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?

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).

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.

map tattoos, part ii

Image above found here.

i clearly haven't been paying much attention.

In my my map tattoos post from April of 2006, I wrote that "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." Then I asked, if that was the case then why weren't there more map tattoos out there.

The answer is: there are.

First of all, the tattoo post was hands down this blog's most popular post evarrr, featuring as it did a colored map of the world on a model's ass ... clearly not a tattoo, but meant to look like one. For a while the photo of the world map on the woman's ass was turning up on the second page of google image search. There was a point, when my blog went into remission, that I was getting a thousand hits a day just from people google-image-searching "tattoos."

I hadn't know people were so hungry for tattoo ideas. I'm glad--for the thousandth time--that I don't have one.

Since then, folks have been sending me pointers--both by email and in comments--to their own map tattoos and I haven't even been noticing all that much. But clearly it's time to update, and post some of these images. And maybe look again at the analysis.

So this one, to the left, is the first one I was sent, about a year ago, by email. Not to be mean, but I wouldn't have known it was a map if the emailer hadn't told me. She also didn't specify what the map was of, just that she planned to wrap another map around it.

I hope she's well on her way to finding the right map tattoo, and hope that some of the images below will give her inspiration.

This one is via Strange Maps. The woman depicted, Britta Oelschlaeger, is "a fan of [her hometown of] Hannover’s football team and ... completely crazy about maps.”

In comments, Desiree "got this cool map tattoo done by Jim at River of Ink in Appleton." It's on her back. Apparently, her lower back. It's more old school than the butt tattoos, but then those probably aren't real tattoos.

Nick Benson of ottergoose.net got this done on vacation in Hawai'i

I've now got the 8 primary islands of Hawaii on display for anyone who lifts of my sleeve**. The three islands I've been to are shaded red. Assuming that I'll be back to visit the remaining islands (and need to get more of the islands filled in), I asked the artist which shade of red he used. The answer? Monthly red. How classy... at least it's easy to remember.

Clearly whoever named that color has never seen anyone's "monthlies."

Yoni, who is apparently more of the lingam sort, has the whole world on his forearm.

So much for the commenters. My previously rather disappointing google search for "map tattoo" turned up a much richer store this time, including the new ass map tattoo at the top of this post (which also appears to be fake. And what is it with ass tattoos on women?). Other treasures:

From the URL at the top of the guy's back, this appears to be a fake put together by a site specifically created to mashup funky tattoo images. But I could be wrong. If you have the time/inclination to dig, please correct me in comments.

Google image search picked up this much cooler, but equally fake looking, underground map here. Also no info.

Nebraska's Creighton University has a website where they posted a spread of students with tattoos. The very cool, seemingly small one above is from

Kevin Miles,
Arts & Sciences senior

How many tattoos?
A solid map of the world on the upper inside of his right forearm.
A compass and sun with the words “Adventure” and “Explore”.
Why get tattoos?
Had both tattoos done while in Thailand with his roommate two years ago. He loves to travel and wants to join the Peace Corps when he graduates.
Do people know you have tattoos?
Most people do since they are in pretty visible spots

Apparently, Napoleon's Australia pirate map tattoo sort of shows the extent of our trip. Whatever that means. This is creepily Pillow Bookish, in its visual invitation to peel it off when the wearer is dead.

And here's a more patriotic map of Australia.

Alejandro uses the three dimensional nature of his body (there's a back and a side!) to depict the world, in shiny shininess. If the shape weren't so familiar, it might look like a medical photo of a skin disease. (see also Kevin Miles.)

Tatiana's political map of Brazil is sexier, I think, and not because she's wearing a bikini over it.

But I think the pièce de résistance is this article about Brangelina, which tells us that not only does Ange have "over a dozen tattoos, including the geographical co-ordinates for all four of her children" (begging one to ask: geographic coordinates for what? Where they were born? Where they were jacked adopted from? Where they are right this second, Mrs. Weasley-style?) but this tattoo, depicted to the left, on Brad's broadening flank, is supposedly a diagram of the levees of New Orleans. The article sez:

Brad's unusual back tattoo comprises groupings of horizontal black lines, with bizarre boxed shapings below.

The strangest combination appears to be inspired by a map of the levees in New Orleans, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the systems failed.

More than 1,800 people died in the storm and during the rescue debacle which followed, mostly the poor, sick and disadvantaged. Costing around $81billion, it was also the costliest disaster in U.S. history.

Since Hurricane Katrina, Brad and Angelina have bought a home in the Louisiana city and the actor has been heavily involved in local building projects.

So, what about map tattoos and identity? Well, let's mention a few really obvious things first. Tattoos are by now pretty much universally accepted in the industrialized West, except in certain subcultures. So de rigueur are they, in fact, that the internet has helpfully provided us with multiple tattoo design sites and blogs (many of which provided the tattoo photos above) designed specifically to help people find tattoos they haven't already seen on everyone and their little brother.

Second: maps and mapping are really, really popular at the mo'. I'm not going to go into this right now. I'm planning a post on it later, when I've had the time to read some more of the books that have come out recently about mapping 'n' stuff. But it is; it's in the air, mapping. Third: in the past two years, Web 2.0 has gone from an industry catchphrase to an embarrassing anachronism, and everyone knows how to post pictures online now. So the above two obvious things might mean that we have a sudden spate of map tattoos, but it also might be that the people with map tattoos are just posting them now, where they weren't before.

And some of these, like the subway maps, which might be fake anyway, or the outline world maps, seem to have been chosen simply because they look cool ... or are cool, conceptually.

But then there are the travelers' tattoos, like the one of Hawai'i, or Australia, or the one of China in the original post, where the tattoo is a marker of the place one has been to. It's a way of claiming possession of the places you've been, a possession similar to Henry VIII's brother Arthur's boast the morning after his wedding night with Catherine of Aragon: "I've been to Spain." That's what the reddening of the Hawai'ian islands the traveler has been to reminds me of: hymen blood, not monthly. Interesting that the travelers' tattoos are all on men. The Hawai'i tattooed guy's girlfriend got a tattoo with a similar intent on the same trip ... of Hawai'ian flowers.

The student's blacked-in world map is explained by his wanting to travel and join the Peace Corps. In this case, the map is a promise made to himself, to possess the world through travel. There's an added element here, embodied in the Peace Corps ideal, of the pending "citizen of the world," or the nascent member of the "international community," that group of geographically and nationally unmoored "experts" whose job is to make one part of the world intelligible to the other, but not necessarily vice versa. (I won't go into it now, but having grown up on the fringes of the "international community," I have isshooz.)

So it's all the more interesting to analyze Brangelina's tattoos about their children. Brad apparently has a tattoo of a blessing to celebrate Maddox's existence: not the child's name, not his birthdate or symbolic words or numbers, but a Buddhist blessing in Sanskrit. Pitt saves the possessive tattooing of names and dates for Ange alone, with a tat of her birthdate in Khmer. The womb raider, on the other hand---already widely reviled for laying claim to countries and cultures by adopting their children---doubles this notion back on itself, by making geographical coordinates symbolize her children (rather than something more individual, like a name or a birthdate), and then laying claim to the whole---nations, cultures, geographical place, and children---by tattooing these coordinates on her body.

And the "New Orleans" tat seems to be a fairly benign identity tattoo, a symbol trailing behind the Jolie-Pitts' purchase of a NOLA house. If it's actually what the media says it is, it's a mild protest of a historical wrong; turning New Orleans and its levees into a metonym for the Katrina disaster, and associating Pitt with both the protest, and the amelioration efforts. It's not him taking over a location to associate himself with it, it's him taking over a metonym to mark himself a good guy.

There's more to say about all of this, but I'm tapped for now. Maybe I'll check in on map tattoos again.

ETA:

This map tattoo by a cartographer of the US interstate system. Tip from comments below.

ghosts of the river

Performance photos jacked from ShadowLight's flickr stream.

on the border tip, if you think about stories white Americans would tell of the U.S.-Mexican border, you might think of anecdotes about illegal border crossers being caught, or the signs warning cars of families on the highway near Tijuana. Tall tales from Minutemen about a good or a bad day catching wetbacks. Thoughtful snippets of shoppers who kept mum when they saw someone stuffed into the trunk of a car, that sort of thing. Stories about people trying to get in from outside, told from the point of view of inside, stories that take into consideration only the land to the immediate "front" and "back" of the border, and not the volumes of land beyond it on either side.

But if you think about the stories Mexicans and Mexican Americans would tell, it's no longer a bilateral in/out kind of a narrative, with the penetration of the border being the climax. Because the reasons for leaving Mexico--and the reasons for entering the U.S.--are legion, and the paths that lead to the border are many, even if the paths that lead away from the border are few. The border stories, then, are not all about whether one gets through it or not, or even whether or not one survives the experience.

I had the enormous privilege a few weeks ago of attending a workshop production (i.e. a presentation of a part of a performance that isn't finished yet) of a new piece by the Balinese-style shadow puppetry company ShadowLight Productions.

Ghosts of the River is a collection of stories about the U.S.-Mexico border by Chicano playwright Octavio Solis, whose last play, June in a Box, I had some problems with but really enjoyed. The company only performed two of the stories, each unrelated except that they both took place on and in the Rio Bravo/Grande.

The other important detail about this project is that it is art-directed by Favianna Rodriguez, the community organizer, artist-entrepreneur powerhouse, who is just the kind of impeccably-credentialed community activist type whose art usually suffers for it. Favianna, on the other hand--who knows really how she does it--is also a fantastic artist ... fantastic in both senses of the word.

Put the three elements together into a dream-team and you could easily have mush. In this case, though, "dream team" is apt. As I said, the workshop only performed two stories, but both were terrific and the puppetry was wonderful.

The first story was about a Mexican woman murdered by her abusive husband, who haunts the river waiting for him to try to cross so she can drown him. The second (more moving because more realistic) story dramatizes the competitive friendship that develops between an American border guard, and a child "coyote" who makes money helping Mexicans cross illegally.

I loved Rodriguez's designs for the piece. Her characteristic organic/cubist faces and figures worked perfectly with the Balinese-style puppets, and details of her landscapes are perhaps more wonderful executed in light and shadow than in ink on paper. The photos here don't do the piece justice.

The team working together on this piece numbered about twenty, and the set-up was complex. I loved the whole thing. They'll be working on a full-length piece for Brava Theater in 2009 and I can't wait to see it. Definitely recommend keeping an eye out for it. I'll review it when it comes out.

austin kleon's maps of fictional worlds

austin Kleon has a nifty post about maps of fictional worlds ... primarily made by the authors themselves.

My undergrad thesis argued that world-building wasn’t just for fantasy and sci-fi writers—every tale has a setting, every tale creates a world in the reader’s mind—and it explored ways that drawing that world (visual thinking!) can lead to better fiction.

Some of my favorite “lit’ry” books are accompanied by maps.

I've talked before on this subject and have nothing new to say at this time, but check out the post for images and links to other maps, especially in Kleon's previous posts, and in the comments section.

Via Gwenda.

Happy Birthday, Walter Gropius!

i don't know if google is way too cool, or if it's the new Absolut vodka, but I found out that today is Walter Gropius' 125th birthday by seeing this googlogo (above).

I associate Gropius with all my atlas(t)y stuff, because the first time I learned about him was when I was a bus tour guide in Berlin and had to mention the Bauhaus Museum as we passed it near the canal bordering the Tiergarten--which building was, itself, designed by Gropius.

(Only a short stretch away was the site where Rosa Luxembourg's body was found in the canal months after her assassination, and in another direction the site in the Tiergarten where Karl Liebknecht was shot as well. I love that these were all contemporaries whose significance is siloed. And Berlin is just chockablock full of historically charged sites.)

The museum/archive is depicted below.

schiaparelli and mars maps

annalee newitz recently contributed an awesome post to io9 comparing 19th century maps of Mars to current science, which she got from an even awesomer (if possible) post on BibliOdyssey. Annalee compares the historical maps to more recent satellite photos from the 1990's. Peacay of BibliOdyssey show a buncha Schiaparelli maps, and a Percival Lowell map, and talks about the (to me, now) well-known history of the canals and the Martians.

What impresses me about this Schiaparelli map (Schiaparelli was the eye-talian who called the structures above depicted "canali," which simply means "channels" in Italian but was misunderstood as "canals" in English, thereby setting off the intelligent-life-on-Mars craze) is how wacko-Max-Ernst-modernist-sci-fi-y they look. Is this the source of a particular aesthetic? Or as Peacay put it:

Schiaparelli's (in)famous 'canali' turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet's surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn't really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.

atlas(t): the galleon trade edition

yes, darlings and darlingettes! Our precious atlas(t) is all growed up! S/he is now popping out puppies!

If that's too cryptic, what I mean to say is that the long bloglessness is finally over. I'm going to half time at my job in July and will celebrate that fact by going on vacation in the Philippines.

But it's not just any vacation in the Philippines. I will be traveling with a group of fartists involved in the project Galleon Trade, an international artists exchange along the route of the old Spanish galleon trade: Philippines, California, and Mexico. July/August 2007 Bay Area artists will be showing work at three galleries in Manila. In 2008 Filipino and Mexican artists will be showing work at the Luggage Store gallery in San Francisco. And then in 2008/9 Cali and Philippine artists will go to Mexico.

It just sounds like a project, doesn't it? Oh, but, my dears, think of the urbanness, the cityscapes and infrastructures, the books, ideas, histories and arts that will pass before my eyes as I travel along. Think of the atlas(t)iness. Yeah, I thought of it too. And got very excited. So excited, in fact, that I wanted to redesign atlas(t) specifically for this occasion. Such things have been done before.

But then I thought: no, it is wrong. atlas(t) is s/heself and must not be tampered with (much). So instead, atlas(t) had a baby blog, atlas(t): the galleon trade edition, which will be the atlas(t) of choice for the duration.

What does this mean, gentle reader? I'm not sure yet. I do know that, for a while, I will be spending all my time bringing up baby. All my atlas(t)ian insight will be filtered through galleon-shaped frames. But as time moves on, I suspect I'll have things to say and do that are clearly shiplike and things that aren't. And perhaps I'll be sorting posts into atlas(t) proper and atlas(t): galleon days. Who knows?

I hope this new project sounds interesting to you and that you'll transfer your attention over there. Here's the link again.

See ya on the dark side. The shizzle begins after June 30.

urban flora

the description on youtube says:

Urban Flora is a project that aims to alter city dwellers' experience of their environment through a series of stickers that identify objects in the urban environment. These "urban flora", such as mailboxes, lamp posts, and fire hydrants, are presented in a traditional taxonomy such as one would see in an arboretum or botanical garden. By defining these man-made artifacts in the context of the botanical world, the project draws attention to the presence or absence of nature in the urban space.

but it's really just a time-spender for urban artsies with too much time on their hands.

Either that, or these people are "artists" who need some "projects" under their belts. That would be indicated by the earnestness of the text. I'd actually prefer the former. My friends and I used to sit around and drink beer and come up with ideas galore for projects. Sometimes we'd even do them, but we mostly just sat around and talked. Doing the projects was problematic because it always required some work, and the projects were always one liners, like this one, so it never felt quite sane to spend 200 hours--or 20 or even two--making something that people would look at for a second, say "huh" about, and then walk away.

But I realize that these sorts of one-off projects are how artists cut their teeth so I'm trying not to be too much of a bitch. And it's a neat idea, for about a second. Then it's just precious. My main issue is art that purports to invite random mans on da streets to "think about" something. Unless the artist is very careful, and very thoughtful, these invitations are more along the lines of demands. Condescending demands that offer an ill-defined idea in the confidence that viewers have never thought of such things before.

Such projects also do all the thinking necessary for engaging with the piece, so that when your two seconds of engagement are up, so is all the thinking around the piece.

The problem here specifically is that this idea requires a great deal more thought and discussion to really give anything new to the random viewer. Pretty much every city dweller has thought, at some point or another, about the lack of vegetation, or wished for more trees or green or just plain shade. Pointing out that we've "replaced" trees and shrubs with hydrants and streetlamps doesn't really cut it--for anyone.

The fire hydrant sticker was starting to get somewhere interesting with its line about hydrants now serving multiple purposes. But the format of the stickers was too brief to allow thought to go anywhere. This could have been solved in a number of ways:

1. making the stickers a little bigger and giving oneself a little more leeway to spin out fantasies
2. making a lot more stickers about a lot more objects, and shaping a discussion by sheer accumulation
3. adding a url to a website that included longer (and maybe not so earnest) discussions about the taxonomy of street furniture, or a map of said street furniture, or a taxonomic table or family tree, or maybe simply an interactive component where viewers could suggest other objects to taxonomize

I hate to see a good idea go to waste.