atlas(t)

map tattoos

as beautiful as is this image above (from XxBammBammxX's Xanga blog) I don't believe it is a real tattoo. I arrived here after finding the real, if less beautiful tattoo below:

and I'm sure you can imagine how excited I got when I found this on fashion tribes blog.

I went forth looking for more map tattoos and found this dude on DDV's travels in China blog:

The blogger describes the work thus:

On eyecatcher by an artist whom I forgot his name, he made a tattoo of a map of china on his back, and then started travelling through the country. each city where he goes, he has something tattooed onto the map. This was weird to see because I happened to be at a dinner yesterday night and randomly sat next to this girl WangWei. I explained her I was gonna live on a farm outside of Beijing and that I'd be interested to get a motorcycle. She said she had a friend who was very into motorcycles and he could maybe help out, he was also an artists and he also did something with tattoos, with a map on his back and at every place he went....

Unfortunately, subsequent repeated google searches didn't turn up any other map tattoos, treasure or otherwise. What they did turn up were:

1) instances of people using map tattoos as plot furtherers in movies and prose fiction
2) a lot of claims of map tattoos on discussion boards, but with no photos
3) instructions on how to get to the next level of a computer game
4) a dream of discovering a map tattoo on one's abdomen

What does this say about us, that we use tattoos of maps in fiction, that we dream of being tattooed by maps, that we claim tattoos of maps in discussions of self and identity. There's something here about personalizing something by having it imprinted on your body permanently; and there's something here about mapping as control -- or being controlled.

The narratives referenced in movies and computer games and in dreams seem to involve people with map tattoos who have no memory of getting the tattoo and no knowledge of what the map's significance is. Their story arc is to discover, and thereby control and own, the territory -- and usually treasure -- depicted in the map. The map tattooed on their body is felt at the beginning to be controlling them -- because they didn't ask for the map and can't read the map. By reading the map, you acquire its power.

Conversely, the claims of map tattoos on discussion boards come inevitably out of discussions around identity and control of self. For example, one e-nterlocutor answered the question "which part of your body do you hate the most?" with a description of the tattoo of the world he has on his back. Putting the map onto you, far from removing your control of its contents, actually intensifies your control of the map's contents by personalizing them, making them not just a part of your claim of identity, but an actual part of your body.

So why aren't there more map tattoos out there?

the kind of problem a city is

link

"... if a city's streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear. When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is a jungle, what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.

But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city's streets and its sidewalks.

This task is totally unlike any service that sidewalks and streets in little towns or true suburbs are called upon to do. Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers ...

The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers. ... Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end. ... It does not take many incidents of violence on a city street, or in a city district, to make people fear the streets. And as they fear them, they use them less, which makes the streets still more unsafe.

... the public peace -- the sidewalk and street peace -- of cities is not kept primarily by the police ... It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city areas -- older public housing projects and streets with very high population turnover are often conspicuous examples -- the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards. Such places are jungles. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down."

-- Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities

(check out the quotes and links on Gwenda Bond's obit posting on Jacobs.)

hacking google maps UPDATED

via Making Light a few weeks ago, here's a list of cool google maps hacks from the book Google Maps Hacks, by Rich Gibson and Schuyler Erle to whet your appetites:

Here's how far a detonation's effects would reach;

and here you can track the location of the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope relative to the ground;

and here you can compare the geographical area of one political entity to another. I didn't choose California, it was locked in as the sample. Three guesses why, first two don't count.

*****
UPDATE: silly me, I didn't know they have their own blog!

international polar year maps oil

the polar science olympics is in town and Dubya's government is going to use it to find us some more oil.

The International Polar Year, actually two years' worth of studies planned for 2007-8, is the latest in a landmark series of "major international science initiatives in Polar Regions" which have been organized about every thirty to fifty years, since 1882.

Why the poles?

