atlas(t)

a street with a view

there is nothing new under the sun if you're referring to broad categories like "art," "writing," "science," "religion," "technology," or even "maps." But web 2.0 isn't just refreshing old categories, nor merely combining them. Web 2.0 provides a synthesis of human functions and ways of thinking that creates new ways of thinking, and doing, that advance--and possibly even evolve--humanity.

This is nothing new to you, I'm sure (whether you agree or not), but I'm struck again by this thought each time I come across new evidence of it. The latest evidence is a project by two Pittsburgh artists to use Google Maps Street View to tweak local reality.

Google Maps Street View, for the five of you who don't already know, is the newish app at Google Maps that allows you to see an eye-level view of the street on a map, so long as that street has been photographed by the Special Google Van. As folks have discovered, the unannounced trips by the Google van have captured the unaware showing their undies, burgling houses, and maybe nose-picking. There was a brief, and silly, controversy, about which no more needs to be said.

So, when Pittsburgh artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett found out that their city was about to be included in Street View, they contacted Google and arranged with a group of participants to stage scenes along the route of Sampsonia Way to be captured on Street View on the day the Van showed up. Apparently, it took several months to organize, although only one day to shoot. View the project site here.

I'm not willing to spend all day searching for info, but from what I can gather, Sampsonia Way appears to be a quaint, gentrified, arty part of town with a big gallery/museum, and a lot of nifty old houses. You can kind of tell when you move through the Alley (part of it is mostly an alley) using Street View.

The experience of seeing these fictional elements on Street View is what's new. First of all, moving down a street on Street View is itself a strange new thing. It's still a pretty awkward system. You'll get RSI from clicking and maneuvering, and you need to have very hi-speed to make it work at a reasonable pace. But if you get it all going, it's pretty cool. You can see about 270 degrees around the car (top and bottom) and 360 degrees on the front, sides and back.

Introducing fictional elements into this pulls from performance art and street theater ideas of interrupting the quotidian or rendering the mundane special. But public performance is performance introduced into public physical space, and public daily life. This is something else: Street View is a map, a mapping tool, that allows you to have the advantage of being in a physical space, participating in public daily life, without having to actually be there or participate.

So this "performance" is drilling down two layers into a completely different area. It takes this tool--that makes mapping feel like walking down a street--and introduces street theater into the mapping tool ... but not actually into the street. It both enhances and detracts from the illusion that you're having an experience walking down a street--detracts because it creates a sense of surreality.

It's also permanent, or semi-permanent. Street View is new so I don't know how long it will be before these images start to go out of date and need to be re-shot. But maps go out of date; that's just how it works. So this experience of surreality--the interruption of the mundane--isn't just a one-time experience. Every time you use this mapping tool for that area, you'll see this same interruption. The performance isn't time-based, as street performance is. It's not a special occasion that gives you to think about the nature of public life or whatever. It's something that's now encoded into the Street View experience of this street. It now IS the mundane.

It's such a cool idea that I can't imagine all the artists and wannabes won't be jumping on this. I expect a lot more of this in the future, and mo' bettah. (Frankly, these performances were mostly amateurish-looking, silly, or boring, the exceptions being a 3-D parade, and a knotted-sheet escape out a window.) No idea what kind of general effect these things will have, if any. I'm probably thinking too much. I mean, you really have to make an effort going down Sampsonia Way to find most of these art moments, and when people use Street View, they're probably not going to use it in this way.

At best it probably just raises the level of excitement at using these new tools: will there be an easter egg surprise?

three gorges dam

speaking of Edward Burtynsky, a video on YouTube of a talk he gave that's on Manufactured Landscapes turned me on to the scale of change caused by the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Here's the clip:

Here's a good summary of the project:

Here's an animation showing the changes the dam has made to the landscape:

Here's a clip in Chinese with a lot of information about the dam, much of which is self explanatory, if you don't speak Chinese. There are some rah-rah shots of the dam, and some animations of how the dam was built:

What fascinates me the most is the underwater cities. Sure, the buildings were destroyed to as not to interfere with ships, but there must be some lower levels of high rises, and some one and two-story buildings they didn't bother smashing. It would be great if someone went down there in ten or twenty years to photograph what happened to the landscape down there.

In fact, I should find out if there are underwater villages in other areas that have been photographed many years later.

manufactured landscapes

the subject is photographer Edward Burtynsky, and the film is a documentary about his work on ... well, Manufactured Landscapes. The trailer is above.

And here's the opening shot, an amazing, eight minute rolling shot of row after row of worktables on a factory floor. You start out thinking, oh this is just a boring factory scene ... an interior. And after about a minute of row after row after row going by, you start to get it: this is a landscape, not an interior.

