2012-02-23
post/18149835089
photo 22:24:05
Metrography, by Benedikt Groß & Bertrand Clerc:
the geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.
‘Metrography’ attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.
There’s a 150cm x 100cm lambda print, as well as a slippy-map interactive version, and videos of the deformation.
See also Matt Webb, in 2009:
Consider a true map of London. Now consider crumpling this map so that it’s all scrunched up, but a top down view is the same as the tube map, but on a different scale. Leaving aside whether this transform is possible, this yields what we’re after. As long as the crumpled true map only bends on a station (ie no peaks or trough on a line between nearest stations), then we could say 0% colour intensity was at the lowest point of the crumpled map and 100% was at the top, and show this on the tube map. Task achieved.
