciertas cuestiones relativas al fenómeno cartográfico. ¿Cómo ha transforma nuestra percepción de la geografía herramientas como google maps?.  ¿Está cambiando el imaginario representativo de la realidad? ¿Qué papel cumplen las prácticas artísticas en relación con la cartografía y la espacialidad?. ¿Qué relación establecemos con los mapas interactivos y open source?
Debatiremos sobre estas preguntas y más con Diana Padrón, Lorenzo Sandoval, Domenico di Siena, Pedro Hernández y Fran Castillo.

Exhausted Geographies; Irit Rogoff, 2010

Artists, geographers, and theorists of art and visual culture discuss issues raised by the exhibitions: Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists presented by Iniva at Rivington Place, and The Creative Compass held at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). The exhibitions, with works by international artists, open up dialogues about critical histories of mapping and explore the legacy of involving creative practices.

This symposium presents a range of perspectives engaging with new approaches to mapping; it aims to blur the boundaries between the art and science of mapping. It builds on existing research and artistic practices that challenge the traditional map with its objective and rational view.

Maps continue to have compelling cultural significance as the focus of artistic practice, scholarly investigation and wider public concern. Mapping enrols scientific methodologies, as well as the cognitive and imaginative processes by which we discover our place and find our way in the world

Onformative

Work from Google Faces
“The way we perceive our environment is a complex procedure. By the help of our vision we are able to recognize friends within a huge crowd, approximate the speed of an oncoming car or simply admire a painting. One of human’s most characteristic features is our desire to detect patterns. We use this ability to penetrate into the detailed secrets of nature. However we also tend to use this ability to enrich our imagination. Hence we recognize meaningful shapes in clouds or detect a great bear upon astrological observations.
Objective investigations and subjective imagination collide to one inseparable process. The tendency to detect meaning in vague visual stimuli is a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia, and captures the core interest of this project.
We were driven by the idea, to explore how the psychological phenomenon of Pareidolia, could be generated by a machine. We wrote an algorithm simulating this tendency, as it continuously searches for face-like shapes while iterating above the landscapes of the earth. As a major inspiration we took a look at the “Face on Mars” taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976.
One of the key aspects of this project, is the autonomy of the face searching agent and the amount of data we are investigating. The source of our image data is halfway voluntary provided by Google Maps. Our agent flips through one satellite image after the other, in order to feed the face detection algorithm with landscape samples. The corresponding iteration algorithm steps sequentially along the latitude and longitude of our globe. Once the agent circumnavigated the world, it switches to the next zoom level and starts all over again.
Our Facetracker already circumnavigated the world a couple of times and astonished us with quite versatile results. As it continues to travel the world within the upcoming months, it continuously zooms into the earth. This process decreases the step-size for each iteration and therefore increases the amount of images and travel time exponentially. Some of the detected images aren’t usable at all, as we are not able to recognize any face-like patterns within the detected images. Other satellite images, on the other hand, inspired our imagination in a tremendous, yet funny way. However the search goes on, as our diligent robot continuous investigation. Below we have collected several images already found. Click on the images to see it directly on Google Maps.” -Onformative

Fom Ilikethisart.