To have any hope of understanding the current global climate and what might happen in future the science community needs a better picture of conditions at the poles and how they interact with and influence the oceans, atmosphere and land masses. Existing climate models do not work well in the polar regions and have for example failed to predict the dramatic break-up of Antarctic ice shelves observed in recent years. The three fastest warming regions on the planet in the last two decades have been Alaska, Siberia and parts of the Antarctic Peninsula, Thus the Polar Regions are highly sensitive to climate change and this raises real concern for the future of polar ecosystems and Arctic society.

Given the scale of the project and the need to coordinate private organizations with national science ministries around the world, the language and atmosphere seem to have been kept as neutral as possible on issues of mineral extraction and the politics of climate change (read "oil prospecting" and "global warming"). However, you don't have to read too far between the lines to see the very environmentalist, stop-the-addiction bent of the organizers.

So imagine their dismay when wannabe participant the U. S. Geological Survey proposed mapping out oil reserves in the Arctic under the auspices of the IPY. The USGS project has thus far been accepted only conditionally, and other agencies are protesting its adoption.

Chris Rapley, a board member of the committee running the polar year, says that the USGS is likely to get the go head soon and justifies it thus:

the U.S. Arctic survey program — part of a long-term American effort to map out untapped oil reserves around the world — would provide valuable scientific information that could help those trying to understand climate change and figure out how to combat and anticipate it. The information it gathers would probably be of only limited use to oil companies seeking new reserves, he said.

"What's come forward is a project to assess how much hydrocarbon resources there might be in the Arctic with a view to (helping) policymakers, thinkers, planners, climate-change experts" plan for the world's energy needs and work on ways to combat climate change, he said. "That's just the sort of thing the (polar year) is about."

I suppose that finding oil which the US will then appropriate and burn, will then provide scientists with necessary data to plot out the world's downward climate curve. I'm just not sure that's, you know, the best way to do it.

It's always so strange when competing interests lead liberals into an argument against collecting data or furthering knowledge. Naturally, the USGS's apologists are right, locating arctic oil reserves will provide useful data. But we all know that's not why they're doing it. And we all, equally, know that whoever provides similar data, for whatever purpose, US oil interests will exploit that data for gain. As someone dead set against ignorance/abstinence as birth control, it goes sorely against the grain to protect a principle by insisting upon ignorance.

And yet, here we are.

map of the marvel comics world

from the "too much time on my hands" file, comes this incredibly cool site-in-progress, mapping out the locations of events and significant sites in the Marvel comics universe. The Marvel Atlas Project (note the clever arrangement of initials into "M.A.P.") was founded by someone named Sean Kleefeld, and handed off to someone named as "The Beetle". Significance lost on me. Although it is still in progress, you can get to some cool sites with it. You start with the map of the world (above) and click through continent, country and region to find a list of significant sites. Like The Avengers West Compound (below), which gets into even more detail if you click on it, to show you floorplans of the main building. How cool is that? In a previous post I noted an ongoing project to timeline significant events in fictional films. Then there's that recent Orwell quote about the "false map of the world" we create in our heads from books. But I think Orwell was referring to map of how to move through the socialities and necessities of the world, not a literal map of land or space in the head. But all of this makes sense -- so much sense. As the globe gets smaller, we get more and more of a handle on its dimensions -- we have more and more of a map inside our heads of what ground we are walking on and how it relates, spatially, to other ground. We have become extremely sophisticated at physical mapping. The new GIS services are a result of this sophistication, not the cause. So it's only natural that in the arts we are taking great pleasure in using the map and chart as a formal construct; and it then only makes sense that we try -- all over, everywhere -- to map out the fictional landscapes that form our romance -- our ideal worlds -- in real space. For years -- for as long as there has been tourism -- there have been literary walking tours, where people see the locations where someone who never existed died of tuberculosis, or said yes to her man, or realized that nothing was ever going to be right again ... ever. A direct interaction between the imagination and space. Why not a middle man? Maps are the intermediary between the idea of space, and the space itself. So why not an intermediary between fictional spaces and real spaces?

milky way

wanna feel rilly, rilly insignificant? Take a gander at the map below that I jacked from miqel.com.

