Kinetic Cartography

Cartography, like any other means of representation, is laced with biases and generalizations of the places depicted using this tool. Cartography and its many tributary applications have a long history of being the means for imperial territorial expansion, colonial conquest, and segregating populations. Cartography is a slow-to-change technique, not too dissimilar from architecture. A facet of the practice is that maps and representations have relied on static assumptions for how the world changes. As civilizations have built evermore powerful and complex imagery devices, we can observe that in fact the crust of the earth and the geological expression of the earth's forces are kinetic, always moving, and malleable. Static representations that cartography depicts ultimately fail to capture the earth as it is.

The maps generated will make use of the moving image to imagine what a kinetic cartography might look like. The temporality of the outputs will ultimately fail to grasp truth (as all maps do) but will do work in pushing past the imperial tendency to superficially graft knowledge onto other objects and the colonial necessity to concretizing things.

Using machine learning techniques, datasets of regions will be used to generate new lands. The final output of the combined research will be a latent space walk-through of their model. This moving image will be used to generate new maps and animations to explore various means of representation. Various deliverables will showcase datasets, static maps, moving maps, and animations of a new world.

Algorhithmic Generated Landscape

Kinetic Cartography

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