National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo presents the “world’s first large-scale spherical OLED” and what do you think they display on it? Right! Cool! As soon as they can do that with bendable OLED panels and thus do away with the gaps in the globe’s surface, I’m sold! On another note: While … Continue reading Geo-Cosmos: Huge globe of OLEDs
I have made various ZIPScribble Maps – Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy – as well as a two-part tutorial on how to produce them using Geonames data, TileMill basemaps and Processing as visualization environment. Those were inspired by the original ZIPScribble Maps by Robert Kosara. He’s back with an interactive version of many ZIPScribble Maps (interactive in … Continue reading Interactive ZIPScribble Maps
A sweet piece of art, wonderfully executed (and using Street View) – enjoy it in full screen: (Head over to Vimeo, if the embedded version doesn’t work for you. It often doesn’t for me.) The film was made by Tom Jenkins at The Theory film production company. (found via FlowingData) Continue reading Address Is Approximate
The New York Times’ Abstract Sunday of this week features the World Map of Useless Stereotypes by Christoph Niemann of I LEGO N.Y. fame. Obviously, the geography has been messed with a little. And New York and its five boroughs (minus Staten Island) are prominently displayed completely out of scale with the rest of the ‘map’. … Continue reading The World Map of Useless Stereotypes
The Urban Earth project by The Geography Collective aims at representing humanity’s habitat by walking across some of earth’s biggest urban areas. The motivation is critical of media and their portrayal of our living environments:
The media distorts the way we see our world(s) with stereotypical images highlighting the most extremes of places. Urban Earth aims to expose what our cities really look like away from the bias and spin of commercial agendas.
(This reminds me a bit of the distorted body image in the media and, for example, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. For an ever-astounding short film [1:15 mins] click here. End of short side-track.)
The Rules
The recipe of Urban Earth is very simple: Walk across a city taking a photograph every 8 steps (roughly) and put them together sequentially into a movie. Photographs are always taken looking forward, without focusing on specific landmarks or ‘nice’ parts of the cityscape. The thing about an Urban Earth walk is that it tries to find normality within each city:
Geography is more important than many people think. A random route across a city may expose many things, but an Urban Earth walk is special because it attempts to reveal what a city is like for the people who live in it. Urban Earth is not about following the tourist trail or tracking down the most extreme places… it is about finding normality.
