Hi David,

I appreciate your critique, thank you. Although we didn't meet, I was in
the audience for your conversation with Emanuele Lugli at the Rumsey
Center's Coordinates: Maps and Art Exploring Shared Terrain symposium a few
years back.

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022 at 7:08 PM David Medeiros <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> About the maps themselves, I like the idea of applying outside domain
> influences and aesthetics to map making. I am decidedly not a
> traditionalist in cartographic terms! So experimental film influences in
> maps sounds awesome to me. But, and I apologize for the frankness of this,
> on the surface this project feels a lot like another sequential-generative
> NFT project, just with map data. I know there are many real-world examples
> of art in series or collections (digital as well). I’m not sure what the
> line is between creating a legitimate expressive art series and what many
> sequential NFTs projects are doing, I think in some ways NFTs have blurred
> these lines extremely. I’d be interested to see how this series develops
> though. And I definitely hope you're able to make the NFT mechanism work
> for map-art sales!
>

It's funny, I felt like I knew how to use the phrase "generative art" in a
sentence but now I'm not so sure. I'm very open to generative and process
work, especially in music, but I do not think of my work as belonging
primarily to these genres. While the dwelling points of the sequences do
take the bounding box of the named place as given and fixed from the data,
I select the bearing (map rotation) for each, for compositional reasons.
That decision is somewhat simplified here given that the maps are square
and not in portrait or landscape orientation (i.e., the hard work is
constrained to 90°, not 180°). I would not let the machine determine
rotation of the final resting points or of the automatic rotation during
transition between locations.

I also put a lot of time into making decisions re: the sequences traversed.
I cannot claim to have evaluated each of the tens of thousands of
candidates but there is thought and a decision behind each one. Perhaps if
I had access to greater computational resources I'd let an AI do the heavy
lifting but the choosing, the humor, insight, or poetry in that choosing,
it's part of the satisfaction for me.

The application of color saturation and lightness to geographic layers, and
the behavior of the backgrounds (through CSS), those are subject to
randomness. I've coded heuristics, some rigorous applications of
probability distributions, and several underlying waveforms, and those will
be more noticeable as the series progresses. I'll let the machine make
those decisions at 24 frames per second and am happy to file that busiwork
under algorithmic or generative.

This is a helpful discussion. Thanks again.

Eric