Of all musical genres, hip hop is perhaps history’s most ambitious. Its world conquering dominance a collective metaphor for the artists that create it - many of whom, against all odds, have become global commodities despite hyperlocal upbringings.

Musical anthropologist, Tahir Hemphill, has contemplated this fact in a recent project, Maximum Distance. Minimum Displacement, which compares rappers’ origins to the geographical ambitions mentioned in their lyrics, producing artworks from the analysed information. These works, inspired by Pablo Picasso’s light paintings, see twelve hip hop artists’ global dreams visualised, tracking the distances traveled by their imaginations.  

The project uses the semantic analysis of words compiled from Hemphill’s previous project, Hip-Hop Word Count (a searchable, ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 hip hop songs), to extract geographic statements by specific rappers. These mentions were translated into geo-coordinates, plotted into a robot arm’s movements and finally drawn by the robot holding a light pen. Amongst the results are the imaginative global ramblings of Nas, Drake, Missy Elliott, Cam'ron, Kendrick Lamar and more. The project was completed at the Frank-Ratche STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.