Superpowers might give superheroes a very specific experience of space. Some examples of spatial machineries in comic books and movies confirm this idea. The superheroes are often confronted with original cartographic issues and often invent very precursory geospatial devices. So here are already Supermap and Batmap, before possibly, if you dig into your old Marvel magazines to find…
Après Fred, il y a quelques mois, voici qu’un autre de la bande à Hara-Kiri se fait la malle. Dans les journaux bêtes et méchants qu’il a dirigés pendant 50 ans, Cavanna a écrit sur tous les sujets. Il a raconté sa vie dans les Ritals et les Ruskoffs. Il est l’auteur d’un nombre astronomique…
Chinese puzzle, the latest film by Cédric Klapisch is certainly not the first film to put Google Maps on screen. We did not attempt a systematic inventory of the Google map service apparitions in movies, but in 2010 Where are the Morgans? already used a sort of fake of Google Maps. Chinese puzzle may be…
We have gems in our « Cabinet of curiosities » that deserve some comments. This cartographic scene from the season 4 of the politically incorrect series Weeds is one of them. This is a prelude to the love affair between the valiant mum, Nancy Botwin, trafficking cannabis to support her family and the powerful and dangerous Mexican…
Here is another example of participative literary mapping proposed by the Ivres de livres bookstore in Strasbourg. The idea is to submit an excerpts of literary work evocative of a place. You can access the excerpts an author index or by a map. The technical option of a mapping module that add a location to…
There is no representational spatial machinery in Gravity, the very impressive film by Alfonso Cuarón. No map, no device for locating characters, no screen for designatind targets. There is no computing tool in this sophisticated but somewhat abandoned technological world where manuals are in binders and where you crank up the retrorockets. In Gravity, you…
A novelty in (e)space & fiction, the reference to a map in a film not yet released and not even shot! If you were in August nearby the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, you could attend the first rehearsal of the shooting of the film Tomorrowland, whose release is scheduled for…
Here is an exhibition of Centre Pompidou in Metz which seems specially designed for (e)space&fiction. Views from above considers how an elevated perspective, from aerial photographs or satellite images, has transformed artists’ perception of the world since the mid-nineteenth century. A gold mine of images and ideas we have to visit later in details. L’exposition…
(e)space & fiction invites you to join the new Cinemaps session that will be held on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 from 18h to 20h during the SIG La Lettre meeting at ENSG in Marne-La-Vallée. An open contest is organized on this occasion. Post images or videos of cinemaps or geomechineries you have found in movies…
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), pioneer of abstract painting, is not in theory an artist inclined to evoke real places in his works. Since 1913 and the discovery of cubism in Paris, Mondrian has made it a goal to find out a visual language for reporting the abstract reality behind the natural one and looking for the…
We present here two recent French projects of cultural mapping. The first is developed by the association of libraries of the Ville de Paris. The second named Géoculture, a very ambitious cultural Web and mobile service with a mapping tool that aim to give access to the cultural works of a region. . Les initiatives…
Fred passed away yesterday and everyone is sad : Philémon, Barthélémy, Anatole, the Manu Manu and all of those who loved Fred and his logically crazy / madly logical poetic universe, always and never following him « to the letter » should we say. At (e)space & fiction we say good bye to the artist, inventor of…
James Shapman published on Tumblr a map locating 113 American TV series including Friends, Frasier, The Wire, Community, The Office, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, CSI, Dexter, Homeland, The West Wing, Glee … The title of the map America, The Home of Television, is a bit presumptuous. Yes, American series dominate the television landscape but…
Art and Geography – Aesthetics and practices of spatial knowledges conference takes place in Lyon (France) from the 11 to 13 Feb 2013. It offers a very rich program of communications and art performances. Le colloque Art et Géographie – Esthétiques et pratiques des savoirs spatiaux a lieu à Lyon du 11 au 13 févr. 2013…
The big Grand Palais Hopper’s exhibition in Paris is closing tonight. It is an opportunity to publish a post somewhere between news, spatial machinery and materialization of fiction. The New-York Time magazine published in July 2012 – and le Monde in September 2012- wrote about the work of the photographer Gail Albert Halaban. In this…
