Hi JP, Thank you for writing.
On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 6:50 PM Jean-Pierre Marchant < [email protected]> wrote: > Are you heading up to Canada anytime for a performance of your > maps-as-expanded-cinema project? I'm in the Toronto area and know that you > would get a large turn out if you came up here to do a performance. > Doing a cross-Canada tour is something of a fantasy for me and Toronto would be a highlight, for a few reasons. Over the past decade I've met a number of folks from the experimental film scene there. Jim Shedden in particular has become a friend; he was in town and at Other Cinema for my collaboration with percussionist Kevin Corcoran a few years back. I've corresponded with Taien Ng-Chan (York), who's involved with an international Commission on Art & Cartography, and I met up with Colin Clark (OCAD), who authored a foundational component of my platform, in advance of the residency at Signal Culture (Owego, NY) where I first hammered out a working prototype. One thing that I'm really interested about in your work is the aesthetic of > the maps you use. Some of them almost look like CAD drawings. Would you be > able to share how you get your maps to look this particular way? Is there a > particular site that has them presented like this, or are you getting them > from online sources and then changing them via different layers and > effects? > > Also, the motion of your maps is very dynamic! I'm assuming that this is > via the software that you're using during the live performance? Would you > be able to elaborate on what the software is? I don't envision my own > project as a live performance but it might be worth exploring different > ways of making the maps & drawings dynamic. > You're not far off (CAD drawings), as all of my maps are vector graphics, derived from geographic data, manipulated in real time, and rendered in a web browser using a platform I've cobbled together using a mix of open geodata and open source software. The data comes primarily from OpenStreetMap, distributed via a derivative project called Protomaps, and it's rendered using several components from the MapLibre project. Normally, a web cartographer creates a one-time geographic layer style, broken out according to zoom levels (e.g., lakes might not appear in a view of the whole world but as you zoom in they should be blue, forests and parks should be green; a highway should be this many pixels wide when you're looking at a whole city, this many when you're at a state/province or neighborhood view; displaying a country label when you're viewing a county or city is inappropriate; you shouldn't display business names until you're at a block-by-block level) but I reconfigure all these layers in real time, in dialogue with the musicians. The mapping libraries weren't designed to do this so my manipulations can disrupt the seamless experience you expect with, say, Google or Apple Maps, and in this way I feel aligned with the structuralist impulse to call attention to the underlying machineries leading to theatrical projection. These manipulations are made using open-stage-control running on an iPad; most people use that software to control Ableton & other DAWs but the underlying OSC protocol is flexible (compared to MIDI) and I've developed an API and written a few thousand lines of JavaScript in support of my cartographic application. (Earlier this year I participated in dadageek's CAST program <https://dadageek.org/cast>, which paired visual artists with composers. I was the odd man out for not using TouchDesigner. That project <https://vimeo.com/showcase/12188220> was pre-recorded via simple screen capture, as was my project for San Francisco's Salesforce Tower <https://vimeo.com/showcase/10862581>.) *Cartographic Perspectives* invited me to write about the project and, while some details have evolved, the basic framework (and my indebtedness to Sharits, Gehr, Breer, and Glabicki) hasn't changed. (I have come to see Sister Corita Kent as a kindred spirit in my typography.) https://doi.org/10.14714/CP103.1921 >From a personal perspective, I just started working on a film project that > uses maps as one of the subjects. It's going to be a film work that > combines macro and micro images. > Synne Tollerud Bull & Dragan Miletic's Proxistant Vision: Motion, Navigation, Scale <https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552189/proxistant-vision/> is all about macro/micro; there's an open access version. I'd be interested in your thoughts about it. The vector approach to maps became predominant with the advent of mobile devices. The earlier approach, called "raster" in the GIS world but essentially meaning static images, is still supported. Collaborators and hosting institutions have asked about incorporating scanned, georeferenced, historic maps into my work … it's not a personal priority but I have applied to residencies (unsuccessfully, thus far) with that as a project. We should talk more about adapting your imagery to a zoomable, mapping format, on or off list. Thanks again! Eric
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