Eric Theise

Since April 2022 I've been manipulating projected digital maps in collaboration with improvising musicians, dancers, and spoken word artists across Europe and North America. Constraining my project to use only web mapping technologies, "A Synesthete's Atlas" is a curious mutation of expanded cinema, applying strategies from experimental film & animation, color theory, the Light and Space movement, and concrete poetry to geography. I'll present Carto-OSC, an assemblage of open source libraries, data, and protocols, plus 1000+ lines of JavaScript that integrates it all into a touch-surface interface. I'll discuss my motivations and use of the OSC protocol to control the manipulations, offer aesthetic observations, and present video excerpts of previous performances.

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First there were DJs and VJs. Enter the MJ (map jockey). Carto-OSC leverages open source libraries, data, and protocols to activate performance spaces – theaters, galleries, nightclubs – with projected, real time cartography. The Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol couples with a touch surface to control layer coloring and patterning, zoom/pitch/bearing effects, label typography, transits along road networks, and a variety of transitions purloined from cinema and visual music. Written in modern JavaScript, Carto-OSC would be unthinkable without a foundation of Open Stage Control, MapLibre, chroma.js, and OpenStreetMap data. This presentation describes its architecture, the impulses behind its creation, and includes documentation of its use in performance.