atlas(t)

individual mapping

commenter Adrian Murphy left a link to his website which has some cool projects on it. (See, folks, this is why you always leave a URL when you commment!)

Murphy, who has a geography degree, spent the past year collecting drawings of the world (not maps specifically) by people he meets for his project My World. Here's his description of his projects:

Each of us will draw a map differently, due to different skills and different perceptions. 2 projects on this site explore this: globe and my world. Both projects ask people to draw maps / pictures. My interest lies in the experimental, collaborative nature of these projects. I enjoy asking people to draw, as this creates a symbiosis between me, as a geographer/graphicist, and the person drawing.

The drawings and maps are fascinating, as they encompass notions of perception, centricity, naive geography and national, cultural geography.

He's still collecting.

These maps really remind me of a completely different and unrelated project by artist Kip Fulbeck called The Hapa Project. Fulbeck is "hapa" (the term for mixed race folks who are part Asian or Pacific Islander) and has spent his career addressing multiracial issues, especially as they intersect with gender, in video, writing and performances.

For about five years, Fulbeck went around the country and photographed people who self-identified as "hapa", taking a "bust" (head and shoulders) portrait with no clothing or jewelry, and then asking them to do two things: 1) categorize themselves ethnically and 2) write a note answering the question "what are you?" He combined these three elements into a single image like the one at left, with the photo above, the answer to "what are you" recreated in the center, and the self-categorization at the bottom. He then collected some of these images into a book, and is showing exhibitions of them on the west coast right now (currently at the Japanese American National Museum.)

(Note: yes, I participated in the project, but my image didn't make it into the book or exhibitions. I don't know if this is the reason, but Fulbeck was displeased when I refused to break down my identity into its component ethnic parts. I put, for ethnicity, "Asian and white", I think. I did this because I think breaking down "white" identities into ethnicities equates European American ethnicities with other American ethnicities, like Asian or Latino. But "white" in America is a monolithic identity that no longer recognizes ethnic differences within it. With the exception of recent immigrants, especially from southern or Eastern Europe, no European Americans are really experiencing racism as a result of their ethnicity. And the majority of "white" Americans are ethnically mixed, making mixed ethnicity the norm.

This is my only quibble with this project: requiring participants to identify themselves according to someone else's idea of categorization. It's cool that Fulbeck includes a self-identification, but I think it would have been cooler to leave the answer to the question "what's your race?" out of it. It would have been more challenging, and would not have reified both the categories themselves, and mainstream America's desperate need to have everything categorized.)

These projects, a variety of individuals drawing and writing descriptions and definitions of themselves and their worlds, are most pleasing (to me) because of two things: 1) hand or handwriting, and 2) attitude towards the subject. Both hand and attitude are how the individual personality are expressed in such projects. Provide a structure for people to express themselves in, and then watch how differently they do it. The more rigid the structure, the more pleasing the diversity of responses.

These projects play directly on the tension between the rigidity of ideological structures and categorical systems, and the infinite multiplicity of individual identities and ideas. Of the two, the Hapa Project has the more rigid structure, and also appears to be the most conscious of this tension. Fulbeck's intention is to directly contrast the categorical description he demands of the individuals' ethnicities, with their own descriptions of themselves. Trumping both and drawing the eye first and last, is the final answer to all identity issues in human interaction: the face. My World is simpler and more open, not as interested in challenging the categorical schema of a map---or any other schema for that matter. With some loose interpretation, any image could appear on the page of a My World drawing. So it's interesting that the participants restricted themselves mostly to maps and outer space views.

Fulbeck doesn't allow for personal body interpretations; he preempts this by handling the body representation himself, through the photographs. Although the participant is allowed to select the photo he will use, the rigidity of the photo format (bust, no adornment, head on, set lighting and backdrop, etc.) leaves the participant with little room to express themselves, except through choice of moue. This also seems deliberate: he doesn't want the body to become a chart, to become a site of categorical division. I find it more interesting that no bodies show up in Murphy's world drawings. The relation between cartography/topography and figures isn't far to seek, but it's apparently not one that springs immediately to mind.

Leave it, then, for a project that directly connects mapping to identity. Artist John Leaños's Mapping Myself project with middle school children was part of the "atlas(t)" exhibition in 2001, and the results were also installed in bus shelters. Three artists, including Leaños, worked with a group of schoolchildren, digitally manipulating found maps, the children's photographs of "their family members, friends, natural and social environments, shelter and school environment", and writings, to create maps of themselves.

