Mapping the Global

Village GIS AS AN ARTISTIC MEDIUM

Daniel Beech

Institute of Geography and

Earth Science

Aberystwyth University

dib8@aber.ac.uk

Mapping the Global

Village

CONTENT

• WHAT IS ART?

• THE POTENTIAL OF A CREATIVE GIS

• EXAMPLES OF ART/SCIENCE ENGAGEMENT

• CURRENT RESEARCH

• CONCLUSIONS

Mapping the Global

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PHD thesis: The Potential of Volcanic

Landscape Visualisation:

Performing the Gap

Between the Known and the Unknown

Mapping the Global

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What is Art?

•“Art is … an arrangement of

conditions intended to be capable of

affording an aesthetic experience”

(Davies, 2005).

•Art is often ambiguous in content and

visceral in form: it is not informational,

but is instead a means of stimulating

emotional as well as intellectual

responses.

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E.g. The Sublime

Edmund Burke

• Sublime is the feeling of wonder and horror when

confronted with the vastness and awefulness of

nature.

Immanuel Kant

• The sublime is a pleasure felt in the powers of the

human imagination, as it seeks to make sense of

the formlessness and boundlessness of nature.

More specific concepts

•William Wordsworth – Romanticism and the Sublime

•Barbara Claire Freeman – Feminine Sublime

• David Nye – Technological Sublime

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GIS and the Art/Science Binary

•Geographers such as Dan Sui have challenged C. P. Snow’s famous

notion of the “Two Cultures,” Science & Art, using GIS as an

example.

• In terms of content, GIS creates new ways of visualising objects,

processes, ideas and behaviours that are capable of mobilising specific

emotions, as well as a creative intellectual discourse.

• As a medium, GIS merges quantitative, locative information with an

embodied process of visual literacy: we learn to present data for the

eye and the hand to make sense of an navigate.

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Why are Artists Interested in GIS?

•GIS encourages synergy and an interdisciplinarity.

• GIS can generate unlimited visualisations of a place, region or planet,

allowing for an experimental artistic process to emerge.

• Interactivity allows for more user-orientated artworks to be created

and re-made.

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A Creative GIS?

• Creative GIS has focused on the overlaying and combining/correlating

of variables, as well as the interfacing and interpolation of GIS

modelling packages.

• GIS software exemplifying this process includes:

TerraView - handles vector and raster data in geo-relational databases.

Capaware - creates artistic architecture for graphical visualization.

Chameleon – imagines new cityscapes that recreate virtual

environments.

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David Endelman, LINE DROPS (1997)

• “As part of my art, I want to share with others what I see and

experience as a cartographer. In addition, I am curious about how

others view the world in which they live. Therefore, I want my art to be

accessible and interactive. GIS as an art form is relevant to me as an

artist because it is a tool of our time that produces a sense of our time

and place”.

Mapping the Global

Village •Lines depict underground piping in Huntington Beach, California.

• The image “displays a landscape of the unseen” (Endelman, 1999)

through visual data and geological modelling software (GIS).

• Line thickness can be enhanced and manipulated through Arc/Info.

• The image is vague and abstract, illustrating a disconnect between GIS

and reality.

• Human connotations are illustrated through the portrayal of the

hidden and the unknown.

David Endelman, LINE DROPS (1997)

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Christian Nold, BIO MAPPING (2004)

• “Bio Mapping … explores new ways that

we as individuals can make use of the

information we can gather about our own

bodies. Instead of security technologies that

are designed to control our behaviour, this

project envisages new tools that allows

people to selectively share and interpret

their own bio data”.

• “… allows the wearer to record their

Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a

simple indicator of emotional arousal in

conjunction with their geographical

location. This can be used to plot a map

that highlights point of high and low

arousal. By sharing this data we can

construct maps that visualise where we as a

community feel stressed and excited”.

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Christian Nold, BIO MAPPING (2004)

•GIS has enabled artists and cartographers to allow people to map

themselves and their biofunctions.

• Data used is based upon the human body and its senses; the virtual

environment is shaped by the arrangement and motion of the being.

• The data is biological and emotional, creating new relations between

individual and technology

• The process of mapping also highlights otherwise unconscious

emotional states.

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Petra Gemeinboeck, Imagined

Geographies 02: Urban Fiction (2012)

• “Petra Gemeinboeck… is particularly interested in the intersections

between physical and virtual spaces… IG 02: Urban Fiction combines

user demographic data and user geographical data (GIS) with the

movements of the user (participants) within the landscape”.

• The sense of unpredictability questions the extent to which the

artwork is bounded, hinting at the limitless spread of the Kantian

sublime.

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Petra Gemeinboeck, Imagined

Geographies 02: Urban Fiction (2012)

• “Urban Fiction” emphasises the role played by networking in the

contemporary uses of Smartphones.

• There is an awareness of location and motion, highlighting the themes

of fluidity and mobility in current GIS-based artwork.

• The urban becomes reconfigured through the artwork’s participatory

usage, creating unpredictability in landscapes formation.

• Gemeinboeck acknowledges the role

played by territory but the work effectively

portrays landscape as individually

sculpted.

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Brian Brush, TERRITORIES AMMAN

(2009)

• “The resulting texture is a simulation or expression of the projective

mental space that is invisible, yet pervasive in the connected experience

between people, culture, activity, and the city.”

• “These assemblages represent an expression of

proximal influence by nearby human activity and

certain territorial patterns emerge.”

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• GIS manipulation can create a

sublime digital texture that

places social-spatial

characteristics in a virtual

positions that produces

coloured assemblages.

