A Synesthete’s Atlas: Performing Cartographym, an Artist Talk with Eric Theise

Since its Lisbon premiere in April 2022, Eric Theise has been manipulating projected digital maps in collaboration with improvising musicians and other time-based artists across North America and Europe. Constraining his project to use web mapping technologies, A Synesthete’s Atlas is his unique approach to expanded cinema, drawing strategies from experimental film & animation, color theory, the Light and Space movement, and letterform design. Although he flippantly calls it “map jockeying”, as the tools – and his skills in using them – evolve, the possibilities for expression continue to expand and surprise.

In this talk, he’ll present Carto-OSC, his assemblage of open source libraries, data, and protocols, and a few thousand lines of JavaScript that integrates it all into a platform that’s controlled using a touch-surface.

He’ll discuss his motivations, offer aesthetic and logistical observations, and present video excerpts from performances, including recent work with dancer Abigail Hinson and clarinetist Matt Ingalls. He’ll also talk about adjacent projects such as his animation for the top of San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower and a portfolio of screenprinted maps produced last autumn in Amsterdam. The presentation will conclude with a short demonstration/performance, leaving ample time for discussion. Theise will perform the following evening in a Pittsburgh Sound + Image program at Homestead’s Glitterbox Theater.

Bio:

Eric Theise is a San Francisco-based artist and freelance geospatial software engineer. Through performance, video, and works on paper he reinvigorates the perceptual inquiries of structural filmmakers, experimental animators, the Light and Space movement, and visual poetry as fresh explorations through the realm of digital cartography. His concerns include perceptual pleasure and fatigue, geographies of the natural and built environment, and subverting the presumed objectivity and authority of maps. Selected residencies include Hangar in Lisbon and Signal Culture in New York State, and November will find him at Worm in Rotterdam. He’s received grants in support of his work from the Interbay Cinema Society, Bay Area Video Coalition, and Film Arts Foundation. He holds Ph.D and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University and a B.B.A. from Loyola University Chicago.