This project has the most rigid structure of all, necessitated, of course, by the limited skills of the children and the project's limited time frame. However, the project was also limited by the artists' aesthetic, and their desire to draw a particular connection out of material the children were then to provide. The project was the artists'---not the children's---exigesis out of the material of the children's lives, and provided the least opportunity for the children to express themselves. The theoretical frame of the piece was a more sophisticated one than the children---presumably---were able to grasp fully. So in this project, the children's individuality was another material with which the artists painted.

This is not a criticism. As Murphy pointed out above, these projects necessarily create symbiosis between the creator and the participant. Murphy is the most hands off; his fingerprints aren't to be seen anywhere on the world drawings, but they would never have been created without him. He's not merely a collector; his will initiated the creation, so he is a co-creator. Each of these projects is progressively more driven and controlled by its creator, but all contain this element of symbiosis, this tension between a rigid, categorical structure, and the fluidity of individual interpretation.

This recalls for me the nature of the map itself: heavily controlled and regularized so that the reader finds familiar elements in every map, yet each containing a wild collection of individual features which always defy expectation. This is what fascinates me about odonymy: how much is revealed of the individual nature of a street through its name, while it appears on a map as merely a line. Perhaps this is what is so fascinating to all of us about maps: that of all the ways we've developed to chart information, the map is the one that most honors this categorical/individual tension. Maps, more than charts or graphs, or timelines, are a dialogue made manifest, useful and delightful all at once.

collecting vs. birdwatching

is anyone at all surprised that this biologist, who has classified more than 50 new species, also has a kink for maps?

Blair Hedges, characterized as "an avid collector of Renaissance prints as well as animals", is in the news because he has invented a controversial new way to date antique prints more accurately. This effort arose from his desire to date his own antique map collection.

For Hedges, (the maps he collects) aren't an investment, but a deeply felt extension of his work. He collects maps of the Caribbean, where he hunts for rare animals. And he collects images of early voyagers and inventors, who shared his quest for knowledge.

"It's part science, part history," he says.

Yet some of the history was incomplete.

Indeed.

Hedges speculated that the line breaks caused by cracking in wood blocks would increase over time, and the darkness of a print made from a copper plate would decrease over time. So he developed a method of measuring these by comparing the line breaks or darkness of several prints made from the same blocks or plates.

Loosely speaking, Hedges is using the same statistical approach with old prints that he applies to his study of genetic mutations.

You could, easily enough, say that all of the humanities, including the arts and literature, are an attempt to define our world in categorical terms. And you'd be right, in a way. But mapping/charting and taxonomies are specifically about defining ideas visually, using both verbal and spatial relations. Timelines are another way of doing this. You can address all these areas (geography, biology, history) without the maps and legends. It takes a certain type of desire, a certain mindset---maybe even a certain personality---to so avidly want to map and categorize things.

Hedges seems to be one of these personalities, for whom the map (or chart, or spectrum analysis, or taxonomy) flows through his understanding of life: a jumping off point, and a home base.

I woud contrast Hedges' seeming impulse to bring his necessarily extensive experience of the world back to the chart, with Phoebe Snetsinger's (and other birders') impulse to take the items on the chart and turn each into an experience. Snetsinger's triumphal story follows familiar lines: she received a death sentence by way of a terminal cancer diagnosis and so decided to indulge her passion for birding (or birdwatching.) 18 years and 8500 species later, she died, not of cancer, but of a bus accident in Madagascar, after having survived a war, a gang rape, and many other "adventures".

You can read about her in her posthumous memoir Birding on Borrowed Time, but that's not the point. I understand this impulse even less than the categorizing impulse that I share, but it appears to me to be the reverse of the impulse to categorize: the impulse to take existing categorizations and make them real by seeing examples of them for yourself.

The shock and excitement of Snetsinger's story for the rest of us is that her experiences/adventures don't deter her (and the gang rape makes it into every description of her trials and tribulations: sensational!) She is quoted as verbally shrugging them off by saying they make good stories. The accompanying adventures aren't the point of her travels; seeing the birds is. But the accompanying adventures are what make the bird-seeing interesting for the rest of us, who aren't obsessed with birds. They're what make the excitement of finally seeing in the flesh a bird you've only ever read about, real and present to the armchair observer. For her, seeing that item on a chart sitting in a tree, or waddling across a road, makes the world real.

