Here’s something you don’t see every day: a 20′ x 30′ aerial image displayed at an art center. Read that again, that’s 20 feet x 30 feet! The folks from the Minnesota Geospatial Information Office (MnGeo) teamed up with staff from the Walker Art Center on an exhibit by Fritz Haeg entitled “At Home in the City.” Walker Art Center staff worked with Thomas Reprographics to print the imagery and prepare the exhibit.
I spoke with Norm Anderson from MnGeo, because I was curious how they pulled off producing such a large image without generating enormous files. Norm said they limited the output resolution (simple jpegs) to 160 dots per inch. That resulted in very manageable files sizes of 80-90 MB for each of three large tiles that made up the display. Norm wasn’t involved in the printing, but he thought Thomas Reprographics used a special-purpose printer designed to produce large billboards.
Kudos to our friends to the west… nice to see some “geo” featured like this!
(All photographs courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN)