{"@context":{"@vocab":"https://schema.org/","artism":"https://artism.org/schema/"},"@type":"VisualArtwork","@id":"https://bernardbolter.com/almadinat-alearabia","name":"Almadinat Alearabia","url":"https://bernardbolter.com/almadinat-alearabia","dateCreated":"2022","creator":{"@id":"https://bernardbolter.com/bio#person"},"description":"Almadinat Alearabia continues the Megacities method of stitching satellite imagery from multiple cities into a single seamless composite, but shifts the unit of compression from a single nation (as in Deutsche Stadt) to a supranational political and cultural bloc — the Arab League. Nine cities are combined: Cairo, Baghdad, Riyadh, Amman, Algiers, Casablanca, Dubai, Damascus, and Beirut, with a stated combined population of 45,017,845 at the artist's working source. Selection followed three overlapping and sometimes competing logics — population size, capital status, and cultural/symbolic weight in outside perception — rather than a single consistent rule; Beirut is the clearest instance of cultural weight overriding raw population rank. Construction relies on finding usable seams — rivers, streets, infrastructure crossings such as a dam or bridge — where two different satellite captures can plausibly meet, most visibly where the Euphrates (Baghdad) gives way to the Nile (Cairo) partway up the image's central river. The work was made for Herbstsalon im Frühling, a community-embedded exhibition organized by ZWITSCHERMASCHINE at the Palladium Studios (5th floor, Pallasseum, Berlin), where it was displayed full-size on banner paper in the courtyard for roughly a year alongside a German and a Yugoslav-cities counterpart. The artist's contribution to the accompanying multi-artist walking piece, 'TRACES,' was titled BLICK OBEN.","artMedium":"Photo collage","width":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","value":150,"unitCode":"CMT"},"height":{"@type":"QuantitativeValue","value":200,"unitCode":"CMT"},"isPartOf":{"@type":"CreativeWorkSeries","@id":"https://bernardbolter.com/series/megacities#series","name":"Megacities","url":"https://bernardbolter.com/series/megacities"},"keywords":"border dissolution, aerial abstraction, political and cultural bloc vs. nation-state, community engagement, view from above","image":"https://pub-6a869efbfec4404396a52a3b7056bfc7.r2.dev/almadinat-alearabia_xl.jpg","additionalProperty":[{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:intent","name":"Intent","value":"Made to connect with the Pallasseum's mixed community — German, Turkish, Arab, ex-Yugoslav residents — by giving each group a satellite-view portrait built from their own homeland cities, displayed full-size in their own courtyard."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:formalContributionAssessment","name":"Formal Contribution Assessment","value":"Marks a variation within Megacities: the unit of compression shifts from a single nation-state (Deutsche Stadt) to a supranational political/cultural bloc (the Arab League), spanning far greater geographic and architectural diversity than the German piece — yet reads, in blind vision analysis, as more visually continuous than Deutsche Stadt. This discrepancy is likely attributable to satellite imagery resolution bias (better commercial coverage over the US/Western Europe than the Middle East) rather than to the artist's construction technique alone — see session note on the Deutsche Skate Stadt blocker for a related instance of the same bias."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:encounterNote","name":"Encounter Note","value":"Displayed on banner paper in the Pallasseum courtyard for about a year; accompanied by a freestyle rap performance. Residents' children were able to identify their own home cities within the piece. Personal formal note: the curve of the Euphrates near Baghdad reads to the artist as resembling Arabic calligraphic form — an association that has persisted in how the river is seen since making this piece."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:intentVsOutcome","name":"Intent vs Outcome","value":"Intent was ground-level community connection; the eventual title, BLICK OBEN ('View From Above'), names the opposite vantage — a god's-eye, distancing view. No tension was felt between the two: the aerial abstraction and the personal recognition (kids finding their own city) apparently coexisted rather than working against each other."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:makingNote","name":"Making Note","value":"Built by layering satellite images directly over each other, unwarped — viable seams found at rivers, street endings, and infrastructure crossings (a dam or bridge marks the Baghdad/Cairo river splice). Water color is sometimes lightly filled in for continuity where satellite water tone varies. Finding the seam is described as 'where the work is done.'"