Not to get all self-help on you, but for those of you containment/charting/definitions/map geeks like me who are looking for a little more balance in your life, maybe taking a page (not the whole gang-rape-die-of-bus-accident book, just a page) from Snetsinger would be a start. Here's my birdwatching book; I think I'll plan to turn some of these items into reality next year. Anyone wanna come with?

more model trains

don't the Germans know that size doesn't matter?

I've found another world's largest model train landscape (presumably using different criteria), this time at the EFA auto museum in Chiemgau, Bavaria.

This one is a classic model train landscape, though, only interesting to me in how depressingly industrial it is. I wonder if there are little capitalists with top hats, and anarchists with bombs, running around the landscape. Maybe that would be too literal.

fool's world map

file under "we love wikis!"

This Fool's World Map shows what "fools" on the internet think the world looks like. It's accompanied by a wiki, which links to each "country" and gives foolish information on it.

Here's what they have for a mission statement:

This is a project visualizing the world map which many fools in the world imagine. If you can see this map comfortably, you are definitely a fool.

The rest of the information on the page is a listing of changes and updates made. Very interesting reading. I'm not sure how relevant this is to actual ignorance about geography or history, but it's fascinating as an object lesson in why wikis and internet info should be distrusted. Truth never comes by committee.

Plus, there's too much anger and disdain in the presentation for this to be truly funny.

el corazon de la mission

this is gonna be fucking good and I'm seriously tempted to go back to SF for a weekend just to check this out.

Guillermo Gomez-Peña (I'll be posting about him later) will be leading performance tours of San Francisco's Mission District (see schedule below), and you'd be an idiot if you were in the area during this time and missed the show.

The LAB presents

El Corazon de la Mission
With Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra

Call 415-864-8855 for advance reservations/ ticket sales

Tour Schedule: Two tours daily, departing from Galeria de la Raza at 2857 24th Street, at Bryant. Limited seating available.
Opening night - Friday, July 28: Tours depart at 5:30 and 7:00 PM
Saturday, July 29: Tours depart at 2:30 and 4:30 PM
Saturday, August 5: Tours depart at 2:30 and 4:30 PM
Tuesday, August 8:Tours depart at 12:30 and 2:30 PM (offered as part of ISEA parallel programming)
Saturday, August 12: Tours depart at 2:30 and 4:30 PM
Prices: $20.00/WET (21+, includes tequila toasts) $15.00/DRY (under 21, no tequila)

The LAB, in conjunction with La Pocha Nostra and Circuit Network, invites you to experience the Mission District as you've never seen it before. Take the hippest adventure tour in the heart of the hippest city, San Francisco. El Corazon de la Mission is part mobile public art project, part site-specific performance, part tourist attraction and all serious fun. Guillermo Gomez-Pena--the renowned writer, border activist, performance provocateur, reverse anthropologist, and NPR commentator--has scripted and narrated this 80-minute tour to take you deep into the heart of the Mission, the place he has called home for almost 15 years. From Dolores Park to Clarion Alley and the 24th Street Corridor, ride shotgun with Gomez-Pena as he honors the Mission's ghosts, from fallen labor leaders of the 1930s to testosterone-driven low-riders of the 1980s, and celebrates the ever-evolving social, cultural and political sensibilities of his favorite neighborhood in San Francisco.

an inconvenient truth

in all truthiness, I expected An Inconvenient Truth to be full of suspect ranting and politicizing. And there was a little bit.

But surprisingly---given its source---there was very little of this. The film centered around a very simple message, repeated continuously in many, many different ways: we're releasing too much CO2 into the atmosphere and we're going to kill ourselves. As Gore himself says: "This is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue." Or as I would put it: this is really not a political or even moral issue so much as a practical one: do we want our planet and species to survive or not?

The film, for the two of you who don't already know, is based around what I can only call a multimedia performance slideshow that Al Gore has been giving all over the world for the past several years. He has a schmancy screen set-up, a cherry picker to elevate him up and down the IMAX-sized charts the schmancy screen shows, kickass visuals (possibly provided by a team of geeks from Apple computer, whose product placement in the film wasn't lost on me), littler screens by the side for dramatic effect every time he steps in front of them, and, most importantly, he has his own performance capacity. This last is combo of a down-home accent that fades in an out (much as GWB's or Clinton's did; I'd be tempted to call this a "politician's accent"), an ability to look handsome, serious, or wrecked with worry as the situation calls for (a Daddy skill he probably learned at home), a dry sense of humor, and an engaging warmth that would have won him the 2000 election (oh wait, he won that one anyway, didn't he?) if it had ever made an appearance.