• Essentially, the view of

Amman is the same but GIS

binaries breed representational

variance and diversity. Spatial

dimensions are permeated and

aesthetics are visually enhanced.

Brian Brush, TERRITORIES AMMAN

(2009)

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Marko Peljhan, MAKROLAB (1997-

2007) • “It is a project that will research isolation strategies: how to isolate

oneself from society to reflect and see this society better. …in an

isolated and insulated environment with completely open possibilities

of communication and monitoring of social events, but physically

isolated, can provide a much faster, further and more efficient 'call' for

social evolution.”

• “This strategy is temporary. It's a come and go strategy. It is not

something that you do once and then you are isolated …you must have

the means and the possibility to transfer the result of this reflection

back into society, whatever that result is.”

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Marko Peljhan, MAKROLAB (1997-

2007) • The MAKROLAB uses GIS in order to gather and map data in remote

and almost inhospitable environments.

• The initiative holistically encompasses art, science and culture through

the creation of a dynamic virtual space.

• The mobile laboratory overturns the top-down gaze of GIS

practitioners, and encourages the communication of findings between

indigenous communities across Alaska and Scandinavia, as well as

‘marginal’ communities in Scotland.

Mapping the Global

Village • Art is important to society for reasons beyond simply inspiration and

entertainment; art extends into sociological and technological

debates.

• Locative art tackles the use of GIS in nation-building and

surveillance, focussing on the freedom and representation of the

individual within the wider community and national level society.

• The human becomes intertwined with both technology and its

products; artists use GIS to create bodily, humanistic experiences.

• Artists are actively changing imagined and lived spaces; this creates a

platform for interaction.

The Changing Palette of Art

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Visualising the Cleveland Volcano

• Research draws on art/GIS genre to note

how representations of this extreme

landscape have a series of aesthetic

dimensions.

• GIS data sources for Cleveland include

the United States Geological Survey

(USGS) and the Alaska Volcanic

Observatory (AVO).

• GIS software includes Google Earth,

Global Mapper and ARC-GIS.

Mapping the Global

Village • Visualisations enhance particular ideas,

such as the ‘top-down’ gaze. Viewers

gain a position of power, illustrating

mastery.

• The image is bounded, hiding the

external setting and hints of the region’s

complex geopolitical past.

• The mobility of the viewer gives them

an additional feeling of mastery. This is

a multifaceted and wholly embodied

gaze; prevalent through the active

exploration of the landscape.

Visualising the Cleveland Volcano

Mapping the Global

Village • The top image echoes Burke’s sublime,

adding aesthetic spectacle and drama to

the volcanic setting.

• The symmetrical topography of

Cleveland draws the eye to the centre of

the image, actively involving the viewer

and drawing emotional attention to data

that was previously quantitative in form.

• The second image draws on the gothic;

the volcano is a distant, unknown

element.

• The iconographic fog and mist

manifests metaphorical undertones that

hint at a foreboding horror.

Visualising the Cleveland Volcano

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Emerging Questions

Does GIS lend itself to particular aesthetic concerns such as the

sublime?

To what extent are artistic uses of GIS a matter of simply adopting

another tool?

Can artists influence future developments in GIS software?

How can the GIS community further engage the arts community?

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THANK YOU

Please don’t hesitate to contact me regarding my

work at dib8@aber.ac.uk

Mapping the Global

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• Burke, E. (1844), Of the Sublime and Beautiful, New York: Harper and Bros.

• Davies, S. (2005), ‘Definitions of Art’, in Berys Gaut and Dominic Mciver

Lopez (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition, London:

Routledge, pp. 227–40.

• Endelman, D. (1997), Line Drops, Computer Geoscience as Art exhibition,

The Bakersfield Museum of Art in Bakersfield, California, U.S.A.

• Eschner, S. (1998), "Computer Geoscience as Art.“, Bakersfield: Bakersfield

Museum of Art.

• Kant, I. (1911), Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, in J.C. Meredith, Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

• www.2012.foss4g.org, Foss4g, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.aber.ac.uk, Aberystwyth University, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.archiplangineering.com, Arch I-Plan Art, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.artscatalyst.org, Arts Catalyst England, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.avo.alaska.edu, Alaska Volcanic Observatory, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.biomapping.net, Christian Nold, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.carlson-gis.com, Carlson GIS, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.capaware.org, Capaware Software, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.cyber-swift.com, Cyber Swift, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.earth.google.com, Google Earth, Accessed 20/05/2012.

REFERENCES

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REFERENCES •www.emotionalcartography.net/bio mapping emotion in social spaces- cities,

Emotional Cartography by Christian Nold, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.envsys.co.uk, Environment Systems, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.esri.com/software/arcgis, ESRI, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.geography.tamu.edu/profile/DSui, Dan Sui profile, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.gis.com/content/what-gis, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.gistec.com, GIS Technology, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.gisuser.com, GIS user, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.globalmapper.com, Global Mapper, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.impossiblegeographies.net, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.josephinebosma.com, Josephine Bosma, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.martacowordpress.com, Martaco World Press, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.monoskop.org/Marko_Peljhan, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.oup.com/us/catalog/philosophy, OUP, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.plato.stanford.edu/kantaesthetics, Plato, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.proceedings.esri.com, The Fine Art of Cartography, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.scientificamerican.com, C. P. Snow, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.seismopolite.com/, Seismopolite, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.terrawareproducts.com, Terraware, Accessed 14/04/2012.

• www.uenca.org/groundwater, UENCA, Accessed 20/05/2012.

• www.usgs.gov, US Geological Survey, Accessed 14/05/2012.

• www.victorianweb.org/philosophy, Accessed 20/05/2012.