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Conjuring a younger me by sifting through QSL cards and other ham radio ephemera from my youth. Toward If Map #6 at Hangar: Centro de Investigação Artística, Lisboa

Let me start by thanking and welcoming those of you who’ve signed up in the interim between the first and this second Missive. It may be the case that I signed you up if we’ve worked together recently, or are making plans to do so, or are simply new friends. There will be this one, another in a week or so, and then probably silence until mid-summer.

I closed Occasional Missive #1 promising news of present and near future activities, many cartographic. In this Missive I’ll talk about returning to Portugal for a two month artist residency, my new Etsy storefront offering prints from the film Perch (in response to your feedback), and what can start bubbling up once you’ve passed a major milestone along a doggedly-pursued path (tho tortoisely-pursued might be more accurate).

I've only been to Portugal once before. In 1997 I attended an EDventure Holdings conference during the leadup to the first dotcom boom. I'd cofounded a startup. We'd received angel funding, staffed up, purchased the then-requisite Sun SPARC workstations and Cisco routers, and opened headquarters in San Francisco and a sales office in New York. We were in Lisbon angling for Esther Dyson to profile us positively in her Release 1.0 newsletter as her endorsement was thought to be the Midas touch of that era.

The million euro view toward Castelo de S. Jorge from my studio/apartment during my International Residency at Hangar

I don't remember much about that conference: a few interesting conversations, a few interesting people. Jaw-droppingly inexpensive vintage port. Absinthe, at the time illegal in the States. The boozy memories remind me that it was a turning point for me physically: I weighed more than 240 lbs (~110 kg) because we'd been wining-and-dining clients, partners, investors, and key hires nonstop for months. Working seven days a week, sleep routines worsening. I felt horrible when I paused so I just kept moving. When I returned home I did the unimaginable – joined a gym – and although my weight still fluctuates – COVID definitely sent it heading in the wrong direction for a spell – I’ve managed to keep it below 200 lbs for most of the past 25 years.

When I flew to Portugal this year I weighed around 190 lbs. During my March and April residency at Hangar, in Lisbon, I only dined out on special occasions, instead cooking in the, frankly, impoverished kitchenette of my studio but taking full advantage of the produce at Mercado Biológico de Principe Real, the breads from Gleba, the cheeses from Queijaria, supplementing those with the occasional seafood from Mercado da Ribeira or morcela de arroz from Manteigaria Silva. I walked everywhere in that hilly city and I'm presently cinching my belt three notches in from where I started. Feels good. Being in Europe as the weather shifts from chilly to hot feels wonderful.

March produce from Mercado Biológico de Principe Real

Cheeses from Queijaria

I’ve always remembered the magical complexity of Lisbon's streets and stairs, the surprises, and how they’re the only possible response to a challenging topography. I've wanted to return.

Level (Rua Damasceno Monteiro) meets steep (Calçada do Monte) in Graça.

Friends have asked how I came to be in residence at Hangar. That’s another complex and magical path, almost unrecoverable, but I've chased it down for the record.

In June 2021 I read about Tales from the Garden of Zār, Rouzbeh Akhbari’s exhibition based on "stories that revolve around the legends of edible earth in connection to purported paranormal activities in the strait of Hormuz". That phrase was evocative enough that I followed the artist on Instagram, learned he would be doing a residency at Hangar, followed Hangar. I cannot recall ever reading another mention of "edible earth" but when Hangar's open call for International Residencies was released, I applied. Much to my surprise – Hangar's mission is primarily concerned with decolonization, social and economic justice, the Global South – I and my experimental cartography got juried in.

My March cohort: artists from DC, Italy, Angola, Spain

My April cohort: artists from New York, Australia, Ukraine, South Africa, Lagos, Spain. Photo: Barbara Gocníková

Listen up: I went through a dark period where attending looked impossible. Irresponsible. Overwhelming. I wish to thank friends Janine, Kate, and Rebecca whose encouragement lifted me up and out from those depths; up, out, and down the jetway. The experiences I've been having are life-changing.

I'll tell you about some. But first…

Still from Perch, 2016. 16mm, black & white, silent, 2 minutes, 45 seconds. Perch was included in 2016’s multimaker tribute to Peter Hutton, A Roll For Peter.