But are these enough reason to see the film? Before I saw it I knew that there would be really nothing new to me in the film (except the numbers and details), and I felt very much like the choir going in to be preached at. Does anybody else feel like this: embarrassed about going to see a film where you feel you're not going to be learning much? Is that stupid?

Anyway, if you haven't seen it yet, I now have four good reasons for you to see it, aside from the fact that it's very well done (imagine! They made a good movie out of a slide show!)

First, it arms you with some easy-to-remember facts and figures you can use in arguments. (My favorite: out of a random sampling of academic science articles in the past 14 years on climate change, none of the articles disputed the premise of global warming. Out of a similar random sampling of major media coverage of the same topic, 53% of the articles expressed uncertainty about global warming.)

Secondly, the film offers concrete steps you can take to reduce your personal CO2 emissions, and connects you back to a website with even more action items. (Click on the flyer image to the left for their top ten list.)

Thirdly, (and I have to credit the brilliant Shailja Patel with this insight, who answered my question about preaching to the choir on a panel about anti-Iraq-war art thus), the choir, too, needs inspiration and refreshment, support and the knowledge that they are not alone in their beliefs or in their action. So films like this are important for environmentalists (or even just anyone concerned about global warming) to see. Refresh yourself. Give up that nasty habit of despair.

And fourth, the flick is full of animated maps! Maps of Florida, Calcutta, and Manhattan being flooded by rising sea levels! Maps of the polar ice caps collapsing and/or melting! Maps of Lake Chad disappearing! Plus, comparative landscape photography! Mount Kilimanjaro with and without snow! Glaciers retreating! Permafrost becoming not so perma! Gore's presentations are really outstanding, but, if you think about it, this slideshow is a geo-geek's wet dream.

So yes, do see it. The film is strangely simple in its message and impact, leaving me with not a lot to say about it, beyond what I've already said. Don't bother to bring your grains of salt. It's all stuff we know anyway. Then go to the website and take some action. Maybe sign this petition/pledge or get trained to present the slide show yourself. Yes indeedy to the last one. I have my laser pointer to the world. Yes I do.

john klima + interview

to get back to the landscape art theme: trolling for information on model railroad landscapes, I came across descriptions of artist John Klima's piece "Train".

A model railway landscape featuring scenes from a variety of films (including "Bad Lieutenant", "And God Created Woman", and "Sid and Nancy"), bears two trains, each carrying a gameboy which is remotely operable by cellphone. The viewer selects a character from the scene depicted in the landscape when the train goes by it, thereby "picking up" that character. The gameboy then displays a CG animation of a new scene between characters from different movies, cobbled together from dialogue from their disparate films. The viewer can listen in to the conversation via cellphone, while phoneless viewers hear it on speaker.

I detest one-liner art and prefer density, so the description fascinated me. Equally fascinating were the decidedly negative reviews of "Train" that led me to the work in the first place. The one from Art Forum actually blames Klima for not fulfilling the expectations of his press release. Given that I haven't seen the work in the flesh, and may never do so, I'll have to withhold judgment, perhaps forever. But, always giving artists who layer the benefit of the doubt, I went to Klima's website.

Such a reward for the map geek! If we're speaking of body as landscape, here's a 2003 piece called "Terrain", which uses the projected image of a woman's naked body to create a light-responsive terrain.

"A large matrix of 225 electro-mechanical actuators conform a projection surface to match a 3d image/dataset in real-time. Using only light, the "terrain machine" surface reacts instantly to the light and shadow projected upon it. Viewers can "insert" themselves into the datastream, casting shadows on the input matrix, directly manipulating the surface, in real-time."

The website has a video, which demonstrates better than words or stills how the piece works. It's simple when you approach it, but lets you spin out multiple implications (not least, how the terrain retracts at the touch of a stranger, the female figure becoming by turns brazen and shy, curious and modest.) Lovely.

Perhaps more essential to his practice so far is his 2001 piece, "EARTH" (image at top), which digitally projects a variety of data about terrain and topography onto screen or rounded object, and permits a viewer with a tracking ball to rotate the terrain and remotely drill down data for desired locations. Sound familiar? Yes, this is the pre-Google-Maps-Hacks version: more difficult and much prettier.

