Art of Geography

About

The Art of Geography is about the intersection of art, a sense of the presence of the natural world, and distilling spatial information. Some of the byproducts of this melding are maps that help you get where you want to go, photographic panoramas that show you what it was like to be in natural locations, and abstract expressionist & landscape art.

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Art

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Artwork from the Art of Geography combines elements from nature, maps, and photography into abstract new patterns.

(tap/click images to view larger)

Panpsychism series of artworks

[row] [col] The Atacama of the mind and the evaporation of peripheral meaning

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[row] [col] The stratigraphic vindication of basalt and the rainlit waning

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[row] [col] Toward the vertiginous magnetism of the Quaternary countercurrent

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[row] [col] Sapling 1971's tertiary branches char, turn into heavy clay

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[row] [col] The shape of whaleback ridge shows the water where to flow

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[row] [col] Gravitons pull to the Kalevi Singularity at Mile Eight

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[row] [col] The Gap in the Mountain Where the Sky Falls Through

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[row] [col] The Archean Eon of Inverse Hydrolysis and the Restoration

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[row] [col] Manifold energy of peak 431

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Artwork from other series

[row] [col] The stratigraphic vindication of basalt and the rainlit waning

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[row] [col] An ursine propinquity reconnects the ancient passage to the Tegosa anticline

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[row] [col] Untitled nr 1015

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[row] [col] Nebulous aquifer marks at minus 94 atmospheres

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[row] [col] Untitled nr 1016

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[row] [col] T0 angular passageway

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[row] [col] The 72 entryways into the Arc of Vastnesses all begin in meadows of alpine tundra

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[row] [col] Submergent backshore saltwater rejoins ancient steppes of Oceania

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[row] [col] Biota Imprint the Phase Change

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[row] [col] Omura whales' faint memory of glaciated mountains

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[row] [col] Stone Ephemera of Codex Monolithiopia

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[row] [col] The man who diverted the river from the foregone riverbed compartments of dirt, dust & bone

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[row] [col] Mapping the inverse memorialization of a Cascadian mountain

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Topology series of artworks

[row] [col] Untitled nr 1000

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[row] [col] Distant fires illuminate the rocky foothills' topology

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[row] [col] The quartzite temporalities structure this field of benefaction/span>

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[row] [col] Threads of authigenesis permeate Veluotte Meadow

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[row] [col] Cascadian temporalized fields tangle and range out

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[row] [col] Untitled nr 492

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[row] [col] The topology of homing pigeons at the polar terminator

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[row] [col] The topology of stratovolcanic wind currents

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Gravitons pull to the Kalevi Singularity at Mile Eight

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Part of the Panpsychism series.

[row] [col] Gravitons pull to the Kalevi Singularity at Mile Eight.

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Mountains are often part of my art because of the spirit of wonder and awe that I experience when visiting them. Studies have shown that being in nature helps to destress people as well as providing fresh clean air to breathe.

This original artwork was created in the fall of 2021 using the Studio Artist app and Photoshop. Earlier in the year I developed hundreds of custom presets for Studio Artist to get the look I wanted. This work was built up from multiple layers, and making this artwork involved both manual work and generative processes.

The Art of Geography drops some NFTs

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

If you like Art of Geography artwork and wanted to own a limited edition, up until now there were no options available.

Today there are now choices, and hopefully more to come.

What is an NFT?

While the term non-fungible token doesn't necessarily explain a lot, it is an application of cryptocurrencies to the problem of digital art being easily reproducible and therefore seemingly having little to no value. The art world depends partly on scarcity to define value. An NFT provides something that can't be duplicated -- a token that is unique to a particular artwork.

NFT artwork has built-in authentication, which provides proof of ownership.

Some recent articles on NFT-based artwork

Where are the Art of Geography NFTs?

The art portfolio page on this site now has a link under the artwork when there is an NFT available.

Three Art of Geography artworks are available (all open in new tabs):

On switching to Gatsby JS for the sixth generation of this website

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This website has gone through a few eras of web technologies. The first incarnation was created using Dreamweaver. I first started using Dreamweaver when that scrappy Macromedia outfit came out with it in 1997. Prior to that I had used BBedit.

The second generation was custom written using Panic Coda. I really liked Coda, and cannot wait for Nova to become available.

Somewhere after the initial launch and before the third generation site WordPress was used for the blog part of the site.

Then the third generation site used Drupal.

What became challenging for both of these CMS's was keeping on top of security updates. Secondarily it was hard to find reasonably priced yet performant hosting for Drupal. And as you can see from the Google Trends charts, interest in these PHP-based CMS's is waning. They're still good choices for enterprise needs, but not so much for this site.

