[Frameworks] on "get a life" and A Synesthete's Atlas

[Eric Theise]

TL;DR: I manipulate projected digital maps in collaboration with
improvising musicians as a form of expanded cinema. I am touring.
I've given three Colorado performances and have one more lined up in Denver
at Counterpath (23 Mar). I head to Chicago in April and will perform in
Madison at Mills Folly (5 Apr) and Evanston at Northwestern's Block Cinema
(7 Apr).

I would love to arrange at least one more Chicago performance (before 23
Apr) and one Milwaukee performance (unfortunately in competition with MUFF
on 14 Apr +/- a day). Looking ahead to the autumn, I will perform in
Pittsburgh (14 Oct) and am keen on arranging additional East Coast
performances in the weeks prior.

Please be in touch if any of this is of interest to you.

❧ ❧ ❧

An unexpected amusement that comes with living in an area with a solid
(experimental) film culture is that people you didn't know subscribed to
Frameworks will take you aside and ask how you weathered your
flame/attack/brouhaha. I'm not here to rekindle that episode but I will
pluck and consider one directive from it: "get a life".

It's ironic I'd get that advice mid-way through a year where I was living
fairly fully. I spent March-June of 2022 in Europe, and the first half of
that in an international residence at Hangar in Lisbon. Some years back it
occured to me that the web mapping software I worked with by day might be
put to avant garde uses: to make experimental films from maps & geospatial
data, or, to make maps that behaved like experimental films.
Toolmaker-in-Residence stints at Signal Culture got me much of the way
there, and my time in Lisbon was spent on three map-related, born digital
projects: a collection of short monochrome map animations that I released
(into the void) as NFTs, a medium-length autobiographical piece (as yet
unfinished) that takes a trope from speculative fiction, and a real time
cartography platform that I've been using to collaborate with musicians as
a form of expanded cinema under the umbrella of *A Synesthete's Atlas*. I
premiered that platform in collaboration with cellist Helena Espvall, in
Lisbon at the end of April, and have given a dozen-plus performances since
returning to the States.

Future and past performances, with video excerpts, can be found at
https://erictheise.com/performances/

I've written a few thousand lines of JavaScript to rig together open source
mapping software, OpenStreetMap data, a laptop and iPad, in order to
manipulate various aspects of projected maps: colors of different
geographic layers; locations via presets, travel routing, and my own walked
GPS traces; overriding standard "slippy map" controls
(panning/zooming/rotating with a growing number of jitters & oscillations
of my own devising); doing labels wrong with inappropriate choices, sizes,
and colors of fonts. In doing this I'm motivated by color flicker film and
the Light and Space Movement (imagine Sharits and Turrell as cartographers)
as well as light shows and the typographic experiments of visual poetry.

(I was delighted to be told, during a Q & A after a recent performance of
*Synesthete's *at the Prelinger Library, that what I was doing was
anti-cinema, post-cinema, pre-cinema, as well as *truly* radical
cartography.)

I'm writing today from Fort Collins, Colorado, toward the end of a tour of
the Front Range. I've performed with cellist Daniel Zamzow at Wolverine
Farm in Fort Collins, with Bob Marsh and his Spontaneous Combustion Arts
Performance Ensemble at Blo Back Gallery in Pueblo, and last night as part
of Noise Floor 8 with modular synthesist Brett Darling at Art Lab. This
Colorado tour was motivated by a talk I'll give about the platform at the
American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver this week,
during which I'll perform with Carl Ritger on prepared lap steel guitar &
modular sampler at Counterpath Press (23rd; please come if you're in the
area).

I have April performances lined up in Madison and Evanston and am looking
to add a few more shows in the Chicago area before the 23rd. I'll be
reaching out to known venues but I would love to hear (off-list or on-)
from showcases I don't know about.

And I will be lining up autumn East Coast performances in advance of
Pittsburgh on 14 Oct; I'd love to hear from interested presenters.

Thank you for reading any or all of this, and for your feedback in this
thread.

Eric
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