Der Untergang (Downfall) is a 2004 German film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel that focuses on the last days of the Third Reich and the fall of Berlin. The movie is set in and around Hitler’s Bunker in late April 1945. It is a realistic reconstruction, based on eyewitness accounts, survivor memoirs and verified sources. Bruno…
[Ajouté le 20/01/2013 : en empruntant sans le créditer la quasi-totalité du contenu de ce site original (pratique condamnable, voir le premier commentaire à ce billet) ], Contre-champ, le magazine documentaire vidéo du Monde.fr sur Dailymotion consacré au cinéma, note que les cinéastes tournent toujours aux même endroits ce qui fait que des lieux réels…
For some time, (e)space & fiction has opened an account on Vodcaster, « le site du cinéma à partager », a French site for collecting, sharing and commenting movie excerpts already available on YouTube and Daylymotion. We have begun to keep a play-list entitled Cinemaps, les dispositifs géographiques au cinéma (Cinemaps, geographical apparatus in movies), which gives…
This famous drawing titled New Yorker map of the World is from Saul Steinberg. The New Yorker published it on its cover on March 29, 1976. It is often seen as a satire of the New Yorkers’ « smug provincialism ». Actually, it is a beautiful and satiric expression of a much more general mental geography. People…
Sébastien Caquard already pointed out here that James Bond used a geographic tracking device as early as in 1964 (Goldfinger). At that time, the idea of GPS technology was just emerging. At (e)space & fiction, we couldn’t keep ourselves from reacting to the debauchery of geospatial tools used in Skyfall, the latest James Bond movie, directed…
Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) is an amazing film directed by Gerald Hustache-Mathieu that tells in a very original and subtle manner the tragic fate of Candice Lecoeur, a small-town woman and aspiring model who thought she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. Deeply rooted in Mouthe region in the Jura, famous for holding the…
About 800 American films evoke Paris, making the French capital by far the most represented foreign city in American cinema. One could almost speak of « Film about Paris » as a specific genre (Antoine de Baecque). The exhibition Paris vu par Hollywood presents this cinematographic American outlook on Paris, between tourist clichés, cultural stereotypes and the invention…
In 1994 and 1995, the artist and engraver Marc Jurt and the writer Michel Butor initiated an artistic collaboration inspired by maps; all kind of maps : city maps or aerial photographs, world maps or topographic maps, aeronautical maps or meteorological maps. Marc Jurt started with geographical documents and juxtaposed or superimposed engravings or paintings…
The exhibition Paris en Chansons is now closed but the interactive map is still on line : http://www.chansons.paris.fr/carto. Dans le cadre de l’exposition, maintenant terminée, Paris en Chansons, une jolie carte interactive des lieux évoqués dans les chansons françaises est en ligne : http://www.chansons.paris.fr/carto.
Matthiew Cusick is an American artist born in New York in 1970 and currently working in Dallas. Among other techniques he uses acrylic with inlaid map fragments from different kinds : school atlases, topographic maps or road maps. He also simply sticks maps as overlaid layers. He composes beautiful landscapes viewed from above or at…
The mysterious tool of the Quiz # 2 is a wire that John (Kieffer Sutherland) made for his sun to visually measure the progressive enlargement of the planet Melancholia that is approaching Earth. It is an archaic version of the telescope also used in the movie and it symbolize in some way the regression to…
Quiz n°2. The answer on this site on 2012/07/20 : / La réponse sur ce site le : 20/07/2012
Those who have seen Une chambre en ville the movie by Jacques Demy (1982) probably remember the creepy televisions shop run by the scary Edmond Leroyer (Michel Piccoli), jealous and crazy husband of the beautiful Edith (Dominique Sanda). As part of Le voyage à Nantes, artistic event held in Nantes from 15 June to 18…
The correct answer to Quiz # 1 is Poupoupidou, a 2011 movie by French director Gerald Hustache-Mathieu. The film tells the story of David Rousseau, a writer, who investigates the tragic and mysterious death of Candice Lecoeur, a young starlet of Mouthe in Jura (France), which sees herself as a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. On…
The artist and film director Jeff Deson created an extraordinary new montage of Rear Windows, the movie from Hitchock, in an unique animated panorama. An amazing experience. L’artiste et réalisateur Jeff Deson propose un objet très inattendu : la mise à plat en un seul tableau panoramique animé de tous les plans du film de…
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