Red, White and Blue! Freedom Mapping

"America! America! God shed his grace on thee! And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!" (And now it's stuck in my head.) Ask any summer light show . Fireworks are not just for July 4th! The sparks of freedom shine bright at this month's GeoNYC when we talk what freedom really looks like -- on a map, in our words, and in our country. Come join us for a visual inquiry into what freedom, independence and justice can look like amid a complicated world of gray.

SPEAKERS

R. Luke DuBois [@RLukeDuBois (https://twitter.com/RLukeDuBois)] is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. Just as a long camera exposure fuses motion into a singleimage, his projects reveal the average sonority, visual language, andvocabulary in music, film, text, or cultural information. He lives inNew York City, and is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (http://bxmc.poly.edu/) at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. Among other flights of freedom fancy, Luke will be speaking about Eye Charts (http://hindsightisalways2020.net/), where hindsight is always 20/20.

Darya Oreshkina [@doreshkina (https://twitter.com/doreshkina)] moved to New York City from Russia in late 2013. Back in Russia she led a team of cartographers who produced maps and infographics for the largest popular-science magazine in the country and, before that, managed a team who supplied major Russian TV channels with maps 24/7. She has a Ph.D. in geography; her dissertation was on developing a cartographic method for revealing falsifications during federal elections in Russia. She collects thematic atlases from the early XX century. Darya will be talking about how we map independence and how we define it.

Brian Clifton [@brianclifton_ (https://twitter.com/brianclifton_)] is a former conceptual artist who’s diverse projects explored the role of contemporary mythology in society, taking complex systems and distilling them into abstract experiences. Now, he uses data and computer programming to investigate political systems, resulting in web-based interactive projects exploring abuses of power. He is a recent graduate of NYU's ITP, and is based in Brooklyn, New York. Brian will be presenting his project visualizing the real estate properties owned by members of the US Congress.

Derek Watkins [@dwtkns (https://twitter.com/search?q=dwtkns&src=typd)] works at the intersection of journalism and design to mold spatial information into geographic narratives. He is a Graphics Editor at The New York Times, where he visually explains the news across print and digital media. He holds a Master's in Geography from the University of Oregon, where he researched overlaps between maps, technology, and cultural geography. Derek will speak about the most detailed map you've probably ever seen from a midterm election. It's so good, you'll be compelled to vote! Find out more at his portfolio (http://dwtkns.com/portfolio/) of awesomeness.

And a guest video Levi John Wolf a PhD student at Arizona State studying geography with the wonderful people at the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation. Levi is driven to understand the ways in which we structure geographic space to both bring us together and divide us. To that end, he studies quantitative and computational issues in modeling economic and political inequality. He uses Python, is passionate about free and open source software, and contributes to the Python Spatial Analysis Library. He also works for Nextdoor.com, the private social network for your neighborhood, consulting on statistics and GIS.

OUR SCHEDULE

6:30PM: Mingle: doors, beer, pizza, people, etc
7:00PM: Presentations followed by Q&A
8:30PM+: The celebrations (and fireworks!)