Border Bumping
Live maps in which roaming cellphones redraw national borders wherever the network disagrees with the cartographers.
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. Till wrote a detailed account of our design and programming process, and the project was featured on The Creators Project.
The stack, for the technically curious: TileMill for a toner-like map style served from the caravan’s own server, OpenStreetMap for country, 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.