Building on the "EARTH" project, Klima has produced "EARTH: Discrete Terrains":

"Based on the EARTH dataset, individual terrain sections are printed with the 3d Systems solid object printer. These rapid prototyping prints then become the molds for archival plaster casts. The casts then become a projection surface for digital data from the specific locations. Using only a single 35mm slide projector, "Discrete Terrains" are the absolute simplest technological reduction of the "EARTH" and "Terrain Machine" projects."

He has also used the data to create specific local terrains that relate to politics and emotions, such as in his project "EARTH: Political Landscape, Emotional Terrain". But his applications of "EARTH" data in artwork seem to peter out around 2004.

I looked for artist statements and project descriptions on his very usable website, but couldn't find anything satisfactory, so I got the following brief email interview yesterday.

*****

How does google maps (and its world) differ from EARTH and the various applications you've been creating around it? (In terms of aesthetics, purpose, proposed viewer experience, tech, etc.) I guess i'm partly asking how one being "art" and the other being "utilitarian" makes them different. Do you think the ubiquity of GIS apps has pushed the EARTH pieces more into the realm of art (and away from novelty or utility)?

I'd insist they are art from the beginning, and needed no additional pushing ;)

First off, EARTH and its offshoots have no utility. You can't "look up" a location, you have to know where it is ahead of time. There are no place names until you zoom all the way down to the terrain level, and these place names are only locations of weather stations, mostly at airports. There are no national borders, or any other features normally found on maps.

Second, EARTH is an exploration into the aesthetics of mapping, digitally, in three dimensions. It is also an exploration into the errors and limits of that mapping. I display the data in a natural state, I do not correct projection discrepancies, I don't make clean seams between the data patches, I don't do a fake "morph" or "blend" when traveling through layers, as Google Earth and the Hummer adverts on TV do. If you know what to look for, you can see just the exact moment they "fake" the transition. It is essentially an artifact of a viewpoint switching from a global overhead viewpoint into a "driver's seat" cruise over the surface view, as well as resolution differences in the available data.

Third, the imagery and how it is presented is entirely created by me, from the raw data. It is my parsing of the data, my choice of color, resolution, etc. I made lots of artistic decisions about how EARTH finally appears, and those decisions were based not on utility, or on mapping convention, or any other such thing. It is all simply "how I wanted it to look."

What things like GIS and Google Earth do, however, is make it clearer to people that my EARTH is indeed a different kind of thing all together. At the time I first showed EARTH, there was nuthin else like it, so people perhaps assumed it was less art, more map. But now that we do have utilitarian "earths" it becomes easier to view my EARTH from the perspective of art.

Have you abandoned EARTH or do you plan to push it forward?

I am proud to have made it long before Google, but I see no reason at this point to continue with it. I've said what I wanted to say with it. Though who knows, maybe it will come back in some way.

I'm loving the TRAIN piece since I have a bee in my bonnet about model railways right now. I'm wondering why you decided to pack it so densely (the model railway landscape issue, the gameboy, the film references, the cell phone). I have some ideas myself but I wanted to hear your thinking. Also, how did you choose the scenes and characters? Are they personal landmarks, or do they map to some sort of larger narrative or progression?

TRAIN comes from a lot of different urges. First, I just felt like there was a compelling and evocative connection between a railroad, a cellphone, and a gameboy. And of course historically these technologies share a common parentage.

Second, there is great pressure for new media artists to make work that is easy for the audience to comprehend, easy to display, doesn't require the audience to, Jah forbid, touch the work etc. The "problem" with my work is that it is NONE of those things. It is complex, some would say baroque, it is difficult for the viewer to see their agency in the work, something that often pisses them off. They dont get how it works, therefore it must be bad. I don't give a damn if large portions of the audience dont get how it works, its not my job to appease them. It is not a shopping website, I could care less about usability. So, this bad attitude I have creates a situation where sometimes I have to view the work as a "hobby" because it is damn hard to make a living making interactive work that pisses people off because it's hard to use. Oddly, TRAIN was actually sold for a handsome figure to a museum in Spain, so I feel somehow vindicated.

The characters are all marginal individuals. I see a bit of them all in myself. The general film themes were chosen largely by the model figures available. I went to a train store in Germany, and bought all the freakiest figures I could find. Drunks, punks, prostitutes, artists, cops, medical technicians, nudists, protestors. I then started thinking about films that have these characters in them, and selected the films that resonated most with me. The scenes were chosen based on both what is expressable within the landscape of a model railroad, and the significance of each scene in the film in question. I played with the scenes a lot, blending some together, adding elements to the scene and taking elements away from its original filmic rendition. There is a general progression on the layout as the train travels, from artist/nudist to protester/cop to punk/drunk to emt/prostitute. These are the basic character decisions the viewer makes, in more or less that order (the layout is branching and looping, so it is not always that exact progression).

