“The new theatre of the world: map mashups and web 2.0 space” presented by Kera

Symposium:

• ISEA2009: 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art
• More presentations from ISEA2009:  

• Positioning local and global transactions

• The new theatre of the world: map mashups and web 2.0 space

• Denisa Kera

Venue(s):

• Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Ireland

• Abstract

  While the 19th Century attributed the flat world to the dark Middle Ages and its primitive believe in the edge of our earth, the 21st Century is facing a strange comeback of this image. It was the French astronomer and, a late if not a retarded romanticist, Camille Flammarion, who is to blame for the simplified view of the middle ages as the period when people believed in a flat earth. He is the probable author of an anonymous wood engraving from his 1888 book L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology) depicting a missionary who just discovered the end of the world and the point where it touches the sky. This influential misinterpretation ignored the fact that the image of a spherical world was not only known to the Middle Ages – as we can see from the name and the illustrations of the famous Johannes de Sacrobosco tractate from the 13th century, De sphaera mundi – but it was actually a more prevalent model of earth.

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Category:

• Paper