Jurjen's world

Another watercolour attempt I made this weekend. I still don’t really feel the love between the medium and me… I don’t know if we will ever become a happy couple. Still I feel the urge to continue exploring with it..

Indian Children - watercolour + charcoal on paper (32x24cm)

I also finally made a descent scan of the drawing of the Afghan Girl (from the famous National Geographic picture), which I uploaded to the album. Speaking of that, I also still need to fix how the photo section looks, because its pretty messed up right know.. Ah well, someday

Actually had to pick it up today, because I wasn't home to receive this mysterious package Friday or yesterday. So when I came to the post office there it was, all the way from South-Africa, a package from ShallowMuse. We agreed on a portrait swap a while ago, so I send her a small oil portrait, so this had to be the portrait she made for me!


So exited to see what's inside, but what's this? There is still some bubble wrap around it, so I can't see it clearly, but it looks like a guy with glasses, and... a lot of broken glass.

Yep, that's definitely a lot of glass

So the glass frame didn't survive the trip. Too bad but who cares about the glass, I just hope it didn't cut through the paper of that lovely portrait! After some cleaning up it appears the portrait is still in perfect shape! Her it is together with that lovely card that also came with it.



Thanks ShallowMuse! It's very cool! I'm going to get myself a new frame and I'm going to find a nice spot for this portrait in my home.

Spherical guys at a harbour - pencil drawing digitally coloured
I created these spherical creatures, I'm planning to do more with these characters, but I haven't got a nice name to call them yet... Any ideas?

So I've been working to finish my webgl application: the fabulous picture map I posted about before. I kind off finished it now, and I thought I write a little background info on the project. You can check out the new picture map on my website. I also made a video for everyone that isn't able to see the picture map correctly, I'll include it here for you to watch and have an idea how it looks.

Video of the picture map in action. You can also view it (in HD) on vimeo.

With this application you can explore the world in a surprising way with a map of the world where pictures appear on the location they were taken. The pictures are shown as soon as users upload them on Flickr, meaning you always see recent images. You see the world through massive amount of cameras used all around the globe by all kinds of people, giving a very diverse result.

With this application I wanted to create a different way of experiencing images on the internet. The amount of pictures on the internet is massive, every second many pictures are added to this ever growing pile. As an art project Erik Kessels downloaded and printed pictures from Flickr that were uploaded during a 24 hours time frame (over one million pictures). He created a landscape of hills by piling up these pictures. A project like this gives a good idea of the immensity of pictures on the internet.
A landscape with hills of pictures by Erik Kessels

It's even more mind blowing seeing this infographic by 1000memories.com and realising that the total amount of 6 billion pictures on Flickr is the total amount of pictures uploaded in just two months on Facebook. Imagine the piles when you would be printing pictures from Facebook during 24 hours.
The world's largest photo libraries - graphic by 1000memories

With this project I didn't want to focus so much on the amount of pictures, but I wanted to try to bring some context into these massive piles of imagery. The two main questions are: “Where do all these pictures come from?” and “How can we explore all this data in an attractive way?”. Watching the map soon answers the first question. You will soon notice that pictures are not evenly distributed around the world. There are some parts that are very densely filled with images, while large parts of the world stay unphotographed.

On the map you see all these images appear one by one and I find it fascinating to watch all these surprising visuals appear in front of me, knowing that someone in some place of the world just uploaded it. I often find myself intrigued by pictures that I see appearing. Luckily I also created the ability to click an image and get some more information about it. You can navigate to the Flickr page and get every available piece of information about the pictures that struck your attention. You may even continue your exploration on Flickr. Picture after picture the maps offers a great access point to unlimited inspiring visuals from around the world. An intriguing way of exploring the different and contrasting parts of the world and its people.

You'll find the project at: http://www.jurjenthinksnot.com/projects/picturemap

What do you guys think of it? I would love to hear some feedback.