Email Steve: steve@muralcartography.com
My name is Steve Demers, I am a GIS Technician with a Mapping Company in Irvine, CA, and have recently graduated from the Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
MURAL CARTOGRAPHY
As my college years began coming to
a close I sought to find my niche in cartography. After seeing hundreds
of maps that were either accurate and scientific but ugly; or beautiful
and attractive but just plain wrong, I knew my niche would be trying to
combine the two. In line with my painting background and my desire to make
big maps, mural cartography was born.
To my knowledge, no person in the
world paints maps for a living. I don’t plan to be the first, but it is
currently an active hobby.
My first permanent and public piece
I have recently completed on the campus of UCSB itself. It is located in
the northeast stairwell of the third floor of Ellison Hall (the building
that houses the Geography Department.)
Unfortunately, because the mural is in a stairwell, no one has been able to back up far enough to get the entire mural in a single photograph. But here are several photos from around the mural:
THE IDEA
For a long time, probably 10 years, I have loved population maps. Over half the maps I have ever made have something to do with population. Why civilization grows where it grows, why people go where they go, and what regions thrive and those that don’t. A complicated set of a million push and pull factors over thousands of years have laid humanity in its present arrangement, and as data comes in, I love to pick it apart and analyze. So of course my first mural would be a population map.
Last year I finished a
world population map I made as an assignment for Geography 128: “Automated
and Computer Cartography.” I loved the way it looked, and I was inspired
to paint something similar. I thought about painting the map as leaves
on a tree, or as flowers in a field. But of course, what do leaves have
to do with population?
Of course!
People.
I would make a map of people.
I would make a dot map.
But these dots don’t represent cities
like they do on some maps; these dots represent a number, and in this case
a certain number of people.
My first instinct for that number was a nice round one
million. That is, one person on the map representing one million people
in the real world. With 6.1 Billion people in the rel world, that would
mean 6,100 people on my map. Hmmm, perhaps too many. But of course it took
me nearly a week to realize that- did I mention my desire to make really
big maps? I paced, I recalculated- yep 6,100, I paced again. OK, one person
equals ten million people- that cuts the count to only 610.
But any Joe can draw a stick figure (sorry Joe,) I’m a Steve. Steve’s draw actual people. So I ran down to my friend Dana Terry’s house, because he was the only person I knew off campus with a digital camera whom I believed would care, even slightly, about my idea. We walked to Francisco Torres, the pair of 11 story towers in Isla Vista that loom over the hundreds of bustling students heading to and from their academic activities. Peering down in his camera, I realized that the mural could be a reality; I could take photos of people (far enough away mind you, to avoid possible legal actions for painting an unwilling subject on a public wall) and paint the images as the dots on the dot map. Though Dana graduated that month and left, taking his digital camera with him, I was not deterred.
January 2002: I had a meeting with Dr. Keith Clarke, the chair of the Geography Department at UCSB. This was a meeting pertaining to an internship I was already involved in, for which he was my advisor. As we concluded the meeting I added a post-script, an “oh, by the way” that I had an idea for painting a mural, and if he knew of any walls in Ellison Hall that needed spicing up.
“For as long as I’ve been with the department here at UCSB” he began “I’ve always wanted to see a mural somewhere on Ellison Hall.” Aha, I have just the man for you, I responded to the Keith Clarke in my head. We talked another 20 minutes about locations and ideas. He told me to write up a proposal, and we would go from there.
Before I could write a proposal, I
needed to have a place to propose it. I walked around Ellison Hall checking
out some locations- too shady, too bumpy, too small, to obscured. Dr. Clarke
introduced me to Meryl Wieder, a Geography Dept. staff member who helped
me get the ball rolling. She took her digital camera and we took photos
of some possible locations for the mural: The South exterior wall, the
West exterior wall, the 2nd floor hallway and the third floor west stairwell.
I measured the size of each ranging from 6 feet wide to 21 feet wide, and
proposed the locations to Dr. Clarke.
“Have you looked in the east stairwell?”
he asks.
“Isn’t the east stairwell just like
the west stairwell?” I said, again to the Keith Clarke in my head.
