Nikolas Schiller
Downtown Houston Mandala
He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps — you can probably find your house in these maps — if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.
Nikolas Schiller, 26, is the god of this alternative reality. Making maps at a frenzied pace of one every two days for the past 1,000 days, he has done everything he could to keep himself off the map of the World Wide Web…
His map quest is for more than just art, let alone directions from here to there. In a way, it’s a pixelated riff that hyperlinks to ancient times, when maps implied a worldview — flat or round? — and cartography was existential.
Since Google Earth appeared a few years ago — and countless office hours were wasted as people mouse-clicked to their own back yards (”Lookee, there’s the deck!”) — the starting point of Schiller’s creations has been familiar. But he doesn’t use Google. He goes to the source, the bird’s-eye rendering of America placed in the public domain by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Then it gets complicated. On his computer he will take a swatch of a neighborhood, then he will tessellate it by creating mirrored repetitions, then he may impose radial geometry on the repetitions. The result is elaborate abstraction assembled from realistic detail, ready for framing at 5 by 3 1/2 feet.
“It’s just a cool idea,” says Dave Roberts, a USGS cartographer. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”—from the Washington Post