The fourth generation was hosted on Webflow and used their site building tools. I liked Webflow but mainly I tried out their site building environment so I could learn what this new crop of tools could do. I never got to do the demo I was wanting to do for some friends, but it was worth learning about Webflow, Squarespace, etc. The more time you invest in customizations with these types of sitebuilding tools, the more sense of lock-in you might experience. While you can export your site, I'm not aware of tools that will import their export and result in a working site.

The fifth generation minimalist site was hand written using Atom.

This, the latest generation, was developed using Gatsby JS.

One of its most satisfying attributes is the sense that you own the means of production (assuming you already have a computer), and because Gatsby JS is blazingly fast, you should be able to avoid being demoted to page 30 of search results for having a slow site. There is no annual subscription or big one-time license fee for the Gatsby JS software itself, and it is possible to host a site for no or low cost. To me this is more aligned with the spirit of the original world wide web where anyone could be a publisher on the internet. Today, if your website is too slow, Google will penalize your site's search engine ranking and your content fades into the darkness where searchers never go. Organizations with vast IT budgets can counter the slowness penalty by buying more servers, faster CDNs, hire bigger optimization teams, and pay for more paid search results. What can you do?

What is Gatsby JS?

It is an open source static site generator that can pull data from myriad sources including local markdown files, YAML or JSON data, or content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, Ghost or Contentful. It can be used to create websites that have the single-page-app experience — loading quickly, and pre-caching code and data needed for other pages so that clicking on a link loads the next page instantly. GatsbyJS uses React + GraphQL + Webpack (and at a lower level, Node.js and npm and/or yarn). The resulting static site can be deployed to Netlify, static hosting, CDN's or Github pages (and some of these options are free or close to free as well).

Some of the most compelling reasons to use Gatsby have to do with the static site aspect: the page loading speed can be amazingly fast, and the site security is enhanced due to no intrinsic database or PHP code. It certainly doesn't hurt that Gatsby's documentation is excellent.

It is really easy to get started with a freshly built Gatsby site thanks to various Gatsby "starters" and themes (assuming you are comfortable using the command line). The effort level to customize the site is up to you -- there's an almost infinite amount of website refinement and tweaking that you can do if you have the time and energy.

Excellent developer experience

Much of the Gatsby JS ecosystem seems designed to make life easier for developers. It is quite easy to get started with a Gatsby site with the starters and themes. Another facet is the clear and well-organized documentation, but another I have not seen many people mention is helpfulness of the error messages. When you make a mistake or create a typo, the error messages that Gatsby develop responds with are typically more helpful than the error messages from a lot of other software tools. For someone who is relatively new to the JAMstack environment, this can make the difference between a 5-10 minute setback and hours of floundering around.

Great support for Markdown

I enjoy using Markdown to write. Its simplicity helps keep the focus on the content, not the zillions of features, toolbars, and popup windows reminding you to upgrade to the newest shiny version. Gatsby can turn Markdown files (for your blog or pages) into content inside your page template. And if you want to go beyond regular Markdown, there is a plugin called MDX which allows you to embed React component calls in the Markdown file.

Gatsby JS advantages

Fast and easy to create new blog posts
Very convenient to add new media to portfolio pages
Virtually instantaneous in-browser feedback after making a change to the site
Open source + community
Despite being relatively new, already many online answers available when you have questions

Possible issues

Build speed could be faster
More logic is moving into the browser, and they change all the time. However server-side stacks change too. Are your PHP and Symphony versions up to date?
Yoked to React, for good or bad

Deploying the site

I had no problem using FTP to deploy the site to either Dreamhost or Netlify, but that is so 1990's. Initially I ran into a glitch deploying to Netlify via Github -- the build & deploy process errored out due to Javascript tooling version differences between my localhost and Netlify's environment. It was fairly quick to work around by upgrading Gatsby and specifying what version of Node to use in a netlify.toml file. Looking through the Lighthouse report for the copy of the site I had ftp'd to Dreamhost, I was surprised to see that http/2 was not present. It turns out they don't provide it on all plans; you have to be on a VPS or a Dedicated server. The copy of the site deployed via Github to Netlify was turning in almost all 100's in Google Lighthouse without a lot of extra work -- the one outlier was a 97 performance ranking. Considering I'd not optimized image sizes at all yet, this was an amazing outcome.

Observations

It's been a few years since I developed a JavaScript-based web app, and the landscape has shifted dramatically. One of the biggest changes is the sense that you are developing an application that runs a website. The Gatsby JS commands even suggest this: while working on the website, you do "gatsby develop" and then when you want to make the production version, you do a "gatsby build."