I am no Marco Polo, it’s true, but I am trying to swirl commerce into my travels and art. Creating my own virtual Silk Route.

After I emailed the first Occasional Missive several of you wrote to ask if I sold prints from Perch, my single roll 16mm film made in tribute to Peter Hutton a few years back. The answer, now, is yes.

There are 20 shots in Perch. All of them were made from my windy balcony using a hand-wound, tripod-mounted Bolex. I aimed northeast during a long-awaited afternoon when the sunset was being reflected back spectacularly from East Bay windows. I aimed southeast and straight down the following morning when the fog was insistent. I used outdated 7224/4-X, a black and white negative stock canceled by Kodak in 1990. The graininess is solely due to its age, not any special processing.

I am offering prints in three variants:

1. a frame from each of the twenty shots, digitally printed on 9” x 12" archival Hahnemühle fine art paper and held in a portfolio handmade by a Bay Area bookbinder. This will be a limited edition with each sheet signed, dated, and numbered on the reverse, including a cover/documentation sheet.

2. a frame from six representative shots, also digitally printed on 9” x 12" archival paper and contained in a handmade portfolio. Also a limited edition with each sheet signed, dated, and numbered, plus a cover/documentation sheet.

3. individual shots, each 12 x 16", digitally printed on archival Hahnemühle fine art paper. These will be an open edition with each print pencil-signed and dated verso.

Shuffling through stills from Perch, printed four-up on an office laserjet, then sliced. Satisfying even at this small size/awful quality. Weighed down with a ceramic disk made by Hangar co-resident Rin Lack; best travel talisman ever.

The limited edition portfolios are meant to be handled, shuffled, considered, reshuffled. One touchstone for this is British Pop Artist Eduardo Paolozzi’s Moonstrips Empire News, a boxed tabloid of 101 screenprints from 1967. Another is a lazy morning spent with friends Andy and Kate, selecting and ordering photographs Andy’d neatly categorized into boxes for just such occasions.

Orders are … really?

I’d scheduled this email to go out on the :15. I guess I should be thankful that, coincidentally, Etsy emailed me a “reminder” that they intend to hold any revenue for 45 days because my offerings are new. So.

You can view the prints at my new Etsy store. Please email me directly should anything there be of interest. I’ll finalize the edition sizes of the portfolios in July based on your feedback. Printing and shipping/delivery will commence soon after.

Your orders in June would make it possible for me to replace my cracked iPhone screen before it fails entirely, and to replace equipment that’s gone missing in my travels. Just saying. Email rescheduled to the :45.

One of my earliest "toys" as a child was a jigsaw puzzle where the individual pieces were US states (New England was a single piece). From it I learned capitals, cities, bodies of water, and more subtly, symbology, legends and keys, and the use of font family and size to express demographics. I still own it and when I taught/co-taught Mapping as a Creative Strategy courses during the 2000s, I'd take it to the first meeting for a "show and tell" about favorite maps.

Growing up in Chicago I learned to make sense of transit and other urban maps. During grad school I led "Be Expert with Map and Compass" workshops at Sierra Club leadership seminars once I'd had accrued enough experience using USGS topo maps on trailbuilding trips. The emergence of the "slippy map" on the Internet was nothing short of miraculous and it's not terribly surprising I was drawn to the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source for Geospatial) ecosystem that flourished around OpenStreetMap and other open data projects.

Drawn to it. Sucker punched by it.

I no longer wanted to be at the State of the Map conference in DC by the time it rolled around but I'd bought my plane tickets and had committed to giving the presentation "Lessons Learned from Experimental Film". I talked about how I’d kept a firewall between my dayjob (always computer-based) and my artwork (pinhole photography, wet darkrooms, etchings), to no certain advantage, until I began reframing JavaScript mapping libraries and geospatial databases as an oddly-constrained toolkit for making experimental films. I asked: if you took the Bolex cameras away from the structural filmmakers and experimental animators of the late 20th century and gave them contemporary digital cartography tools what would they have made instead? I’ve kept that question simmering on a back burner ever since.

Ditching routine is one of the benefits of artist residencies and my time at Hangar, and at my earlier Signal Culture toolmaker residencies, are where I've been able to clarify and take bigger steps. In this Missive I'd like to tell you about one of three projects I worked on in Lisbon.

