Mercator Map Projection

After implementing the animation of the simulated sunrise, I showed my work to a number of people for feedback. They expressed appreciation for the dynamic sunrise animation but confusion around how and why the colors were changing. I also observed that they were very curious to find out how the actual sunrise pictures on Instagram. Some of them tried to find the picture that the system is pulling colors from on Instagram while they were looking at the piece.

To help the audience understand that the colors are actually coming from photos that were just uploaded by someone else, I created a second component to pin the Instagram photos used onto a world map, based on associated geo-location information.

As the two programs ran concurrently, the sunrise photos they use needed to be synchronized. After the first program downloads the photo, it sends a message over the local server with the picture file name and the geo-location information of the current sunrise picture to the second program.

This map component displays where the sunrise pictures are currently taken from. The map also tells the audience where the sunrise is currently happening. I collected over 10,000 pictures that are tagged "#sunrise" from Instagram and recorded whether they have associated geo-location data. With the dataset, I was able to estimate about 30% of Instagram photos are geotagged. The coordinates of the pictures are accessible in the struct created using the Instagram API. I then pin the coordinate of the places on the map using another OpenFramework add-on tool, ofxMercatorMap [Vanderlin, 2015]. The system then sends a request to the server to find the local time of the pictures uploaded. The audience can see the position of the picture that is taken and the time the pictures are uploaded. Learning from Christian Marclay’s the Clock, I added an element to share with the audience my perception of time (more in the Time and Nature section in Discussion). I keep reminding the audience of the local time in their current location to create conversations about time and space and to connect the audience with people around the world.

I also added the earth’s shadow on the map to help the audience understand where the sunrise is currently happening. Over time, the audience can see that the pictures are moving across the latitudes.