What I've found so far is when I want to add a new feature, like tags for blog posts for example, there are usually one or two plugins that provide some or all the required functionality. But not so many that you get paralyzed by too many choices or have to spend days researching them all. In this case I added tags to my site as one of the first customizations. I quickly realized that since I didn't know React, I needed to get a little more experience with the React-based layout component and set the tags feature aside. Some time later I picked it up and finished it off in about an hour. All website platforms should be capable of adding a new feature in less than an hour or two. To less toil!

Postscript

I see some people have had trials and tribulations with Gatsby. I may have been lucky? I should have pointed out I didn't start at ground zero -- I had a one day class on decoupled Drupal with Gatsby at BADcamp which gave me a bit of a running start. That and I was keeping the MVP for this first release pretty minimal.

What is a graticule?

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

In cartography, a graticule is a network of lines representing meridians and parallels, on which a map or plan can be represented. On many maps of the world, the gridlines of latitude and longitude allow you to get a sense of where a location or area is relative to the poles, the equator, or east/west in a hemisphere.

The image above is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

On this site, Graticule is the pattern or framework that blog-like content appears in.

To quote Brent Simmons on his inessential blog, 'Old proverb: “The best time to start a blog is 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.'"

Cartography

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Maps for books

One City's Wilderness is an awesome book by Marcy Houle about Portland's Forest Park. The Art of Geography created the maps and elevation profiles for the third edition of the book, published by OSU Press. The customization of the maps and elevation profiles for the book involved many iterations with the author, who was a pleasure to work with and did a tremendous amount of research and field work for this third edition.

From the publisher: "This updated and expanded edition of One City’s Wilderness provides directions to twenty-nine hikes of varying length, difficulty, and scenery, covering every trail within the 5,100-acre park. Each hike is accompanied by new, full-color maps, and a fold-out, full-color map of the entire park is included inside the back cover."

Oregon State University Press page on the book
(Note: there are no "affiliate" links on this site. This link is provided for informational purposes)

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Printed maps

There have been several different form factors of the Art of Geography map of Forest Park. This poster version is 39 inches wide by 13 inches tall.

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Photography

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This flattened 360 image is not from today's panorama on VRlog.com but an example of what you might see there.

We have captured over five thousand 360 degree panoramas from all over. At our microsite https://www.vrlog.com you can see a different immersive Art of Geography panorama every day. These virtual reality scenes have enough resolution to be viewed full-screen on a 4K monitor. They work well in most modern browsers and do not require any plugins. Some of the scenes are panoramas from virtualparks.org which have been rebuilt in higher resolution and open standards. Some are newer 360 degree scenes that have never been published before anywhere.

Above Eagle Lake, Lake Tahoe area

VirtualParks.org is the result of over 24 years of hiking, exploring, and shooting panoramic photography. Since 1995, millions of people have visited VirtualParks.org and gotten a glimpse of what it's like to visit incredible wilderness locales such as Mt. Rainier, Kings Canyon, Crater Lake, Yosemite, Banff, Zion, The Three Sisters, the John Muir Trail, and hundreds of other parks and natural areas using QuickTime VR (virtual reality).

VirtualParks.org was conceived as a visual documentary of special places in North America. Natural or wilderness lands provide refuge and inspiration for people as well as habitat for other species.

Elk Creek redwoods

The pressure of population, economic growth, park budget cuts, climate change, and catastrophic events often encroaches upon our green spaces and wilderness lands. It is my hope that through experiencing the special beauty of our wild lands, the public will better understand the value of open space and wilderness and want to preserve it for future generations to enjoy.

Glen Pass, Pacific Crest Trail

When shooting these scenes, there was also a sense that many of these locations will never be the same again; some may improve, some may be destroyed--because geological and environmental change is inevitable. People usually think of big changes only occurring in millennial timescales, but all it takes is one natural disaster (Indian Ocean tsunami, Mt. St. Helens, earthquake on the San Andreas fault) to devastate an area for generations. Not to mention man-made disasters such as giant forest fires. These panoramas provide a unique documentary record of what specific places looked like at recorded moments in history.

Green Creek aspens, eastern Sierra Nevada

One of the most remarkable facets of this collection of panoramas is how many were shot on film. In today's world of rapid image capture, it may be hard to imagine the amount of effort it took to create digital stitched panoramas from twelve or more individual film exposures. In many cases a single film 360 panorama took dozens of hours to get the film processed, scan all the shots, stitch them together, edit the stitched scene, and reate a virtual reality player file.