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:directInspiration","name":"Direct Inspiration","value":"Commissioned in the sense of arising directly from the Herbstsalon im Frühling / ZWITSCHERMASCHINE community program at the Pallasseum — not a self-initiated Megacities piece, but made to fit that brief."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:seriesContext","name":"Series Context","value":"Shifts Megacities' unit of compression from a single nation-state (Deutsche Stadt) to a supranational political/cultural bloc (the Arab League) — a move repeated with Yugograd, suggesting a small distinct thread within the series rather than an outlier."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:artHistoricalContext","name":"Art Historical Context","value":"Sits within the broader tradition of satellite and mapping-based art — aerial imagery repurposed as composition rather than documentation — with some kinship to Andreas Gursky's large-scale pattern photography, though not treated as a fixed reference to reapply mechanically across every Megacities piece."},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:sizeTier","name":"Size Tier","value":"xl"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:orientation","name":"Orientation","value":"portrait"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:catalogueNumber","name":"Catalogue Number","value":"BB-MEG-2021-001"},{"@type":"PropertyValue","propertyID":"artism:dominantColors","name":"Dominant Colors","value":"#c9b896, #0a1420, #3d5c3a, #b8b8b0"}],"artism:recordUrl":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/almadinat-alearabia","artism:visionPageUrl":"https://bernardbolter.com/almadinat-alearabia/vision","artism:indexUrl":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/index","artism:sessionsUrl":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/almadinat-alearabia/sessions","artism:sessionsPageUrl":"https://bernardbolter.com/sessions?artwork=almadinat-alearabia","artism:scope":"work","artism:depth":"record","artism:tier":4,"artism:availableTiers":{"1":true,"2":true,"4":true,"5":false},"artism:tierMap":{"1":{"url":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/index","scope":"corpus","depth":"gist","description":"triage — identity, series, gist"},"2":{"url":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/index?depth=survey","scope":"subset","depth":"survey","description":"narrowing — description, intent, colors, keywords"},"4":{"urlTemplate":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/{slug}","scope":"work","depth":"record","description":"full record — all fields, all vision analyses"},"5":{"urlTemplate":"https://bernardbolter.com/api/corpus/{slug}/sessions","scope":"work","depth":"sessions","description":"session transcripts — how it came to be known"}},"artism:embeddings":[{"@type":"artism:Embedding","artism:model":"clip-vit-large-patch14","artism:dimensions":768,"artism:specUrl":"https://huggingface.co/openai/clip-vit-large-patch14","artism:shortDescription":"Language-informed visual embedding — 768 dimensions","dateCreated":"2026-06-18"},{"@type":"artism:Embedding","artism:model":"dinov2-large","artism:dimensions":1024,"artism:specUrl":"https://huggingface.co/facebook/dinov2-large","artism:shortDescription":"Self-supervised visual embedding, no language influence — 1024 dimensions","dateCreated":"2026-07-16"}],"artism:visionAnalyses":[{"@type":"artism:VisionAnalysis","text":"The image presents as a single continuous satellite-view urban landscape rather than a visibly seamed composite — dense tan-and-beige building fabric threaded by a dark, irregular network of streets, broken by a dominant dark waterway running roughly north-south through the composition's right-of-center. Sparse pockets of green punctuate an otherwise uniform built texture; the water shifts tone subtly partway up its length, marking an unmarked splice between two different river systems. Along the upper edge, a coastline with visible port/marina structures interrupts the density with open dark water. Compositionally, the eye reads the piece as one coherent city rather than nine. Mood is administrative and distanced — a cartographic, overhead register with no human scale visible anywhere in the frame. Formally, the density and grid-irregularity read as generically 'Middle Eastern urban' rather than legible as nine specific cities, possibly an artifact of uneven source-imagery resolution rather than a feature of the composition itself. Unresolved: without the artist's account, the number of source cities, the specific splice locations, and the selection logic behind them would not be recoverable from the image alone.","artism:model":"claude-sonnet-5","dateCreated":"2026-07-24"}]}