Limited Edition Print: 11” x 17” (1 of 45)

Next American City is pleased to announce its new limited edition program in which we’ll offer a new edition for sale with every new issue of the magazine. To inaugurate the program, Neil Freeman designed Identically Named Places Connected(USA) exclusively for NAC.

Q&A with the artist:

At first glance, the image looks simple, but the more one looks at it one realizes how complex and dense the drawing is. To the uninitiated, this looks like a lot of work or the product of a smart computer program — how did you actually create this image?

The image contains roughly 35,000 lines connecting roughly 25,000 distinct points, so drawing it freehand was not a good option. That doesn’t mean that creating the image programatically was as simple as pressing a button. The details of how the image was created will probably sound like alphabet soup to laypersons (wget, GIS, FME, mySQL, Java, CS3), but I’ll try to give a rough outline.

I began with data downloaded from the US Census website. The files contained the locations and boundaries of every place (anything from a hamlet to a major city) in the US. I first manipulated these files with specialized geographic software, then in a custom database. I then wrote a small application to parse the data and generate the basic image. I did further work on the image in a Adobe Illustrator.

Many of the works you have created in the past deal with geography and cartography. Can you describe why you are fascinated by maps?

I’d say that I’m concerned with maps in the mathematics. In math, a map is just a rule that associates two sets of things. That could mean anything from associating highways with red lines on paper to equations with imaginary numbers. I was deeply impressed fractals and chaos theory, two areas of mathematics that are concerned with very simple rules that result in unpredictable, and sometimes beautiful results.

You’re a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. How is this project influenced by your education?

I’m currently enrolled in the Masters in Urban Planning program at the GSD.  The program stresses building an understanding how laws, ecology, economic flows, and social forces shape the built environment. That entails building an understanding of urban geography, and using cartography to explain ideas. However, my work process as an artist is very different than as a planning student. In art, you generally don’t have to compromise. My ideas can be carried out fully, because there are abstract and exist outside of the day to day world. I judge an art project a success if it pleases me. My conception of urban planning, on the other hand, is about building consensus and creating compromise between many groups with overlapping and competing interests.

More about the artist:
Neil Freeman is an artist and urbanist whose work has been exhibited at the London Design Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Flushing Town Hall. A proud product of Chicago public schools, he holds a BA in Visual Art and Mathematics from Oberlin College. He currently lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is a candidate for a Master of Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

More about the program:
Are you an artist interested in being considered for the limited edition program? A buyer who has a few questions? Please contact .