About Dada Maps

Dada Maps is an art project that creates new maps at random. It simulates the Dada technique of cut-up collage by rearranging the static image tiles hosted on Google Maps. Different parts of the world are placed side-by-side at different scales. Roads become teleportation devices.

Picking map tiles completely at random would yield an inordinate number of blank or ocean tiles. Instead, I've chosen cities from around the world (some because of their size; others because of personal meaning to me), as well as large-scale maps of the US, Canada, and western Europe.

Each map is a large rectangle, and the coordinates of the rectangles are given in the data file maps.txt. Every one of these rectangles contains a large number of Google Maps tiles, and every tile that Dada Maps knows about has an equal chance of being chosen.

If you'd like to see a city added to Dada Maps, find the city on Google Maps at zoom level 3, and pick tiles to be the upper-left (northwest) and lower-right (southeast) corners of the square. For instance, one line of maps.txt looks like this:

3093,6156 3102,6170 3 Salt Lake City

This says that on zoom level 3, Salt Lake City can be considered as a rectangle whose upper-left corner is at Google Maps URL /mt?v=w2.17&x=3093&y=6156&zoom=3, and whose lower-right corner is at Google Maps URL /mt?v=w2.17&x=3102&y=6170&zoom=3. In real life, Salt Lake City sticks out of that rectangle a little bit, but that rectangle covers most of the city without including a lot of empty tiles.

You can, if you want, create multiple rectangles to represent a city more precisely. See the "Moscow" entries in maps.txt.

Once you have the coordinates of a city, email them to me at the address given on my contact page.

Dada Maps is a greatly expanded and digitized version of my 1996 piece Dada Road Map. Made from a physical road map and atlas, Dada Road Map is now in the Jacob Berendes collection.