I walked down the hallway and opened
up the door, I turned to my left.
It was perfect. The shape, size, and
texture of the wall were all perfect. Meryl did some research for me and
found that exterior locations would need to go through extensive procedures
to approve, because Ellison Hall contains many departments. However, interior
locations within the Geography Department would only need to be approved
by the Geography Department itself.
So in the eastern stairwell it would
be.
WRITING THE PROPOSAL
To write the proposal, I had to do several things first. I wanted to make a rough preliminary image of the mural, a preliminary sketch of what it might look like on the wall, and show some sample images of what each of these people might look like. I also needed to decide how I was going to transfer these images from the computer to the wall. Finally, some research on types of paint, varnishes, and anything else one might need to paint a mural that I would include in my proposal’s cost estimate.
A software package called ArcView contained just the information I would need to begin the map. I downloaded a map of the world, using this, the map I had made the year previous, and a few other reference lists and atlases, I made a map of dots.
Click here for the Map of Dots.
Making this dot-map was an interesting
process. Using the US Census Bureau’s International Database the goal was
to place dots over the map, so that the location of each dot represented
ten million people who live closest to that dot. So in a country of 10
million people, like Portugal or Greece I simply placed one dot in the
country, near its center of population. A country of 20 million, like Australia
would receive two dots. Though not all the dots were quite this easy to
place. Some examples:
The Island of Borneo, for example,
has about 17 million people and the nearby island of Celebes has 13 million
people so I had to place three dots over the two islands (the middle dot
actually over water, but closer to Borneo than to Celebes.)
The country of India has 1,046,000,000
people. So I had to give it 104 dots, and a 105th dot that would be “shared”
by an adjacent country. For India, China and several other very populated
countries I consulted populations of their states and provinces, and various
population density maps to organize the dots within the country.
The Island of Madagascar has 16,473,000
people- too many for one dot and too few for two dots- but I had no adjacent
countries to “share” that second dot with. So the northern dot also includes
the islands of Mauritius (1,200,000 people,) Reunion (740,000 people,)
Comoros (610,000 people) and Mayotte (171,000 people) combining for more
than 19 million people and receivable of two dots. Though I had to displace
the second dot to the northeast to represent these additions.
In a pinch, I would look to the rate
of growth of the country. I felt more comfortable giving a country of 37
million people four dots if it had a fast growth rate than if it had a
slow growth rate. In the same way I might have given a country of 33 million
only 3 dots if it had a negative growth rate. This way, actually, my map
becomes more and more accurate everyday!!
I created the entire map this way.
Next, with a tape measure I went to the east stairwell to sketch out my “canvas.” I measured out the full height of the wall from ceiling to floor, including the staircase below to give plenty of context for the sketch. Because half of the mural would be above a staircase, I knew scaffolding would need to be set up, so I used the same image to create a “scaffolding sketch.” This had some basic dimensions shown to assist whoever it would be creating the scaffolding.
Borrowing the digital camera of Susan Baumgart, the Geography Department’s staff artist, I went to the top of Girvetz Hall, a six story building in the heart of campus. I looked over the students walking near the Arbor and took a few pictures. Using Adobe Illustrator 9.0, I traced over a few of the people in these photos with seven different colors. I would use these three images as samples of what the people might look like.
Choosing the method I would use to transfer the images to the wall proved very difficult. My first instinct would be to set up a projection system. I would create overhead transparencies of the images (at about 1/3 size) and projecting them onto the wall, just paint over the projections. It sounded simple, however the projectors in the department weigh about 30 pounds, and would be too cumbersome to move around on the scaffolding, so I hoped to create my own lightweight projection system. Though this would not be the eventual technique, this was the idea I included in the proposal.
Finally, researching mural paints and varnishes was as simple as a few web searches.
With each of these five things done,
I wrote out my idea, and gave the completed proposal to Dr. Clarke in early
April.
These were the Preliminary Sketch and Scaffolding Sketch
included in the proposal.
