Becka Barker’s The Hundred-Eyed Satellite

The Museum of Natural History, 1747 Summer Street
Zone 3, exhibit number 301
http://wmdp.ca/

Artist and filmmaker Becka Barker has been collecting hundreds of hand-drawn-from-memory maps from Haligonians for weeks, hosting World Map Drawing Parties at libraries and opening up online submissions to increase her hoard.

Why, you ask? All will become clear at Barker’s Nocturne project, The Hundred-Eyed Satellite, the catalyst to all this wacky map collecting. Barker has animated over 550 maps into a flowing, morphing map of the world—a satellite image created from human memory.

“Not knowing what people would draw when I started out, I expected that the animated result might be pretty close to the edge of actually looking ‘animated’ in the way people might expect it to,” she says. “One of the things I love about hand-drawn animation is that it is an optical illusion, and since people generally know that the frames of this project came from so many different hands, we get to play with that principle a bit.”

The project will continue beyond Nocturne, as Barker plans on widening her map-collecting reach as far afield as she can. Her website wmdp.ca has a submission form for your own contribution to the drawn-from-memory maps.

As a complement to Barker’s massive geographical undertaking, SMU’s assistant professor of geography, Jason Grek-Martin, will host a pop-up chat about the project and its relation to the social aspects of map-making and geography, 8and 10pm.