For a better world view, check out the OpenZoom implementation of the map Instructions: press I to Zoom In - press O to Zoom Out - or travel the world with your mouse



Economics or "the state of the economy determines the shape of the state determines the state of the economy determines the shape of the...."

Photoshop forever. Two meanings for that statement:
1. Photoshop is a wonderful place to explore digital creativity and we are wishing it well in future endeavors.
2. 700 + layers and nearly incalculable hours really felt like forever.

We began with a political map that was pre-layered with countries that were available online to begin our adventure in currency. We thought it would be a relatively quick art project. But there are a lot of banknotes in ciruculation and for every currency/region there was a layer mask, adjusment mask, and boundaries to be redefined.. and of course a decision to be made with regard to which hi-res banknotes we could use. We also ran into a little issue with using photoshop for banknotes as there is a banknote protection mechanism that doesn't allow you to upload many of the world's banknotes into photoshop. This is a clear violation of fair use and the legal concerns thereof ended up into a small footnote in Lyyli's thesis on copyright law. The protection mechanism can be easily thrawted however by opening up an image of the banknote in an earlier version of photoshop and warping the image (I say easily but it took us a bit to figure this one out) - for a full discusion of the issue check this out...
It took a lot of time to work out all the kinks in this portion of the project, and they were the kind of hours that I don't ussually associate with art . Yet, the hours were well worth it, as this exercise taught us an incredible amount of information about the way the world's economy works and the signifigance it has. A few of our favorite pieces of information:

  • Zimbabwe has 100 trillion dollar bills due to inflation rates that reached over 11.000% in 2008
  • Syria has a George W. Bush doppelganger on the front of their bill
  • Saudi banknotes are printed in english
  • Papua New Guinea has a wierd little psychadellic shaman on one of their bills
  • We discovered a rule that countries under control of a dictator invariably will have that man's face on every single banknote in circulation (it's such an obvious psychological tatic but we were still suprised to see the trend nearly unbroken as we investigated it)
  • If you get a chance, check out the banknotes of French Guyane, Somalia, and Laos.. they are too wonderful for words alone
  • Kazakistan has perhaps the most stunningly original and beautiful banknote in the world
  • The United Arab Emirates 50 dinar bill features the prominent theme of: The dubai Golf and Yacht club (Amazing!)

Since the map we started with was pre-layered using a smart tool, islands that were part of a country became seperate layers and had to be re-united with their mother country. The work involved in this burned some statistics into my mind:

  • Canada is home to something like 30,000 islands, of which only 1000 or so are actually inhabited
  • Indonesia has about 18,000 islands, of which only 6000 are inhabited
  • The Philipines have roughly 7000 islands, the number of which are actually inhabited is unknown
  • etc..

The chalkboard paint we found to create the background with is probably my favorite art supply in existence. Lyyli found a house up in Vienna that was completely painted in chalkboard paint, thereby making the walls effectively a morphing mural of tags, drawings, messages etc... and she came back with the best idea for the background of our art pice. The open-source / interactivity of it really won us over immediately and we went ahead and solved the issues around getting it to stick to the photograph. Despite the local paint shop telling us it was impossible, a single can of plastic/rubber primer for cars seemed to set the photographic print up just fine for the adhesion of the paint. Either that or this incredibly thick and fast drying paint doesn't mind what it sticks to - it just sticks. We ended up with a lot of waves due to the fast drying properties of the paint but since the chalkboard was largely representing the ocean floor we decided that it was in fact perfect because it was. Finally, a frame was built to house the whole thing - which consisted of a series of 3 inches pine-board and a heavy piece of greenhouse plastic that we found laying around the city. And... well, although we blame this particular art piece for getting us evicted from our place (deciding to run a 35000 rpm dremel at 5 in the morning is probably the more blameable factor but hey, inanimate objects don't really feel it when you blame them so what's the harm?), it is in fact something we really enjoyed doing and we're proud of the result to boot.