Dege Peak, Mt. Rainer National Park

Unfortunately QuickTime VR has not been updated for today's browsers and as a result VirtualParks.org is not very easy to view unless you have an older computer that has QuickTime VR installed. The second challenge is the resolution of the scenes built in the 1990's is not high enough to look acceptable on today's monitors. Rebuilding these scenes for higher resolution and open standards is a slow process as it is not our primary or even secondary work, but rather a labor of love. You can see some of the results on VRlog.com

Log over Bear Creek, Portola Redwoods State Park

VRlog highlights a different VR every day

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

In August 2018 VRlog.com started hosting 360 virtual reality scenes that only require a browser that supports html5 (i.e. most all browsers). This spring the site was updated to have more scenes and to display a different 360 panorama every day. The panoramas were rebuilt at high resolution so that they look fine on a 4K monitor.

The player on VRlog supports these keyboard shortcuts:

shift - zoom in
right-arrow - pan to the right
left-arrow - pan to the left
escape - get out of fullscreen mode
f key - go into fullscreen mode

Kolob Canyon, Utah

There were a few small coding challenges but nothing that couldn't be figured out in an hour. It seemed like rotating in a different scene in every day aligned with the idea suggested by the name of a virtual reality log or VRlog.

Announcing the Topology series of artworks

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Under development for over two years, the Topology series imagines what it might look like if you could see connections between constituent parts of our natural world. For example, what if the connections between all flying animals were visible as lines, both species ties and lineage back to the dinosaurs? There are some analogs, such as the visualizations of how everyone and every server is connected on the internet, but also phenomena like the discovery that trees talk to each other underground. While there are dozens of these artworks in the studio, twelve of the best are publicly viewable in the Art of Geography art portfolio.

Untitled nr 431, from the Topology series.
View more from this series in the portfolio.

The Portland bakery map

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This map of Portland bakeries was first unveiled in February 2011. It’s a bit of an experiment since no streets are labeled. In order to work on a letter size page, there’s not much room for street names. However the general neighborhood centers should be evident — for instance Alberta Street has a fabulous cluster of bakeries.

A word about the parameters for choosing what is shown… I thought the map should be about baked items, which leaves out chocolatiers and ice creameries and candy stores for another map. I tried to include places that focus on baked goods (breads, croissants, pies, cakes, cupcakes, cookies, etc). I went back and forth on places like Random Order and Pix.

I hadn’t really noticed it before making the map, but it is striking how some neighborhoods are bakery free, or have just one bakery for miles and miles of city. Apologies to the neighborhoods that fell off the edge of the cookie… it just wouldn’t be legible if the entire region was included.

The map is not for sale anywhere.

Unfortunately this map is out of date -- there are some fantastic new bakeries.

Announcing the updated and expanded "One City's Wilderness" book

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT

One City’s Wilderness Portland’s Forest Park

Third Edition

Marcy Cottrell Houle

Maps by Erik Goetze

Situated in the rugged hills west of Portland, Oregon, Forest Park is one of the largest urban parks in the world and the only city wilderness park in the United States. The park is home to hundreds of native plants and animals and offers more than eighty miles of trails--all within minutes of downtown Portland.

This updated and expanded edition of One City's Wilderness provides directions to twenty-nine hikes of varying length, difficulty, and scenery, covering every trail within the 5,100-acre park. Each hike is illustrated with a new, full-color map, and a fold-out, full-color map of the entire park is included inside the back cover.

Marcy Houle shares the history of Forest Park, introduces the people who fought to preserve it, and explores the role stewards play today. She describes the park's critical wildlife corridor, its exceptional watersheds, and important native interior forest habitat. She encourages people of all ages to take an "All Trails Challenge"--learning about the unique nature of the park by exploring every trail. The book also includes bird, plant, and mammal checklists and eighty-four color photographs of native plants and birds.

For its recreational and educational opportunities as well as its extraordinary natural beauty, Forest Park is unquestionably America's premier urban forest. One City's Wilderness, in its updated third edition, continues to be the authoritative, complete guide to Portland's greatest natural resource.

Publisher: Oregon State University Press The book is 6x9 inches, 256 pages. Color maps, color photographs, bibliography, index and fold-out overview map. ISBN 978-0-87071-588-4.

Cartographer's notes This was an exciting project that built on my existing Forest Park map and took it to the next level. It was an honor to be picked to make this book's maps, and a pleasure to work with Marcy. OSU Press made it as easy as possible to be part of a wonderful book's rebirth. The printing quality of the color maps exceeds what I thought was possible for a paperback.

The Portland Chocolate Map postcard

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT

The "chocolate map" is an Art of Geography postcard map that was created Feb 12, 2007. I had noticed that there was practically a chocolate district spanning the Pearl and Downtown, and I thought it would be fun to propose a "Chocolate district walk" whereby you can visit all of them. I went to each chocolatier and asked them which product they wanted to iconically represent them on the map. The map shows six (formerly eight) chocolate shops within a ten block radius in Portland.

Unfortunately this map is out of date.