GPSing Your Cat

Author Caroline Paul's cat disappeared for five weeks before returning home. Wondering where he went she fixed him up with GPS and mapped his wonderings.

 The story and process are documented in Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. The map above shows 10 hours of the cat's wanderings through part of San Francisco. He prefers certain nearby houses, but does get around and crosses many streets. He appears to have little interest in that water tower-like structure at the top of the image.

Upon further digging, I found this map from the book on the Lost Cat website showing the neighborhoods as seen by their cat.

The Tokyo Zoo Project-Geoglyphs!

The nav-U, a personal navigation device that can be mounted on a bicycle, started the Tokyo Zoo Project. This is a virtual zoo where the animals are drawn by cycling through the streets of Tokyo.

  You can zoom in and click the animals for route details such as this:

For more precise directions you can go to the PetaMap site.

There's also a how to page that shows how the elephant was created. This page gives you some interesting details encountered on the ride such as the line of cats along the elephant's trunk in "Cat Town;"

and along the banners of the nearby shopping street.

Thanks to Rafael from Urban Demographics for sending me this link.

Stunning Pictures of America "Revealed"

These pictures are from a PBS miniseries called America Revealed. The series is a look at the "systems that keep America working" by analyzing our networks of transportation food delivery and others. These pictures are from a recent article in the Daily Mail. Many of them are from GPS tracks.

The route of a combine harvesting business.

The electrical grid.

New York's morning rush hour color coded by transportation mode.  Buses (blue) are only shown for Manhattan and cars are not shown.

A "visual representation of the nation's wind resource."

A vast array of communications towers

For more pictures see the Daily Mail.

Mind the Map

Mind the Map: Inspiring art, design and cartography opens this Friday, May 18th at the London Transport Museum.

The displays will explore geographical, diagrammatic and decorative transport maps, as well as the influence of the iconic London Tube map on cartography, art and the public imagination. The Underground, London Transport, and its successor Transport for London, have produced outstanding maps for over 100 years. These have not only shaped the city, they have inspired the world.

Looking in particular at the relationship between identity and place, Mind the Map will explore the impact maps have had on our understanding of London and how they influence the way we navigate and engage with our surroundings. Mind the Map will be accompanied by an extensive public events programme and a book to be published by Lund Humphries - London Underground Maps: Inspiring Art, Design and Cartography.

The exhibition opens with a Friday night reception and runs until October 28th. Come for the Olympics, stay for the maps! So far there is no online page for the exhibit so images are hard to come by but here is one from the Museum's site.

Also, Jeremy Wood of GPS Drawing will be presenting London Overland, a narrative of traveling in London based on over 100 hours of collecting GPS tracks. Click the image for details.

Map of the Week-GPS Art

GPS Adventures has just opened at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore. This is a life sized maze exhibit that introduces visitors to GPS and geocaching. In honor of the exhibit here are a couple of profiles of GPS-obsessed artists - people that create art from the tracks of their GPS units.




Jeremy Wood is a British artist and cartographer with a GPS Drawing web site. Here is a pentagram drawn from a series of consecutive flights beginning and ending at London's Stansted Airport.

 

"5414 miles in 68 hours for £74 from London Stansted airport to London Stansted airport" - was all this flying just to create a pentagram? He doesn't say.
      
He also leads GPS art workshops at schools, museums and festivals. Here is a map from a festival in Basel, Switzerland where participants spelled out the name of the city on the lower part of the map.

One day, he decided to enjoy a drink at the John Snow Pub in Soho. The pub is named after Dr. John Snow who produced the famous map that traced the 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump just down the street from the pub. While there, his bag was stolen. His GPS unit was still in the bag and running. When the police returned the bag, he got back his unit and had a souvenir of his bag's travels. Here are the tracks of the stolen bag, overlaid onto John Snow's cholera map.

Over in San Francisco graphic designer Vicente Montelongo has created a series of GPS trail by bicycle in homage to the 8-bit video games of yore. Here are a couple of drawings reproduced for SF Weekly's "The Snitch." On the left is Space Invaders and on the right, Pac Man.