RND/ To consider some imaginary maps:
Bruce Sterling, Islands In The Net
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Possible representation of Sterling’s Islands In The Net – one of the best psychedelic new age Sci Fi novels.
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Gretzinger: Map Of Annexia
On maps procedural generation / symbolic landscapes.
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Email to artist Jerry Gretzinger re: maps / procedural generation in video space.
Dear Mr. Gretzinger
I discovered your art by accident via Twitter linking to a mini documentary about your wonderful maps.
As I mentioned, it might be interesting experiment to transform a current snapshot of your entire map into explorable digital aesthetic research space, using for example modern computer graphics principles like Procedural generation to form trees, hills and towns.
Here are my philosophical notes in response to your art, all based on first impressions of your fascinating (interior) world:
- It’s organic surreal nature reminds one of Humument by Tom Phillips
- Your use of playing cards with art generative ‘instructions’ parallels Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies”
- The aesthetics brings to mind Masquerade by Kit Williams
- It’s fine lined technical aspects echo the work of Mike Wilks
- The maps exude ‘landscape embedded narratives’ akin to W.G Sebald, Franz Kafka’s Prague and the poems of Georg Trakl
- Conceptually, such landscapes evoke the existential void seen in the movie Valhalla Rising
What might be important is to not to simply recreate such maps electronically, one for one but to use their technical -aesthetic DNA as a seed box in which self organizing sacred spaces may emerge, ie. virtual maps of symbolic dimensionality., psychogeography geo-tagged with personal emotional responses (eg. short descriptives pieces and poetry.)
What might be cool – to see develop in realtime in any such ‘map digitization’ projects as entirely open at both ends; a process directly involving human imagination in helping generate such imaginary universes – which one then inhabits narratively, eg. via roleplay.
To consider the human brain itself looks like a map as of vital artistic co-incidence, ie. your maps somehow display non teleological organic forces at play.
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Rousseau In Xanadu
Virtual Art Experience – to consider Rousseau In Xanadu (256 colors)
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Eexample Artist Statement via Theorist Robert What:
In which Rousseau rides his tiger through the distant mystic ranges of lonely Xanadu in search of imaginary adventures, wild and free.
Traveling at speed through various Eastern plains of existence his conceptual mapping of such odd landscape merge with varied ancient mountainous realities and exotic flora, creating strange new ontological states of being.
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The Aztecs Map Los Angeles
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Digital Art Quadtych: when the Aztecs symbolically map Los Angeles using an unusual yet precise quartz method – referring to City Of Quartz by Mike Davis (1990.)
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Wave Ontologies
To consider an abstract digital art painting (remix from a photograph by Clem Onojeghuo)
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Note dimensional skull emerging and manifesting from the deep polyversal aether-water.
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When Marco Polo Was Lost
Digital Abstract Experience
(Paraphrase) It’s often in the interests of empires for lands they covert to hover in an intermediary realm of reality
– Paul Williams, Race Ethnicity and Nuclear War: Representations of Nuclear Weapons and Post Apocalyptic Worlds (Liverpool Science Fiction Texts / Studies, 2011, p87)
Example Artistic Statement via Theorist Robert What:
In which Marco Polo finds himself lost in fractured conceptual landscapes extracted from the colonial imagination.
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Vast inverted tiers of fiery mountains – raging toxic rivers exist on multiple simultaneous layers of imaginative reality exposing the nomad soul to dangerous, unexplored new vistas of high adventure and emotional defeat; everything around is superheated to extreme psychic temperatures causing a vital flux-fusion of manifested intent and dynamic boiling; a will to abstracted power.
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Ideal / Idealized Cost for such Conceptual Work: £1.4M each – contact Robert What today for details.
// how to play big science