MURAL PRE-PROSSESING
May 1st: Now to take the actual photos. I met with fellow Geographer Ian Bortins who had a digital camera (yes, everybody in the Geography Dept. has a digital camera except me.) We walked first to Girvetz Hall, the same place I had taken the first set of photos. This time I was not happy; the angle was too low. I needed to take these photos more top-down. After thinking of a few other locations we went back to, ironically, Ellison Hall where a sixth story perch overlooking the path between Ellison Hall and North Hall proved exactly what I wanted. It was a place where people walked in all directions, where there were few trees and few shadows, and where I could take photos at a wider range of angles. We took 28 photographs yielding 98 images of walking students.
With the pictures in hand, I began the most tedious part of the entire project: tracing. I narrowed the 98 images to about 75 that were usable, and began tracing them color by color. I quickly discerned that the seven colors I was using would not be sufficient and increased the total to eight. Where I was previously using a dark gray and a light gray- I was now using black, medium gray and white, along with the original blue, green, red, brown and tan.
After one week of tracing (about 5
hours a day) I realized my goal of tracing 609 unique photographs was unrealistic.
I would spend over 100 hours tracing alone. Ian and I went out once more
on May 8th and gathered about 50 more usable photographs; I traced about
10 of them and called it quits. I had about 85 images with which I would
begin the mural. This would mean that each image would be used about 7
times in for the entire map.
I made sure to take all the photos
from the same place, looking in the same direction, at the same time of
day. This way, the shadows in each of the images would be identical. I
wanted all 609 images in the mural to look well together. If one image
had the right side of a person’s face shaded and another had the left side
shaded, the two images would not look natural when placed side by side.
Therefore keeping consistency was a must.
I then began to copy the 85 Adobe Illustrator images onto the dot map. Also in Adobe Illustrator, I could simply copy them and move them into position, placing each image where I wanted it on the mural. When images overlapped I made sure it looked good, and that each image was still distinguishable from its neighbors. It would ruin the map if five overlapping images only looked like four.
The Photo to Wall Process
Although I did not yet have the funding, I used my own money, and took a trip to Michaels- Arts and Craft Store, to find some paints. I came back with eight two-ounce bottles of Acrylic paints and a set of brushes of various sizes - $30. I would use these paints to practice my technique before I began painting on the actual wall.
The problem again arose of how to transfer
images to the wall. I took the sample images I had made for the proposal
and made an overhead transparency to test my idea of making my own lightweight
projector system. After studying the mechanics of one of the department’s
projectors, I quickly found that projecting this image onto the wall in
focus was far more difficult than expected. The color transparency I created
cost $2.70 at the copy shop on campus, leading me to believe this was also
an economically unrealistic route.
Next, I tried taping the transparency
to my wall at home, to see how well I could simply copy the images using
only my eye as a guide. To my wife’s chagrin, I painted the five people
onto the wall in our spare bedroom. Not bad. Not great, but not bad. I
figured if all else failed, I could use this technique.
Dr. Clarke suggested to me the idea
of creating stencils. With 85 different images, and eight different colors
on each, I would need to create nearly 700 different stencils. At first
the idea seemed like much more work, but Dr. Clarke convinced me that it
would make the painting process much quicker. So I made the decision that
if the scaffolding went up by Mother’s day I would use the eye-ball technique,
but if the scaffolding didn’t go up until later, I would spend the time
making stencils, so that the painting process would go by more quickly.
After testing the paints on my wall at home I realized the white wasn’t white enough, my blue looked too much like the gray, and the green was too dark. So I went back to Michaels, and got three new colors - $21. Now the blue was too dark and the white still wasn’t white enough. On a third trip to Michaels I returned the two, and got just the right blue (which was actually blue-violet) and just the right White. The switch serendipitously resulted in a $10 credit back to my credit card.
THE SCAFFOLDING
I received an e-mail on May 2nd from Alex Glendenning from the Campus Facilities dept.
Concerning the scaffolding
that you need I would like to meet with you
and figure out what
I can set up that will accommodate you Call me at...
So I did. We met the next day in the
stairwell, and we talked about what I needed, my “scaffolding sketch” in
hand. We met again the following week once he had a chance to see what
scaffolding pieces he had, and he said he could have it up for me the morning
of the following Tuesday.