And what are you working on now?

Well, funny you ask. I am basically performing sex change operations on gundam models and making my own universe of all female gundam super-heroes, essentially a combat force of dominatrix gundams, a.k.a. domdams. I will then use them to make scenes and build a narrative that will also have a strong digital component in the way of a fairly straightforward computer game aesthetic.

I have also spent a great deal of time inventing a procedural human animation system I will use for a variety of pieces, including the domdam work, as well as a piece I am working on with another artist, France Cadet. We are making a virtual/real robot circus with her as the ringmaster. We think its gonna be really fun and funny. It's also a great excuse to travel to Aix-en-Provence frequently ;)

fascinated

you know that spike in hits I got starting fourth of July weekend? Well, it wasn't a spike, but a sudden jump upward, which has been steadily climbing ever since.

Thus, I finally figured out where it's coming from. Most of the hits are coming from a google image search that is landing people on the map printed on a woman's ass I used as the primary image for my map tattoo post.

Somehow, that post had accumulated enough hits through normal means to rise to near the top of the google image search list of "tattoo" images. At the point that it rose high enough to appear in the early pages of image searches for "tattoo", people started arriving at my site. Because people were clicking over to my site's "tattoo" image, the image rose even higher in google image search, causing more people searching for tattoo images to find it.

The image is now on the second page of google image search's results for "tattoo". There must be a term for this kind of self-referential upward spiraling. Does anyone know what it is?

I'm absolutely fascinated. I knew (technically) that this sort of thing must happen all the time---I mean that a website page can rise in "popularity" through no fault (or value) of its own---but it's a different thing to watch it happening to mine. I'm going to be checking back in on a regular basis to see how high the "maptattooass" image rises on google "tattoo" image searches, and I'll let y'all know if the hit count keeps climbing.

You all, I'm sure, can guess what I'm ultimately after. So if anyone knows a way of diagramming, charting, or, of course course, mapping this trend, please let me know. Please!

(By the way, an earlier commenter's suggestion that I "use" the opportunity to recruit new readers is a great idea, but not up to me. Most of the hitters stay at my site for less than five seconds. Blink yourself, Malcolm Gladwell!)

odonymy taxonomy

yes, great minds do think alike!

Michelle Manafy at E Content, writes a readable essay arguing in favor of the organic, intuitive, and historically meaningful "user-generated" tagging as opposed to "an orderly top-down taxonomy". And she does this by comparing idiosyncratic street names to numbered and lettered grids.

When I think about these approaches, I can get lost in esoteric historical facts, but ultimately, the point of all this street naming is to help us get from point A to point B. Okay, naming them A and B is certainly clearer, but it isn't terribly intuitive. If I want to pick pumpkins at Angevine farm, I take a right onto Angevine Road off Route 341. Sure, you could argue that if and when the Angevines succumb to the perils of factory farming, the road will lose its meaning as it is overrun with development houses, but somehow I believe that the impact of its populist name will remain for decades after the Angevines host their last hayride.

Such is the appeal of user-generated tagging. Certainly, an orderly top-down taxonomy will be clearer and more accurate, but while it makes navigation neat, it can be imposing and unwelcoming. For those of us who have never, say, studied etymology, a taxonomy is not second nature.

I've been neglecting taxonomy (Greek for "arrangement method") in favor of mapping and geography, but this essay points to one of the many reasons why I think the subject areas are related. I'll address this soon, promise.

paradigm shifts

just a quickie. I'm sure this map of technological paradigm shifts has already long ago made the rounds of the internet, but I'm just discovering it now, so here 'tis.

This graph was put together by singularity guru Ray Kurzweil, whose name is so appropriate to the task, that it must be made up.

The chart demonstrates that the rate of technological change can be predicted, by showing that change accelerates at a steady rate. Start on the upper left where the horizontal axis tells you how long ago the change was, and the vertical axis tells you how long it was from that event until the next. As you can see, the time between events declines steadily as history moves forward.

The chart is drawn from 15 lists of "key events" collected from various sources. The key on the right will tell you which sources each event is drawn from. If you go to the chart Wikipedia link, you can find links to each of the sources.

The theory is that when we reach "singularity", i.e. the point at which the world becomes "post-human" and technological advances no longer depend upon the initiative of meat people, this chart will go all haywire.