Lessons Learned from Experimental Film

During the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, American avant-garde filmmakers expanded the boundaries of cinema by experimenting with perception, duration, and narrative expectations. While software and datasources for online mapping have evolved to foster responsiveness, accuracy, and clarity, it’s interesting to reflect on what our tools might produce if these same artistic strategies were brought to bear on interactive cartography.

This session will be part history of cinema, part impractical cartography, as we riffle through filmmakers, their canonical works, and maps generated from OSM data and détourned mapping software. Stressed throughout will be the freedom to create that’s provided by OpenStreetMap data and an open source stack made up of such tools as Leaflet, TileMill, Mapnik, and PostgreSQL.