And here's a segment with Burtynsky himself speaking from a Canadian tv show.

I still haven't seen the film, but this whole things excites me to no end. I'm gonna go consume some of his product and then report back (maybe).

race map of britain

a few days ago I was hanging out with a friend, a South Asian immigrant who grew up mostly in England but has lived in the States for a decade. She made an offhand reference to how much she hated England ... something I had never heard from her before, although we've been friends for about seven years.

I pressed on the point and she--shocked that she's never ranted to me yet--explained that, although (especially since 9/11) there's a lot of anti-South Asian prejudice in the States, it's nowhere near the level of daily hatred and harrassment a South Asian in the UK faces. Last time she was home, it took only 18 hours for her to get her first racial slur hurled from a car.

In the course of her rant, she mentioned a map that had greeted her on the front page of The Independent during one trip home. This was a race map that didn't show percentages of racial groups in England, but rather the chance that random pedestrians on the street would bump into someone of a different ethnicity. (facepalm/) Naturally, this led to a much more dramatically "colored" map than a simple population percentage map would have been.

Of course, I went looking for the map and it wasn't up at The Independent's site, but urban cartography had it in the archives. Here 'tis, above. And here's the explanation of the "method" used to produce such a highly colorized map.

Experts devised a "diversity index" based on the probability that any two people chosen at random from a particular area would be from different ethnic groups, even if neither of them are white. A score of 0.5 means there is more than 50 per cent chance of this happening -- and the area is classed as highly ethnically diverse.

Think about this for a minute. They're not going by absolute numbers, which is to say, how many people, or what percentage of people are what ethnicity. They're going by probability: what is the chance that people on the street will bump into someone of a different ethnicity. Depending on how they choose to do this (and they don't identify the "experts" doing it) they could be seriously inflating the impression of diversity--or danger--in these areas.

Additionally, they're talking about people meeting on the street. Is there any controlling for ethnic factors like the women of one community not going out as often as the women of another community? Or for the fact that a lot of these communities are concentrated in ethnic enclaves, so you wouldn't actually meet them on the street unless you went into their enclaves?

What this is, is an incendiary map intended to stoke racial suspicion. It's about the daily experience and perception of otherness. Think about the wording: what are your chances of meeting an outsider on the street! They're everywhere! On your streets! Look at how much chance you have of meeting an outsider on the street all over England! England is stained! Publicly stained!

Basically, they're counting on their readership not understanding the math, and especially how math and perception work together in sociological issues such as these.

Just an example of how maps can obscure and obfuscate as much as they illuminate.

obama's office of urban policy

political buzz, via members of his transition team, has it that Obama will fulfill his promise to create an Office of Urban Policy when he hits the presidency. Political Punch quotes one of his speeches:

"Yes, we need to fight poverty," he said. "Yes, we need to fight crime. Yes, we need to strengthen our cities. But we also need to stop seeing our cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution. Because strong cities are the building blocks of strong regions, and strong regions are essential for a strong America."

Wow. Has someone been reading St. JJ?

Four Story breaks down Obama's election promises to The City.

• A focus on improving the liveability of cities;
• Increasing funds in metropolitan regions through better financial coordination and providing an urban green work sector;
• (and my personal favorite) A focus on the development and investment of affordable housing for everyone.

The only thing that would make our first trans-national and multiracial president more perfect would be a background in cartography.

obama video map

for those of you who haven't stumbled across this yet: Google has a gallery of election-related maps, including the one above of places Obama has made speeches where the speeches have been videotaped and put up on YouTube. Click on the location to see the video. Cool, huh?

There's also a map of red and blue states (click on each state to see the number of electoral votes), as they stand currently, and a historical map of red and blue states going back to 1980. Very interesting.

Oh, and please getcher ass out there and vote. And also, if you have time, make phone calls to swing states. Here's how. Or go here to sign up to visit a swing state.

maya lin's systematic landscapes

all I can say, really, about Maya Lin's show Systematic Landscapes, is that the title is appropriate.

Lin takes a number of materials and objects, and systematically finds a way to impose landscape/topography on them, or to use them to depict topography and landscape. Some of these are beautiful and successful, some are strained. All are cold, minimalist, and uninviting.

Which is not to say that I disliked the show. It's up at San Francisco's de Young Museum right now and was the impetus to finally mounting an original exhibition of Asian American art from 1900-1970 that had been years in the making. The Asian American exhibition is rich, vibrant, diverse, and full of high-energy, extremely skilled landscape paintings of the very landscapes Lin is depicting in Systematic Landscapes: Yosemite, the San Francisco Bay. The coldness of Lin's work doesn't contrast with the warmth of the other work to the detriment of either; the Asian American historical work enriches and contextualizes Lin's work, and Lin's work gives the obvious tradition of Asian American landscape depiction continuity and contemporary currency.

