Nikolas Schiller

Nikolas Schiller is a prominent digital map artist who lives in Washington, DC. He is mainly known for developing Geospatial art, which is the name given to his collection of abstract maps created from aerial photographs of D.C. He has created an interactive website around his numerous abstract maps produced within the past years. It wasn’t until March of last year that Schiller removed an exclusion protocol that allowed for his website to be accessed from all major search engines. When I first learned about Schiller’s art you had to know his whole name before any search engine would being up the link to his website.

Lately he has been know to attend voting rights demonstrations in D.C. wearing colonial outfits to emphasize the fact that District residents are colonists who suffer from taxation without representation.

The work I find most interesting in Schiller’s collection of abstract maps is his Mother Nature projections. One of his first commission pieces Lady Liberty on a quilt of the Pearl River Delta, 2005, Schiller incorporates the patrons’ native country Hong Kong were the Pearl River Delta is located. The NASA satellite image of the Pearl River Delta is used as the backdrop of the whole image. On the body of the model Schiller uses the same modified aerial photography he’s used in his other D.C. based rendered art. The finished image has a contrast between the past and the present that makes it successful. This art has some similarities and differences with the projection project were working on. It is similar in that, the map is projected onto another object to create something unique, interesting, and reminiscent of a figure. The differences are that the projection is not an actual projection on an object, but a printed 2d surface.