A Science and Art Interface: Geographic Information Systems and Remotely Sensed Images

Friday, February 15, 2013: 8:00 AM-9:30 AM
Room 313 (Hynes Convention Center)
Geographic information systems (GISs) are heralded as an innovative geospatial technology that helps us understand our world, one of the three components of the scientific enterprise’s “unreasonable effectiveness.” Their visualization capabilities foster the duality of both generating aesthetically engaging maps -- an artistic flavor -- and supporting eminently practical natural and social science research -- a scientific flavor. To this end, GISs are making contributions to society in general, and the academic community in particular, in unexpected ways, one of which is at the interface of science and art. This session will help cultivate a much richer set of connections between these two disparate fields, highlighting valuable and complicated connections between GIS visualization and art, as well as how a two-way interaction between practices of these two fields will help bring about both mutually practical benefits and the beauty of pure understanding. In doing so, this session will foster a convergence of science with the creative arts and the humanities. Speakers will illustrate facets of this interface through the following: pattern commonalities revealed via GIS that a mathematics-based spatial analysis technique shares with selected paintings; GIS-displayed remote sensing that enables imaging of our world as art, from the micro- to the macro-scale, using space-borne sensors; and the use of GIS as a creative tool to explore new ways to render and re-imagine the worlds in which we live.
Organizer:
Daniel Griffith, University of Texas
Co-Organizer:
Ren Vasiliev, State University of New York
Moderator:
Ren Vasiliev, State University of New York
Speakers:
Daniel Griffith, University of Texas; Ren Vasiliev, State University of New York
Art and Spatial Statistics: Seeing Abstract Spatial Patterns Using GIS Visualization
Kim Yasuda, University of California
Experimental Geography: Mapping and Contemporary Art
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