But I think Lin's work would have suffered without the juxtaposition. Ultimately, this is an intellectual show that takes little pleasure in its aesthetics, and doesn't love its materials very much. This is especially apparent in her 3-D topographical "drawings." She imposes a grid on a topography, and then transposes  that grid to 3-D space using plastic tubing or wire. I have no doubt these topographies are very precise, but they don't look precise; they look messy and unloved. I would vastly prefer that she had fudged the scientific precision a bit to make the pieces look more precise, and to perhaps express her love of the hard definition more ... er, emotionally?

I did like the look of the wooden topographies [one set of vertically placed 2x4s (to the left) and one set of horizontally placed pressboard depicting mountains, and one set of horizontally placed planks representing landlocked sea basins] and of the topographically carved atlases (one of which is in the image at top.) But the atlases might have made more sense if the actual topography of the region shown on the atlas page had been carved, rather than something more random. And even the good work was all one-liner.

I think I rather appreciated the show as a palate-cleanser after the rich meal of the Asian American history show, than as a free-standing set. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in the difference between simple (her best work) and simplistic.

collective nouns list

wiktionary has an appendix which is a searchable database of collective nouns, those nouns used to collect a group of other nouns, like a "pride" of lions, or, famously, a "murder" of crows. You can search by collective noun, or noun, and they include both standard and ... uh ... made up ones.

This is another item--the quirkiness of collective nouns--that has become popular and trendy lately. I've seen lists of collective nouns in recent quirkster books and mentioned in various quirkster contexts. I'd hesitate to align myself with the forces of collective quirk ... only, it's a database!

I like a "hand" of bananas and a "stare" or a "parliament" of owls (both are so appropriate, no?)

mass transit in america

via Wikimedia Commons, this map of the Tokyo subway.

I have a t-shirt with this image on it, boughten from Urban Outfitters. Yes, as I've said before, mapfascination is zeitgeisty. I'm not even sure if I should bother writing a post about it.

This is an oblique lead-in to a brief post pointing you to a good article by Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon (does she ever write bad articles?) called "Who Says Americans Won't Ride Mass Transit?"

The thrust of the article is that gas prices are driving Americans back to mass transit, but governments are simultaneously cutting funding. So the new/old transit riders are not merely encountering the overcrowding that would result from an influx of new riders into existing schedules, but are actually joining at a time when lines and service are being cut.

It's a story being repeated across the country -- a story with a grim irony. California, under the Schwarzenegger administration, has embraced ambitious goals to fight global warming, pledging to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But you wouldn't know it from how the state is treating transit. Transportation is the No. 1 source of global warming pollution in the state, and it's the fastest-growing source, yet the state budget recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature raids $1.7 billion from transit funding.

"They're diverting the money from transit and keeping highways whole," says Tom Radulovich, a BART director and executive director of Livable City, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable transportation. "There's been a big shift to transit as people are trying to avoid high gas prices. But we're taking billions of dollars away from transit, and investing billions in highways."

Mieszkowski calls the attitude of "'When you're allocating money for transit, nobody ever asks how crowded buses are'" a "persistent hangover of America's romance with the car." But I'd call it a date rape, not a romance. Naturally, I'm one of those misanthropic liberals who sees conspiracy everywhere, but it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize the persistence of the automobile industry's lobby against withdrawing money from public transit and putting it into highways at a time when any fool can see the writing on the wall. What else would you call a situation where the public is actually asking to put away their cars and ride the bus, and the government still won't step up?

Seriously? Vote for Obama.

zip code map

just sticking my head in to put up a useful and cool map I found on wikipedia: map of U.S. ZIP codes.

Didya know that "ZIP" means "Zone Improvement Plan"? I guess the plan worked. Reading the article, I'm remembering dimly a time in grade school when we were taught  to write and address letters and we wrote: "San Francisco, California" clearly, because otherwise the letter would go astray. That was before the two-capital-letter State designation came in (we had to learn those in school, too) and before ZIP codes were used universally. They were optional.

Not all good ideas or systems are adopted. I guess the good ideas that arise in conjunction with the power to implement them get adopted. Or perhaps, if there are people with the power to implement good ideas, who LISTEN to good ideas, then they get implemented. If not, George W. Bush, then you get stuck in a terrible, expensive war with no way out, and your economy crashes.

Okay, that was a stretch, but the election is ten days away. Are you voting?