Many excellent tools, commercial and closed source, free and open, are available for doing digital cartography but they lend themselves to being measured and precise, not spontaneous and receptive to accidents. I wanted a nimble, alternative interface for styling maps and my thinking evolved to where a studio design tool began to incorporate elements from expanded cinema, disc & video jockeying, planetarium light shows, and sensory immersion à la James Turrell and other Light and Space artists.

It’s a singularly odd day to be writing about OSC, an acronym for Open Sound Control, a networking protocol for musical and related hardware. OSC is often compared and contrasted with the better-known MIDI. Today’s news includes word that Dave Smith, the "Father of MIDI", has passed away at 72. RIP.

For my purposes, OSC seemed the right choice. Its messages appeared less tightly coupled to the notion of notes and their URL-like format appealed to me as a RESTful API (web) developer. I started working with a program called Lemur that must have been something in its day. Which is long past: it’s not even capable of operating when a second monitor is plugged in to your laptop. Now I use another OSC, Open Stage Control, whose creator is talented, responsive, and generous, and whose user community is vibrant. Open Stage Control lets me create virtual knobs, sliders, tabs, and displays on my iPad, and to craft the messages they send and receive over a local network. I've written 1000+ lines of JavaScript to translate those messages into instructions for digital mapping libraries to alter zooming, panning, rotating, and pitching, as well as layer and feature coloring, strobing, and an ever-expanding list of other manipulations.

One of three goals I set for my Hangar residency was to develop this platform to the point where I could use it in front of an audience. I'm ecstatic to say that the premier performance of A Synesthete’s Atlas, a 45 minute improvisation with cellist Helena Espvall, took place at Hangar on 21 April 2022. I dedicated the performance to the soon-to-be-born daughter of cellist Joana Guerra; Joana stepped up and made the introduction when she could have simply deleted my out-of-the-blue invitation to collaborate.

Helena Espvall. Photo by Tiago Fróis.

René Levasseur Island left and center; me, manipulating, at lower right.

I’ve posted five excerpts from the performance to a Vimeo showcase. I hope you’ll watch. And I hope you’ll come to a performance (and maybe assist me in setting one up!). Three are already scheduled:

• with saxophonist/flautist/composer Ken Field, Powder Magazine, Cambridge, MA. 23 Jun.

• with composer/performer Carl Stone, Indexical, Santa Cruz, CA. 15 Sep.

• at Mirror Lab, Minneapolis, MN. 22 Oct. In conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society but open to the public. Collaborator(s) TBD.

Listen up: I am trying to line up performances between Boston and Washington DC between June 24th and July 3rd or so. Conversations about Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC are progressing.

In the Bay Area, we’re looking at dates in late Sep/early Oct at Shapeshifters Cinema, and Nov/Dec is a distinct possibility for the fall Other Cinema calendar. And since my proposals for technical presentations at a pair of back-to-back geospatial conferences have been accepted I’ll be working on setting up August performances. In Florence. Possibly elsewhere in Europe in the days to follow.

I’ll let you know.

But back to Lisbon. During the post-performance Q & A, Helena's husband Derek asked me what software I was using. I rattled a list of components off from the top of my head but this is more thoughtful and documented:

• various components from MapTiler/OpenMapTiles

• Mapbox GL JS v1.13, to be replaced with MapLibre

• Colin Clark’s osc.js

• chroma.js replaced tinycolor but the jury is still out

• gaussian provides convenient ways to sample from normal distributions

• PostgreSQL with PostGIS extensions

• data from OpenStreetMap

The dynamic range in illumination was wild, making it impossible to capture screen and humans simultaneously. Photo by one of the Hangar interns.

I was pleased to find this audience photograph as I went through the many performance photos taken by Hangar interns. Closest to the camera is Javier, another Hangar intern who I’ll remember better as a thoughtful young Spanish artist. When I told him I was thinking to go to Seville after my time in Lisbon he suggested instead Granada.

And so it came to pass that I spent my birthday visiting the Alhambra before heading to Madrid and Barcelona. Much more to tell but until next time … I hope this Missive finds you well and that you're engaged in happy, creative pursuits of your own.

Thank you for reading, Eric