Atlas of Places

This project has been inspired by Nicolas K Feldmeyer’s series ‘Even After All’ & ‘After All’.

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This first volume of an ongoing “Asperities” series was constructed out of LIDAR Point Cloud data. Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) is an airborne mapping technique, which uses a laser to measure the height of the terrain and surface objects on the ground such as topography, trees and buildings. The data used in these images were built up out of a collection of hundreds of millions of highly accurate 3-dimensional x,y,z points and component attributes. Once compiled and processed, entire portions of a territory can be reproduced and manipulated with 3D software.

The raw data needed to make the images below was gathered from various locations throughout the U.S.; such as Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens in Washington, Mount Hood in Oregon and Lake County in Colorado. The end result helps to showcase the power of these tools and the accuracy they provide to the ones willing to venture within the maze of technical information available. From thousands of simple geo-referenced points to complex mystical scenes, they can offer much more to the expert – and the layman – than a purely scientific and rational analysis. By placing “out of scale lamps” within white landforms, one sheds a new light on these familiar territories and provides an additional reading to these landscapes full of asperities.