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Apr. 6 – May 7, 2010

tue – fri, 12 – 6 pm

Reception: Apr. 21st, 6:00 pm

Robin Hewlett & Ben Kinsley

Christian Nold

Jeremy Wood

Sha Hwang

Stanza

Map Marking features five works by artists and designers who employ digital technology to create maps, annotate them or intervene in the mapping process. Taken as a whole this exhibition represents a personalized cartography that endows maps and the spaces to which they are linked with the ephemera of life, from the fleeting sensations of the environment to the transitory movements of people and their emotions.

Jeremy Wood maps out his personal life by charting his walks throughout London and tracking his lawn mower's traversal of his garden. In his Star Flights GPS Drawing, Jeremy used economy airline flights and GPS to trace out a colossal five-pointed star across the face of Europe. His video encapsulates each airplane's take-off and landing during his contiguous 68 hour journey. Sha Hwang’s NYC Subway Ridership 1905-2006 is an interactive visualization of the NYC subway system that displays its ridership as it expands and contracts over time. Its interface invites a viewer to select a station and a year, offering the opportunity for reflection on past experience as part of the crowd. In their artwork Street with a View, Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley orchestrated the crowd to personalize the anonymous documentary imagery normally captured by Google Street View. In a project that was part community activism, part street theater, and all fiction the narrow Pittsburgh street of Sampsonia Way became a stage for diverse performances that now reside within Google Maps. Stanza's Sensity Brixton London maps the transient ambient sensations surrounding his home that have been captured in real-time by his sensor network. Sensity expresses the collective pulse of its environment, rendering its emergent emotional state. Christian Nold mobilizes people to record their feelings as they wander through San Francisco's Mission District. His San Francisco Emotion Maps is a collective attempt at creating an emotional portrait of a neighborhood, and envisions new tools that allow people to share and interpret their own bio data.

Francis T. Marchese, curator, is co-director of the Pace Digital Gallery and works in visual computing. (csis.pace.edu/~marchese)

The Pace Digital Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of Pace University's President, Stephen J. Friedman and Constance A. Knapp, Interim Dean, Seidenberg School.

NYC Subway Ridership 1905 – 2006, (2009). In NYC Subway Ridership 1905 – 2006 Sha Hwang has created an interactive visualization of NYC subway ridership from 1905-2006. Beginning with a database containing the annual ridership for each station in the NYC subway system and applying two different methods of representation — scaled dots (centered on each station) and lines (connecting stations), a viewer can track the ebb and flow of masses of anonymous New Yorkers as they course through the New York subway system throughout its history. (www.diametunim.com/shashi/nyc_subways)

Sha Hwang began his university studies in engineering but changed to architecture, receiving a BA in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley in May 2007. Currently working in the areas of interactive design and data visualization, Sha's diverse background includes animation and design at IwamotoScott Architecture, architecture and web design at MESH Design, and motion graphics at Brooklyn Digital Foundry. He is currently a member of Stamen Design in San Francisco. (diametunim.com/portfolio )

Street With A View, (2008). Street With A View is the first artistic intervention in Google Street View. Artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh to collaborate on a series of tableau vivants along Sampsonia Way, a small street on the city's north side. Staging scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight and more, Street View technicians captured 360o photographs of the street, and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. (www.streetwithaview.com)

Robin Hewlett is an artist who lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. Robin has been an artist-in-residence at Baan Unrak School in Sangklaburi, Thailand where she initiated the Write to Fight Book Project in collaboration with the Women and Child Rights Project of Burma. She has shown work at the International Center, Chiang Mai, Thailand; Transformer Gallery, Washington DC; and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. Robin organizes Spare Room, an informal exhibition space and residency program in her home. (www.robinhewlett.com ) Ben Kinsley is a multidisciplinary artist who creates site-specific responses to particular situations, often though collaboration with local residents. His projects have ranged from conducting an orchestra of screaming humans, directing a maritime-themed play for boaters on a lake in Maine, and organizing a shadow play in the middle of the California High Desert. Ben’s work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, film festivals, and is included in the permanent collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art. He received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. (www.benkinsley.com )

Sensity Brixton London, (2004-2009). Sensity Brixton London is an audio-visual artwork by Stanza that visualizes the dynamic data around the artist's environment. The city is made up of bits of data that change and Stanza's wireless sensor network captures and interprets this change, presenting it online in real-time. Sensity represents the movement of people, pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of buildings. They are in effect the emergent social sculptures that embody the emotional state of the city, representing the sense of accumulated incidents of love, abuse, death, and the fundamentally of change. (www.stanza.co.uk/sensity/motes/mote_sounds.html)

Stanza is an internationally recognized award winning artist whose work has appeared at the Venice Biennale, Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain, Mundo Urbano Madrid, and Sao Paulo Biennale. His mediums include painting, video, prints, generative artworks and installations that include CCTV, online networks, touch screens, and environmental sensors. Recurring themes throughout his career include, the urban landscape, surveillance culture, and alienation in the city. Educated in fine art at Goldsmiths College in the early eighties, he later studied at Greenwich University and Central Saint Martins Art College London. He is a pioneer of net art and was one of the first to use Internet art as a medium. (www.stanza.co.uk)

San Francisco Emotion Map, (2007). San Francisco Emotion Map by Christian Nold presents a collaborative emotional portrait of San Francisco's Mission District. Ninety-eight participants used Nold's invention, a Bio Mapping device, to record their physiological responses to the surroundings as they toured the Mission District. In the version of San Francisco Emotion Map that is installed in the Pace Digital Gallery, the results of these walks are represented as area charts within Google Earth. Highs and lows of the emotional trails of each volunteer are plotted along with their personal annotations. (www.sf.biomapping.net)

Christian Nold is an artist, designer, and educator who develops participatory models for communal representation. In 2001 he wrote the book Mobile Vulgus, which examined the history of the political crowd and set the tone for his research into participatory mapping. Since graduating with an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2004, Christian has led a number of large scale participatory projects including his widely received ‘Bio Mapping,' which has been staged in sixteen countries. He is currently based at The Bartlett, the Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London. (www.softhook.com)

Star Flights, GPS Drawing, (2008). Star Flights GPS Drawing is a video of five airport runways captured with slitscan photography. It was created by Jeremy Wood as part of his Star Flights project in which he generated a GPS drawing over Europe in the shape of a star by taking five consecutive Ryanair flights. Starting from Stansted airport (STN) in London, he traveled to Copernicus airport (WRO) in Wroclaw, Barcelona's Girona airport (GRO), Stockholm's Skavsta airport (NYO), Rome's Ciampino airport (CIA), and back to Stansted London. His journey covered 5414 miles in 68 hours at a cost of £74. (www.gpsdrawing.com/jw/work/star.html)

Jeremy Wood is a multidisciplinary artist and map maker who employs GPS tracking as a visual and conceptual tool to explore digital marking on water, over land, and in the air, thus creating a personal cartography by recording all his daily journeys with satellite navigation technology. Wood has conducted numerous GPS drawing and mapping workshops in schools, museums, and galleries. His work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of the University of the Arts and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Wood holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin’s in London and a First Class Fine Art Degree from the University of Derby. He has a studio near Oxford and in Athens, Greece. (www.gpsdrawing.com/jw/index.html)