This is the cellular pattern of the total universe as seen from our galaxy cluster. The center is our galaxy cluster. Not so bad, right? Well, check this out.

This is the galaxy cluster. See the leetle, tiny white elliptical dot in the center? That's the Milky Way. As in, where we live. You are here kinda thing. Go check it out. On the same page there's a diagram of the Milky Way showing where Earth is located, and another map of our galaxy showing its satellite galaxies -- like moons to our Earth. Doubleplusmacrocosm. Coolness exemplified.

While we're on the subject of miqel.com, the maps section has other goodies including this lovely (and clearly psychedelic-era) map of gas bubbles near our beloved sun.

Whatever drugs they were on, sign me up for twice that.

Speaking of drugs, who is "miqel", which name I'm starting to suspect is pronounced "Michael"? Dunno. Some dude with a website, which he intends as "a resource for sharing ideas on alternate human futures, visionary art, science, new concepts, spirit, music, freedom, complexity, simplicity, social progress and applied chaos." He went to a Montessori school. 'Nuff said. Extremely cool site, go check out.

abortion states

usa today came up with this map, predicting what will/might/could happen with abortion legislation if Roe vs. Wade gets overturned.

John Scalzi linked to it with predictions of his own:

I personally suspect that this map is not quite correct because if it came to that people would vote in representatives with opinions more in line with the general thinking about abortion; which is to say I suspect you'd find rather few states like South Dakota and more like Illinois. It might take an election cycle or two to hit equilibrium, however, during which time I suspect people would be vividly reminded that women who really want an abortion really will get one, regardless of risk. I doubt there would be a national law against abortion, unless the GOP really does want to either fracture or relegate itself to permanent minority status.

... I'm not particularly keen on Roe v. Wade being overturned, but I don't think overturning it would give the anti-abortion folks what they want. ... Because it's been 33 years since Roe v. Wade, you know. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the same as turning back the clock. I sometimes wonder if anti-abortion folks have actually internalized this salient fact.

I only hope he's right -- and if the world were reasonable, he'd be right. However, people's capacity for hypocrisy -- or perhaps simply for alienating themselves from the common human condition -- is nearly infinite. Just have a look at this article by Joyce Arthur about anti-abortion protestors who have abortions in the very clinics they picket. If even half of this article is accurate ... well, these are clearly not people who suffer from an excess of either perspective or the ability to reflect.

I would submit that "pro-lifers" in the aggregate (always with exceptions) do not suffer from such an excess. That's why opposition to abortion is so tenacious: Life, history, and everything -- social realities, demographic trends, political events -- in the nearly 35 years since Roe vs. Wade have argued utterly persuasively in favor of affordable and safe abortions for all. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to not listen.

cartography of ashes

i met artist/filmmaker Dolissa Medina in the course of mounting the "atlas(t)" exhibition at Galeria de la Raza in 2001. Although Dolissa didn't participate directly in that show, the cartography/geography theme of the show drew many people out of the woodwork whose thoughts and ideas ran towards this thematic set, Dolissa included.

(In fact, I think part of the reason I'm still so fascinated with geography and mapping for their own sakes, as well as as a metaphor, is my involvement in the "atlas(t)" show. Many of my most meaningful and interesting friendships, acquaintanceships and ... uh ... colleagueships (?) were formed as a result of that exhibition, and formed around the understanding of culture as a mappable entity. Of course, that's because the show was produced by two organizations whose members were predominantly immigrants or children of immigrants; no one is more aware of borders, landscape overviews, and the control of culture and space, than immigrants. But more on this in another post maybe.)

Back to Dolissa: she has recently completed a 45-minute film -- the work of four years of thinking and sweating -- called Cartography of Ashes, which she describes as a collaboration between herself and the San Francisco Fire Department:

Produced to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, the film recounts stories of several city intersections that were destroyed by the conflagration that ravaged the city in the aftermath of the quake.

