Border Bumping — Mobile Republic

Border Bumping

Live maps in which roaming cellphones redraw national borders wherever the network disagrees with the cartographers.

Year
2012
Type
Data art
Exhibited
Mobile Republic · MediaCities
Role
Map design · Code
With
Julian Oliver · Till Nagel
Tech
Leaflet · D3.js · TileMill

National borders are a construct — a line on a map, a sign by the road. Crossing one usually feels like nothing at all… until your phone buzzes: welcome abroad, roaming charges apply. Often that happens kilometers before or after the official line. Border Bumping takes these cellphone moments seriously: wherever a device registers a border that the map disagrees with, the border itself gets redrawn — the territory as told by cell towers, not cartographers.

The project was created by Julian Oliver for the Mobile Republic caravan exhibition; I built the visualization side together with Till Nagel — live maps in which the collected “bumps” continuously distort national borders. My part was the animation of the bouncing borders and much of the interface around them (the animated zoom, the popups, and the sidebar where each bump arrives as a ticket), written in JavaScript. Till wrote a detailed account of our design and programming process, and the project was featured on The Creators Project.

Border Bumping map of the German–Polish border near Szczecin: red circles mark bump incidents along the black border line, which is pulled out of shape around them, and a dark sidebar lists the incidents as tickets with device, crossing direction, timestamp, cell owner, signal strength and coordinates, under a minimap of Europe

The stack, for the technically curious: TileMill for a toner-like map style served from the caravan’s own server, Natural Earth for the country borders, OpenStreetMap for street and city data, GeoJSON for the interactive border data, Leaflet for a fast multitouch map with SVG rendering, D3 to animate the distortions and read in the bumping data, jQuery/zepto for the lightweight UI — and paper to prototype the ideas in the first place. Built Berlin-hack-style between coffee, beers, and night sessions; the code is open source on GitHub. A demo with test incidents still runs on GitHub Pages: the borders bump as before, but the Stamen base-map tiles under them no longer load.

In 2013 the work was developed further during a short residency at the Techne Institute in Buffalo, New York, and I updated the map for the U.S.–Canada border.

Both collaborations carried on: Till Nagel and I later built cf. city flows (2016), and Julian Oliver and I teamed up again for Deep Sweep Visualization (2015) and HARVEST Visualization (2017).

Inside the caravan: a desk with a touch screen and an architect’s lamp over printed maps, in front of a large wall projection of the map with two red incident circles on a border.
Inside the caravan
The map on the caravan’s touch screen, seen at an angle: two red incident circles on the French–Swiss border in the Jura, northwest of Lake Geneva, where the black border line kinks out toward them.
Touch-screen map in the caravan
Three marker styles side by side on map fragments: a red hexagon, red circles with dashed outlines, and concentric red circles fading outward over a gray and white map.
Marker styles tried for the incidents
The gray base map around Slovenia, from Venice to Zagreb, with thick gray country borders, thin roads and place names set in a typewriter-like font.
Base-map style, made in TileMill
Pen sketch on paper: a black border line of vertices marked with crosses, an incident point above it, and a red line showing the vertices pulled toward the point inside a red arc.
Paper sketch of the distortion algorithm
Three small map sketches of a border section, each with a dashed original line, an orange distorted line bulging toward a red incident point, and a red line joining the point to the border, at different strengths.
Distortion experiments
A printed gray map of the northern Adriatic around Trieste, drawn over in pink marker: concentric circles around incident points and hatched areas where the black border is pushed out toward them.
Scribbles on a printed map
A small gray caravan with a yellow »Mobile Republic« sign on its side, parked under a white tent canopy on a paved square, its front hatch open on a directional antenna.
The caravan, exterior by Designers Republic
Black-and-white photo of the caravan interior: a man at the desk under the lamp writes on a map, with the touch screen beside him and the projected map behind.
Annotating maps with discovered cell infrastructure

Inside the caravan
Credits
Christopher Pietsch — map design · code · with Julian Oliver · Till Nagel
Exhibitions
Mobile Republic, Abandon Normal Devices, North West England — 2012 · MediaCities, Buffalo — 2013
Press
The Creators Project (VICE): Julian Oliver's Border Bumping Redraws National Borders Using Cell Phone Data (2012) · Rhizome: Julian Oliver's Tele-Cartography (2012)
Link
Visit the project →