Alice in the Subway

Would you imagine Alice taking the subway to wander around Wonderland? Perhaps not, but this transit map identifies the key locations of Lewis Carroll’s inspiration.

Well, if you don’t know where you want to get to, it doesn’t matter which way you go as the Cat would say…

See also:

• The drugs of Alice in Wonderland
• The strings of the NYC subway
• Strings of words
• The dark side of a fairy tale

The DNA of a city

What appears as abstract shapes and colors at first sight, it could actually be an artist’s point of view of a city, let’ s say. That’s the case of Chinese artist Lu Xinjian, who based on aerial views from Google Earth, creates his own maps of major cities across the world in his series entitled City DNA.

See if you can recognize your city:

 Highlight to see city name: Moscow.

The colors of each piece represents the colors of each city and its national flag.Highlight to see city name: New York.

See more after the jump

A world of clichés

All French people are arrogant, Greeks are lazy, Americans fat and all the people from the Middle East are bad. Our world is full of clichés, perhaps because it is our way to identify our self and differentiate it from the others. See some of them in The World Map of Useless Stereotypes created by Christoph Niemann.

via Laughing Squid

See also:

• The bad guys (in video games)
• I was once blue, now I am pink
• The world is not a peaceful place

91 New York movies

Correctly identify the 91 movies depicted in the New York City movie map by Bernie Hou and win a copy here.

P.S. As one would expect, lots of Woody Allen in here.

via holykaw

See also:

• See the object, guess the movie
• A riddle for 2010

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

Read it elsewhere

Quick links:

• “If every single bee disappeared…humanity would also die out within four years” – good.is
• An ode to Japanese creativity – Core77
• The biggest egoists on Twitter – uproxx
• The emotion vending machine – The Creators Project
• When to drop Google and prefer some other search engine – Lifehacker
• The best April Fool prank: the cartridge that turns every film camera to digital – re35 via popphoto
• This is what the world would look like if every country’s area was proportionate to its population – I love charts

Know your Middle East

I’m Michael Jordan and I rock because I run to Afghanistan. Coolest geography heuristic ever.

via HolyKaw

See also:

• Tidying up the map
• 3D geopolitical maps out of LEGO
• It’s a small world

The bad guys (in video games)

Do video games create a world of fiction? A world where imaginary characters fight each other in fictional battles? Or do they reflect, to some degree, the existing relationships between countries and continents?

The following world map highlights the origin of the really bad guys that threatens us in video games over the past decade. Terrorists, guerillas, mercenaries, or just insane leaders come, most of the times, from the so-called ‘axis of evil’ nations, from corrupted governments or countries with a history of Islamic terrorism.

You can see the full map in order to understand how politics and international affairs affects the gaming industry after the jump.

London diorama

File this under: incredibly amazing.

Sohei Nishino is a very persistent photographer, to say the least. He roamed the streets of London by foot, took 4000 photographs printed them in his dark room and created this collage by hand (with a little help of the old scissors and glue). The end result looks like an aerial view of London, faithful to its topography, although it is made up from street view snapshots.

And I repeat: incredibly amazing.

Part of the Guardian Eyewitness Series

Read it elsewhere

Radiohead’s new album generates the latest web meme, and other news:

• Listen to a (huge) medley consisting of 5 sec samples of all number 1 singles in history, up to 1992 – BuzzFeed
• Good typography helps clarify everything, even Kanye West’s mind – brain pickings
• How to built your own Stonehenge with IKEA instructions – designboom
• Until recently MoMA featured only one typeface in its permanent collection: Helvetica. Now it acquired two dozens digital typefaces. See a slide show of the 11 most important ones – fastcodesign
• Dancing Thom is the new Sad Keanu – dancingthom
• The King of Limbs review: Are Radiohead the only band that makes so many fans turn quite so studiously patient and open-minded – vulture
• Poignant anti-Berlusconi, anti-censorship ad – Lost at E minor
• United States of America as movies – reddit

Flight patterns

We have already seen the musical intersections in the New York City Subway, it is now time to see the aerial ones over North America. Check out the colorful paths of air traffic created in the sky during 24 hours.

