Distorted cities

Imagine a map that instead of representing the physical and geographical boundaries of a country or a location, displays human communication and interaction. SubMap:Visualizing locative data on distorted maps, a project created by Dániel Feles, Krisztián Gergely, Attila Bujdosó and Gáspár Hajdu at Kitchen Budapest, is a subjective map of the personal experiences and preferences of a city’s residents. Their first attempt was to present maps that show the city from ‘their point of view’ by choosing their homes as epicenters of unique, spherical, perspectival distortions. Locations that were closer to them look larger, whereas locations further away become smaller.

The project’s latest version, SubCity 2.0: Ebullition, visualises and sonificates data pulled from one of the biggest news sites of Hungary, origo.hu. Whenever a Hungarian city or village is mentioned in any domestic news on origo.hu website, it is translated into a force that dynamically distorts the map of Hungary. In the following video, each frame represents a single day, each second covers a month, starting from December 1998 until October 2010.

See also:

• Invisible cities
• Northern lights, WiFi lights
• Tidying up the map
• The strings of NYC subway

Read more: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/04/06/submap/#ixzz1IousqtWT