# maps procedural generation and symbolic landscapes email to artist jerry gretzinger re: maps and procedural generation in video garmes dear mr. gretzinger i discovered your art by accident via twitter linking me to a video about your wonderful maps as i mentioned on your blog it might be an interesting experiment to transform a current snapshot of your entire map into a explorable digital (/garme) space using (for example) principles like procedural generation to generate trees hills and towns here are my philosophical notes in response to your art all based on first impressions of your fascinating (interior) world **+** ir 'organic-surreal' nature reminds one of tom phillip's "a humument" **+** your use of playing cards with 'instructions' parallels brian eno's "oblique strategies" **+** ir unique aesthetics brings to mind kit william's "masquerade" **+** ir fine-lined technical aspects somehow mirror the work of mike wilks **+** they seem to exude 'landscape embedded narratives' akin to w.g. sebald franz kafka's prague and the poems of georg trakl **+** conceptually such landscapes seem to involve g.i.s digital physics non-places geotrauma and the existential void of valhalla rising **+** in terms of video garme-like systems (or what i call 'abstract encounters') such landscapes remind one of pathologic elevated by rgba love introversion dayz and sir you are being hunted what might be important is to not to simply recreate your maps electronically one-for-one but to use ir technical / aesthetic dna as a seed box in which self-organizing sacred spaces may emerge // image here: gretzinger's map that is a virtual map of symbolic dimensionality which may be psychogeography geotagged with personal emotional responses (eg. short descriptives pieces and poetry) what might be cool to see develop realtime in any such 'map digitization' project is the entire open-ended-at-both-ends process directly involving human consciousness in helping generate such imaginary universes - which it then inhabits that the human brain itself looks like a map is of vital artistic co-incidence. that is to say your maps somehow display non-teleological organic forces at play [vimeo 13596774 w=755] artist jerry gretzinger reveals the process and philosophy behind ir decades-long mapping project // republic of bob