As you have probably understood by now, we love Aaron Koblin’s work.

Tidying up the map, vol.2

You know of our passion for maps and, most of all, of their deconstructions. Besides Armelle Caron, Matthew Cusick loves to play with maps. In his series Map Works, he has created beautiful collages of portraits and landscapes, all of them made by map pieces from all around the world.

More after the jump

Free the Internet

Do you think the Internet is free? Nope, it’s heavily censored, actually.

What Is Being Censored On The Internet?
How Is The Internet Being Censored?
Why Are They Censoring The Internet?

Find out the answers to these questions and take a stand here

via Co.Design

January wrap up

January has been a month of obsessions.

Obsession number 1: the ephemeral. Unlikely collections, elaborate bento boxes, etsy treasury lists inspired by chalk writings on a blackboard and Polaroid snapshots. We just love the beauty in everyday things that shines for an instance and then quickly vanishes.

Obsession number 2: colors. We’ve spent hours aimlessly searching for flickr images by color. We ‘ve noticed the large gap between how men and women describe colors. We’ve tried to sense colors in their complete absence. And we heard colors synesthetically in the music of John Coltrane.

Obsession number 3: maps. We’ve roamed the streets of New York through Hip-Hop lyrics. We’ve revisited our childhood homes. We’ve compared our countries to the rest of the world. And we finished things off by completely deconstructing the map.

Mapping the meaning

I’m in an Empire State of Mind.

You don’t need to be a hiphop fan to appreciate Rap Map. I could just (virtually) roam the streets of New York City for hours, visiting different clubs, hotels, bars and recording studios to discover the history of rap. Rap Map is a location-based, Google Maps application, which connects hip hop lyrics to specific places, unveiling the inside story behind them.  The placemarks feature a short description of the place and cleverly selected lyrics from well (or lesser) known hiphop songs.

You can also access the vast database of rap songs, provided by Rap Genius, creator of Rap Map. Rap Genius is an online rap lyrics encyclopedia, dedicated to the meanings and stories behind hip hop songs.

For the time being, New York City has the most Rap Map placemarks, but other places, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, etc. are starting to gain ground.

I only wished I knew more (or anything, actually) about hip hop music, so I could contribute to the list.

It’s a small world

It’s a small world. Yet it contains a whooping amount of countries.

How does your country compare to them? In terms of life expectancy, class divide, free time? In terms of oil and electricity consumption?  Visit if it were my home and you’ll get hooked (and also very surprised of how your country measures up to other countries).

Its very effective interface it allows you to compare any two countries in the world – I especially like the map overlay that compares the two countries land mass. Careful though, it can be rather addictive!

Tidying up the map

French artist Armelle Caron deconstructs city plan maps. Or rather, tidies up maps.

The maps have an amazing visual effect. It is also very interesting to notice the difference between the variability of city blocks in Istanbul and the geometric homogeneity of New York, for example.

Istanbul by Armelle Caron

New York by Armelle Caron

See more maps here.

via pinterest

I can see my house from here

We used to waste hours just walking around/We used to wait/All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown

Songs are places. This song is your place. The one you grew up in. The one you have left behind. The one you are running away from. Or towards?

Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait“, from their latest album “The Suburbs” (highly acclaimed by well established magazines, such as Uncut, Mojo and so many others, and by alternative digital websites and blogs, such as Pitchfork and Gorilla vs Bear) is a haunting tune about the no man’s land that is memory.

“The Wilderness Downtown”, directed by Chris Milk, is an interactive interpretation of the song, where a faceless man (me? you?) is running around the streets of his/her childhood*. By entering your childhood address,  a narrative unfolds, revealing beautifully rendered images and videos of your hometown. Choreographed windows, custom-rendered maps, flocking birds and growing trees create a personalised scenery. At the end, you can make amends with your past, writing a beautifully typefaced note to the person you once were, only to see it incorporated in the video.