NACIS 2026

Audio Cartography: The New Frontier
Brandon Biggs, CEO of XR Navigation
For thousands of years, cartography has been either visual or tactile. We invite you to join us to learn how cartography can now extend to sound. Learn about auditory icons, ways to hear shapes, understand spatial relationships using your ears, and listen to the world. Through real-world examples and live demonstrations, attendees will experience how audio can communicate iconology, distance, direction, topological relationships, orientation, and environmental context in ways traditional maps simply cannot. We’ll also discuss accessibility, map design, and why auditory cartography may fundamentally be a paradigm shift in cartography, expand who maps are built for, and how humans interact with space itself."

Sound Cartography: Listening as a Cartographic Practice
Nuzhat Tabassum Nawshin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Cartography has long been treated as a visual medium, but spatial experience is also shaped by listening, movement, and divided attention. In this talk, I review selected strands of sound cartography, from soundscape studies and sonification to audiovisual and locative audio mapping. I discuss how these approaches expand what maps can communicate about place, narrative, uncertainty, and mobile spatial experience, while revealing unresolved questions about design guidance, evaluation, and real-world use. I use these questions to consider how sound cartography might develop as a more experimental and inclusive practice.

What does a smell look like? Considerations for olfactory cartography
Jake Steinberg, The Minnesota Star Tribune
Most maps depict what our eyes can see and the ground we can feel under our feet. But what about the other senses? In this talk, I will discuss a map I made for the Minnesota Star Tribune depicting the landscape of smells — or, smellscape — of the Minnesota State Fair, where the aroma of roasting corn is as prominent as any mountain. Depicting smells visually isn’t easy. I offer a whiff of what I learned from this olfactory cartographic challenge.

Beyond Long-Form Cartographic Improvisation: Composition, Columbaria, Dance, and a Return to the Atlas
Eric Theise
Since its 2022 Lisbon premiere I’ve given 50+ performances of A Synesthete’s Atlas across North America & Europe. Until 2026 these projected map manipulations were typically ~50 minute collaborations with improvising musicians recruited in cities I tour through. This talk discusses recent developments that break with this practice including:
• commissioned, composed works
• site-specific performances
• collaborations with choreographers
• integration with movement sensors
• breaking long-form improvisation into movements, guided by structure &titles taken from atlases
The talk includes extensive video documentation and is complemented by Saturday evening’s performance at Woodland Pattern (see Workshops/Field Trips).

A Thousand Raves: Towards a Posthuman Cartography of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Zach Thorpe, UC Berkeley
Conventional cartographic design often upholds subject-centered logics, leading to maps that represent complex places as fixed spaces. How would one incorporate relationality and becoming within maps to open alternatives to this paradigm? This talk explores these possibilities by outlining how posthumanism can be used as a critical praxis for developing a theoretical foundation, methodology and set of practical applications for a “posthuman cartography”. Using EDM/rave culture as an affective and technologically mediated site of mapping, this research challenges cartographic humanism in favor of maps that attend to becoming rather than being, culminating in an interactive posthuman map.