By the following Wednesday (after
Mother’s day) the scaffolding was not up. But by Thursday, he and another
facilities employee, Charles Ferries, under my eagle eye constructed the
scaffolding. A rectangular pre-assembled tower about 12 feet high sat on
the landing between the second and third floors, and two 14-foot planks
bridged the tower with the second rung of the railing on the third floor.
A scaffolding piece was wired and taped to the railing, and a 20-foot pole
connected it to the tower. This pole would act as my “hand rail” while
I walked along the planks.
Alex also provided me with a body
harness (many sizes too big for me) that Dr. Clarke insisted I attach to
the rail every time I walked the planks, to which I obliged.
May 16th, Setting up the Scaffolding
Scaffolding complete, I wasted no time. With the assistance of Michelle Ponce and Robin Johnson I made an overhead transparency of my dot map to project onto the wall. (This time the department’s projectors would be sufficient, as I could project from the stability of the third-floor itself.) The stairway was not wide enough to get the projected image large enough, so I measured the disparity with my tape measure and printed the dot map again 2.82 times larger on three different transparencies. I purchased some dot stickers from the Bookstore and used them to stick onto the wall in the projected dot’s locations. All 620 dots were now on the wall in their correct locations. I could now envision what the mural would look like on the wall.
PAINT HITS WALL
May 18th: With some of the images arranged
onto the dot map on the computer the way I wanted them, I couldn’t wait
but to start painting. So I printed all 85 images in color and cut them
out, then I found about 10 that I had already pre-arranged and taped them
to the left of their dot on the wall. And I painted them.
It took me an hour and a half to paint
those 10 people. Coinciding with the 45 minutes it took me to paint the
5 images on my wall at home I realized that I could paint about 7 people
per hour. With 609 images, I calculated an estimated painting time of about
87 hours. I hoped to finish the mural before graduation June 15th, in less
than a month. I would need to average 23 images (over 3 hours) per day
to finish on time.
So I started painting the map.
Here I am on May 22nd getting ready to paint part
of Southeast Asia.
You can see the images I have already painted
at the bottom, images taped to the wall
in the middle that I'm going to paint, and
the white dots above I have yet to paint.
Painting Day by Day:
May 18th: Part of central Asia (10 images) 2% Complete
May 20th: The island of Java (14 images) 4% Complete
May 21st: The rest of Indonesia and Malaysia (12 images)
6% Complete
May 22nd: Thailand, Cambodia and South Vietnam (10 images)
8% Complete
May 23rd: North Vietnam and the Philippines (10 images)
9% Complete
Then my wife and I went to Southern California over the weekend and I didn’t paint for three days. I then realized I wasn’t quite on pace. Now with 19 days and 564 images left I would need to average 30 images (over 4 hours) per day to finish on time. So I looked to pick up the pace.
May 27th: Western Russia, Ukraine and Scandinavia (16
images) 12% Complete
May 28th: The Middle East and Western Africa (41 images)
19% Complete
May 29th: Northwest Africa and part of Western Europe
(21 images) 22% Complete
May 30th: Turkey, Eastern Europe, Australia and Misc.
(26 images) 26% Complete
May 31st: Egypt (7 images) 27% Complete
On Thursday the 30th I took a few more photos. I didn’t feel like the photos I had would be adequate to fill in the dense parts of India and China. I needed more photos of people standing (as opposed to walking) and more photos where I could make out faces easily. So I had some friends and Geography faculty pose for a few more shots.
June 2nd: More of Europe (15 images) 30% Complete
June 3rd: Rest of Europe, Northern Pakistan, Some India
(25 Images) 34% Complete
June 4th: Southern Pakistan, More India, Half of Japan
(22 Images) 38% Complete
June 5th: More India, Rest of Japan, Arabia (28 Images)
42% Complete
On the 31st I spent time tracing the
new images. On June 1st and 3rd-5th I finally got all the images arranged
where I wanted them, even in India and China. Placing these images was
more difficult that just pasting them onto the dots. If I had someone with
black hair overlapping someone with black pants, then they might look headless.
