The Berlage

Session Room K
—12:45

From Image to Pixel

Bert Spaan

The town of Staphorst in Overijssel, shaded according to year of construction. (Source: https://code.waag.org/buildings/)

This is a lecture about maps. About old maps and what they can teach us about the present and the future. And about new maps, about how they are made and about what we'll learn when we peel off layer by layer until we see what we're interested in.

Bert Spaan is an independent software engineer and cartographer. He designs and builds creative technology for data and exploration with a focus on open source and open standards. In the past, he worked for Waag, a research institute for technology and society in Amsterdam, and for NYPL Labs, the digital humanities lab of the New York Public Library. Currently, he works on Allmaps, an open-source platform for curating and exploring digitized cartography.

Bert Spaan's website

The Berlage Sessions, a seven-part seminar series entitled “Architecture’s Transpositions,” examines the mediatic disciplinary transfers, from sixteenth-century abstracted geometries to twenty-first-century augmented realities. Topics will include the digitization of maps, the creation of digital replicas of landscapes, the modelling of multisensory extended reality experiences, the framing and photographing of buildings, and the imagined histories of architectural drawings and models. 

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