Marc Tuters

At its most straightforward, the idea here is to represent how I use space. Here I would use my collected GPS tracklogs to create a deformed 2D map of how I move through the city if LA. In terms of functionality then, this project might be compared with Tom Carden's London Tube Time Map, or Timo Arnall and Ewan Westwang's Time that Land Forgot.

I see would make this algorithm run on top of Googlemaps, for example, to make it simple for people to create personalized cartograms of city by inputting their waypoints. I would call this "Yourspace.biz" (or something like that). This, as Mark Bolas would say, is my back pocket solution. Not that it would necessarily be easy, but it is a clear outcome, that I can plan well in advance. Julian would be an ideal internal advisor for this project, and I have consulted with him a bit to this end. In terms of how to proceed, practically speaking, I would start by familiarizing myself with the GPS, AJAX, doing some of the hacks in the Google Map Hacks book, and researching the math behind creating a cartograms. To that end, here's a moc-up of what a bike ride around Silverlake might look like.

My "blue sky" idea for the thesis is to move away from mapping and cartograms as my central metaphor, and more towards landscape. I'd still want to keep the generative component, working with real GPS data, for example, but in this version of the project, I'd like to also work more with memory; how the city exists in my mind. For this I would like to work with photography, video, and 3D, and end-up with a sculptural piece as my final artifact. I'm less sure exactly of how this would be done, but I envision a final product as a kind of highly detailed sculptural representation of paths through the city festooned with bits of architectural vernacular, a kind of cubist sculpture, but created according to some underlying logic. I see this work to be somewhat akin to some of Naimarks's work, and as such see him as an idea internal advisor. I also feel the idea is related to Dietmar Offenhuber's 2002 piece Wegzeit - the geometry of relative distance "a project about Los Angeles and how it is transformed when brought to relative space".

Before continuing, I should note here that this latter "landscape idea" is not antithetical to the "cartogram idea", as I suppose, I could, use the tracklog information to create 3D cartograms, in Google Earth, for example, where i would deform the buildings' relative size to represent where I had been and for how long. Indeed, I'd like to produce a variety of visualizations around this idea, like Dietmar Offenhuber did with Wegzeit. Indeed, his "rush hour slope" visualization comes closest to what I want to do.

In terms of scope, in the case of the former idea I would like for it to be something that would be both easy and produce attractive and meaningful visuals that people might compare their maps. So, this would really live and die on the web as user experience. But I really don't know if I can generate maps that will accommodate.

In the case of the landscape idea, I would probably be looking at this more as an installation, probably based on local geography, in that sense somewhat like the Snapshotmapplot game, which Perry led last year. I would be working with 3D in the latter case as opposed to 2D maps, and as such it could though of more as sculpture. It might be interesting develop the project as a responsive space, somewhat akin to Char Davies work. Ideally, I would like to go beyond a traditional screen-based experience here. I would work with stereo and or immersive cinema, but I would also like to actually create some kind of physical sculpture, perhaps by rendering and fabricating sections of the 3D object with a 3D printer, the latter which you could think of as being equivalent to film stills from an interactive environment. Here I've been fascinated by Eyebeam's OGLE (i.e. OpenGLExtractor), an open source software package that allows for the capture and re-use of 3D geometry data from 3D graphics applications (only runs on Microsoft Windows). It works by observing the data flowing between 3D applications and the system's OpenGL library, and recording that data in a standard 3D file format. In other words, a 'screen grab' or 'view source' operation for 3D data.

As Julian pointed out, what I'm going for here is a bit the David Hockey collage aesthetic. But what I'd really want to do is extract the depth information from pictures so that, in the end, what I get is this kind of inside-out cast of the space I'm moving through (though, admittedly, this first mockup doesn't really reflect that that well).

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New vizualisation (03/16/07)

I've been developing the 3d idea and playing around with Sketchup/Google Earth. Here I've made a little mock-up in photoshop. Imaging the spraypaint as being made up of polygons, with faces that are geo-referenced photos.

Admitedly this is starting once again to look like the Snapshotmapplot prototype for Hunter Gatherer that Perry made in Max/MSP last summer. And now that i think of it, Max would give me the ability to distort the basemap (as discussed above), something that would be impossible in Google Earth (also, it'd be nice to build on all that work we did, it helps that NUS have a horse in that race). On the other hand, Google Earth has this great community aspect going on, kind of a kind of a public space, which appeals to me.

Ken noted that the idea, as 'm describing, sounds like the way they represented time traveling in Donnie Darko. They portray time and space as a kind of wormy blob. I'm reminded here of Carol Strohecker's Amble Time, in which a steadily shrinking area of a city map shows where you can walk as time ticks by, so the bubble shows everywhere you could go within timing constraints that you provide. I like how she incorporates time into mapping, but I would want to deform the basemap, as I discussed in my post popular blog post to date, in which I discussed the Digital Derive project, which showed "different layer in the use and experience of the city", and compared it with the "Trace" project which stated: "Current collaborative mapping projects using locative media technologies have often overlooked the conventions of the basemap as a site for reinvention. Although these projects imagine alternative organizations of urban space through the way it is digitally mapped, they remain bounded by datasets that reinforce a Cartesian and static notion of urban space."

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what this project is not:

it's not a game. it doesn't disconnect you from your physical environment.
it doesn't encourage you to think of your computer as a the ultimate interface to networked reality. it doesn't encourage you to imaginatively project yourself out of your body into an avatar living in a fantasy realm. it doesn't reify the image on the map as representing the space that you actually use in your daily life.