drifts

I landed at the South Aral Sea. It was hard to look up close because there was not street view available, but there was a lot to see from above. There were tons of colors and textures to find and that’s what sparked my interest from the beginning.

At first I was kind of struggling with the Google Maps/Earth program, because it wasn’t acting how I wanted. I found out later because it is a different area in the world, where they probably didn’t ‘allow’ Google to share the details of these countries. Maybe because they’re just south of Russia? Though we were introduced with a Google Maps like search engine; Yandex. I will talk more about that later.

Because there was no streetview from the starting point, I started to drift from it quite fast. From above you could see a lot of different shapes and colors. It sparked my interest, because some of it didn’t even look real. More like an abstract painting.

I noticed that on Yandex there is a database where you can find pictures from the area. Maybe it's something from their server, or it's randomly picked from someone's social media account? I don't know. It seems a bit weird to me because it looks like a collection that you can browse through. With google maps, it's much different because you have to select a certain location first.

This made me think of cultural mapping. The camera that shows how much people already made a picture of a certain place.

From above it doesn't look livable. What if I connected these things with each other and made a painting with the colors/textures.

The third main intersection between art and cartography identified in this entry refers to the use of cartography as a way to investigate our relationship with place, with and within different forms of artistic expression. This kind of inquiry can be done for three main purposes: (a) to examine fictional and non-fictional narrative structures through their spatial dimensions, (b) to understand places as they appear in artworks, especially in films and novels, and (c) to explore our personal and emotional relationships to places.

You can see that over time, nature goes her way. The lake evolves naturally, but also quite fast. Everything responds to something else; the water dries up, then it floods by the melting ice.