Mona Hatoum’s map works / Les oeuvres cartographiques de Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum’s exhibition, held at the Centre Pompidou until the 28th of September, gathers over 100 works of this internationally renowned artist, in media as varied as performance, video, installation and sculpture. A dozen of these works give a particular overview of Mona Hatoum’s fascination for maps, which she represents as figurative images of real…

Napoléon : la polyvision d’Abel Gance/ Abel Gance’s Polyvision

In 1925, Abel Gance was the first director to use three cameras for shooting his movie Napoleon. By the juxtaposition of the  three images he obtained a very large screen, three times the traditional format. This process, called « Polyvision », allows to increase not only the area shown by the images, but also to multiply the…

Gravity, film géospatial/Geospatial Movie

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…

Cartographier une planète où les lieux sont mobiles : Donjon. Sfar, Trondheim et al.

Donjon is a series of satirical fantasy comic books created and supervised by two famous French artists, Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. Many other talented designers have contributed to this collective work: Manu Larcenet, Christophe Blain, Blutch or Andreas. The world of the series is extremely complex and changing, and the question of mapping this…

Siodmak, The Killers : where are we? / Les Tueurs : où sommes nous?

The Killers (Siodmak,1946) is truly a classic of film noir. The opening scene is famous. Two men are sitting in front of a car driving at high-speed through the night. Then the camera scans the road and a sign shows up in the headlights: Brentwood, New Jersey. And below, in an ironic mode considering what…

L’Île aux fleurs / Ilha das Flores – Furtado

Isle of Flowers is a 1989 Brazilian short film by Jorge Furtado about globalization.You can watch it (12 min) on line. Here are the part one and the part two in English). The film starts with a spinning globe and the next shot focuses on a field of tomatoes. A voice  locates the action very…

Grey Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood/Le Loup gris et le Petit Chaperon rouge – Bardine

Garri Bardine is a Russian animation director. In 1990 he created Grey Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood (Russian:  » Серый волк энд Красная Шапочка, Krasnaya Chapotchka seriy Volk i »), a claymation film. The movie was  adapted from the famous children’s story Little Red Riding Hood as a musical. Living in Moscow, the mother of…

Casablanca: At the Origins of Google Earth

Before Google Earth there was WorldWind and Keyhole (the company that created the application used to develop Google Earth). Before Keyole, there was the movie Powers of Ten (dir. Charles and Ray Eames 1977). Indeed, one of the co-founders of Keyole – Avi Bar-Zeev – recognized the inspirational dimension of Power of Tens in the…

The Use of Google Maps in « Netherland »/L’usage de Google Maps dans « Netherland »

Google Maps appears in Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first time that Google Maps appears in a literary work. If you have an earlier example, please write us a comment. Of course Google Maps doesn’t play a central role in the book. Google Maps appears in two…