Also because I took photos at a wide range of angles, if I put a more top-view
image next to a more side-view image, how realistic would that look? You
will see that most images are used repeatedly in the same approximate latitude
and that very few will appear several times across the full height of the
mural. In the same way, I couldn’t have people walking into each other,
or have two of the same images next to each other.
So with that task done, now there
is only painting left to do and I can spend all my time doing that, which
is very good because now my pace to finish is over 40 images (5 ½
hours per day)
June 6th: More India, East Africa, part of China and Korea
(53 images) 51% Complete
June 7th: More India, Nepal, rest of Korea, More China
(19 images) 54% Complete
June 8th: More India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, More China
(39 Images) 60% Complete
June 9th: More India, More China (64 Images) 71% Complete
June 10th: India done! Sri Lanka, More China (46 Images)
78% Complete
June 12th: China done! (36 Images) 84% Complete
June 13th: North America, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador
(56 Images) 94% Complete
June 14th: Rest of South America, Southern Africa (39
Images) 100% Complete!!
THOUGHTS
The purpose of this mural, and all
my future murals is to combine the art and science of cartography. I wanted
the observer to learn something about world population, but by seeing it
in a way they never had before. By leaving out continent outlines, by leaving
out names of countries or names of cities, by leaving out any sort of reference
to the physical world the observer is forced to see the distribution of
world population without a context. I love how by simply placing images
to represent an area comprising 10 million people, continent coastlines,
mountain ranges and even river valleys become distinguishable. The observer
essentially is making a map for him or herself in reverse. Can you see
South America by the few images that outline its coast? Can you see the
Himalayas forming a crescent northern border for people of the Ganges River
Valley? Can you make out the boot of Italy? Or the upside-down triangle
shaped Nile delta?
Another goal I had was to leave the
mural a little bit mysterious. 99% of maps are made so that they are most
easily understood and interpretable, this is one of those 1%. I predict
that only half of the people who see the mural will recognize it as a world
map, and only half of those will recognize it as a population map. I always
say: art is no fun if everybody gets it. Because of this, I am completely
prepared for the dissatisfied looks on many faces of people who have no
idea what it is. For those who do get it, I wanted them to be able to see
two things at once. I wanted them to see 609 people walking in a large
Plaza- perhaps students in a large open area of a campus. And secondly
a world population map. Observers coming from the second floor might see
the people first and only later realize the geographic distribution, whereas
people coming from the third floor (particularly from the Geography department)
might see the map right a way and only on close inspection see the people.
In most population maps, because of
the way the colors or the symbols are scaled, the observer’s interpretation
of population is heavily distorted. For example, in one map, Poland and
Bangladesh are colored the same color because they were both in the “more
than 300 people per square mile” category. However Poland has 319 people
per square mile, and Bangladesh has 2,400 people per square mile. The map
was accurate but it did not give the user a true sense of the data. I wanted
to be able to paint a map that was accurate and also gave the observer
a true sense of world population. Even in other dot maps, no one can tell
the difference between 20 dots crammed into a square centimeter and 500
dots, yet many cartographers chose this deceiving technique. Try looking
at any other population map, and you might find it difficult to distinguish
which one is more populated- Europe or India. But on my mural it becomes
fairly obvious.
As for the symbols themselves, I thought
for a long time as to how I would represent these dots. As I mentioned
earlier, I had several ideas of color-coded flowers in a field, or leaves
on a tree, even just as color-coded squares. But I settled on images of
people because, of course, I am representing population. By looking at
the mass of people walking in China or India do you imagine how crowded
it must be to live there? Would you have thought that if I had represented
population with leaves instead of people?
As for the title: "Where Are We?"
I beleive this perfectly captures the goal of the mural. For those who
dont see the spatial pattern of the mural, this might very well be the
question they'll be asking themselves. However, for those who do see the
map, the map itself answer this question. The mural, in a sense, shows
where we (humans) are. As a map of world population distribution,
it very simply but elegantly answers that question.
SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Susan Baumgart, Charles Ferries, Alex Glendenning, Dana Terry, Meryl Wieder
EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Ian Bortins, Dr. Keith Clarke, Robin Johnson
I will add to this page as time dictates, but please feel free to e-mail me with comments or questions at steve@muralcartography.com