If that's not cool enough for you, Dolissa will be premiering the film this Friday, April 21st, at a screening on the Fire Department's training lot. The film will be projected onto the surface of the fire training tower (the one where they train big, burly, sexy firepeople to rescue folks from burning buildings) on the corner of 19th and Folsom streets in San Francisco. How cool is that? How bummed am I that I'm going to miss this one?

I did get to see a preview of the film on the website (of which the above image is a framegrab), and it looks just as thoughtful, beautiful, and well-researched as I would expect from Dolissa. Do not miss this one!

happy devastation!

This photograph, taken from a tethered balloon five weeks after the great earthquake of April 18, 1906, shows the devastation brought on the city of San Francisco by the quake and subsequent fire. The view is looking over Nob Hill toward business district, South of the Slot, and the distant Mission. The Fairmont Hotel, far left. dwarfs the Call Building. (photo courtesy of Harry Myers).

today is a major anniversary, the 100th birthday of one of the most significant earthquakes of all time -- not in size, but in cultural, social, political, and overall historical impact. I'm talking, of course, about the topography and cartography-changing, history-making, illegal immigrant document-altering, scientific-breakthroughin', 1906 earthquake and fire. 100 years! Happy devastation!

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area this week/weekend, you really have no excuse to not participate in the goings on around this landmark (or timemark?) If you're looking for things to do, I'll be posting a couple of things here over the next few days, or weeks, as things come up. And here's a listing of official and related events.

The one I like the most is the projection of a film of the earthquake and fire onto Coit Tower, which happened last night and will happen again tonight starting at 7 pm.

(cross-posted at SeeLight.)

random invisible city

Cities & Names 4

clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.

In its centuries of decadence, emptied by plagues, its height reduced by collapsing beams and cornices and by shifts of the terrrain, rusted and stopped up through neglect or the lack of maintenance men, the city slowly became populated again as the survivors emerged from the basements and lairs, in hordes, swarming like rats, diriven by their fury to rummage and gnaw, and yet also to collect and patch, like nesting birds. They grabbed everything that could be taken from where it was and put it in another place to serve a different use: brocade curtains ended up as sheets; in marble furnerary urns they planted basil; wrought-iron gratings torn from the harem windows were used for roasting cat-meat on fires of inlaid wood. Put together with odd bits of the useless Clarice, a survivors' Clarice was taking shape, all huts and hovels, festering sewers, rabbit cages. and yet, almost nothing was lost of Clarice's former splendor; it was all there, merely arranged in a different order, no less appropriate to the inhabitants' needs than it had been before.

The days of poverty were followed by more joyous times: a sumputous butterfly-Clarice emerged from the beggared chrysalis-Clarice. The new abundance made the city overflow with new materials, buildings, objects; new people flocked in from outside; nothing, no one had any connection with the former Clarice or Clarices. And the more the new city settled triumphantly into the place and the name of the first Clarice, the more it realized it was moving away from it, destroying it no less rapidly than the rats and the mold. Despite its pride in its new wealth, the city, at heart, felt itself incongrous, alien, a usurper.

And then the shards of the original splendor that had been saved, by adapting them to more obscure needs, were again shifted. They were now preserved under glass bells, locked in display cases, set on velvet cushions, and not because they might still be used for anything, but because people wanted to reconstruct through them a city of which no one knew anything now.

More decadences, more burgeonings have followed one another in Clarice. Populations and customs have changed several times; the name, the site, and the objects hardest to break remain. Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead. There is no knowing when the Corinthian capitals stood on the top of their columns: only one of them is remembered, since for many years, in a chicken run, it supported the basket where the hens laid their eggs, and from there it was moved to the Museum of Capitals, in line with other specimens of the collection. The order of the eras' successsion has been lost; that a first Clarice existed is a widespread belief, but there are no proofs to support it. The capitals could have been in the chicken runs before they were in the temples, the marble urns could have been planted with basil before they were filled with dead bones. Only this is known for sure: a given number of objects is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them each time, then try to assemble them. Perhaps Clarice has always been only a confusion of chipped gimcracks, ill-assorted, obsolete.

-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities