atlas(t)

earth at night

zee Earths, she ees so byootiful.

Never mind the visual malapropism of an entire planet turned away from the sun. Just click on the image to enjoy the detail. I love my planet. Not gonna leave.

spam/maps

even before you know what this photograph is, it's a little disturbing. When you find out it's a map made of dried spam, it's just gross.

That's part of the point. It's visceral: oil often drips down the wall from the spam, sometimes, on a hot day, you can smell it. In community galleries dogs are drawn in from the street by it.

The map above is part of the "Axis of Evil" SPAM/MAPS: a chart of Iran and Iraq. (The rest of the installation shows North Korea.)

For over six years, Mike Arcega's been making and showing his SPAM/MAPS of different geographic regions for different political purposes. As far as I know, his first one was a map of all of the islands of the Philippines, by island. I've also seen a map of the United States, by state. For the atlas(t) show I helped organize, he created a map of the world, by country.

SPAM occupies a privileged place in Asian/Amerian lore, especially among Filipinos. It is quintessentially American, and yet quintessentially corruptible into the manifestation of a hybrid culture -- just ask the Hawaiian consumers of SPAM musubi or Koreans who fry SPAM with kimchi to eat over rice. SPAM isn't just a simplistic symbol of American militaristic or cultural hegemony; it is also a visceral symbol of the mutability, the syncretism, of both materials and values.

Cast Away 2002

Arcega bakes the SPAM in an oven until it's dry and then cuts out the shapes. He installs them by pinning them to the wall with straight pins. Often he'll paint the wall a flat blue, to indicate the ocean. This flat ocean that highlights and separates is a continuous motif in Arcega's work. His 2002 installation "Cast Away" recast his maps in 3-D. He created a series of islands, each dominated by a structure of industrial first world commercial culture (oil rigs, a freeway overpass, a billboard). Each island was built upon a miniature motorized toy car, which Arcega then set loose upon a blue formica table, again representing the ocean (click here for an animation).

It's a three dimensional map, a kinetic map, a satire of a map, a map of how hard it is to map culture. It's hard not to see a parody of -- and an angry commentary on -- the Philippine archipelago in the resulting bumper-car mess of the installation. Arcega's work is nearly unique in explicitly political Asian American art in that it both delves and attacks -- fruitfully, humorously -- without sacrificing complexity. He accuses without laying blame.

His most recent work, as all of his work does, plays with linguistic/material puns. Using "manila folders" as a primary material, Arcega has created a number of remarkably accurate artifacts of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines, including a miniature Spanish galleon (christened "El Conquistadork") that actually floats, and that Arcega sailed across Tomales Bay in 2004, and two complete suits of Spanish armor.

El Conquistadork at the Lucky Tackle gallery 2004

In galleries, the galleon is installed against a painted map of the Tomales Bay excursion, early-modernified to look like an explorer's map, and showing the triangular route of the afternoon's trip, referring to the triangular routes of Manila galleons between San Francisco, the Philippines and Mexico.

movie timeline

if the world of film were a broad consensus reality, this movie timeline would be our history.

Paul Kerensa is compiling "historical" events, as depicted in movies, into a timeline. It's funny (especially the person who insisted on mapping out every single time the predators from "Alien vs. Predator" must have come down to Earth to hunt since prehistory) but it's also mind-boggling. Mind boggling, that is, thinking how large and complex and detailed this project could become, especially since he's accepting (asking for, really) help from others.

People could really, really get into timelining their favorite films. A timeline of the Star Wars double trilogy could be a project of its own. Or imagine if someone wanted to detail the sequence of events in A Very Long Engagement, or Memento. It's already begun with Star Trek movies, which are already a consensus, collaborative reality created over a longer period of time.

What will happen when (inevitably) two films compete for the same timeslot -- and the events they want to fill that slot with are mutually incompatible? I can't think of any examples, but believe me, they'll come up. Not least with alternate history -- yeah! What about alternate histories? I believe they made a film of Fatherland, for example. Where will those events belong? Will this essentially 2-D timeline have to become 3-D (linking to other pages) to accommodate alternate timelines? It's pretty fun to break your head over.

Don't forget to contribute your favorite movies!

clui

although visually boring, as maps go, the above image hides a mountain of fascinating information, fascinatingly organized. It is the home-base interactive map for the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Land Use Database.

The ... Database is a collection of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. ... The database is a free public resource, designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the national landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society. Some sites included in the database are works by government agencies involved in geo-transformative activities, ... industrially altered landscapes, ... museums and displays related to land use, and one of the most thorough listings of land art sites available.

The database describes these sites, and offers links for more detailed information. In many cases information on how to visit these sites is provided, so that they may be directly experienced.

The online database is just a sampling of what is included in the files at CLUI central in Los Angeles, where the files are open to the public. The website is also a place where you can download a form to suggest a site to CLUI to be included in the database.

Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" land sculpture in the Great Salt Lake is a land art site included in the "culture" section of the Land Use Database.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI, which I've heard pronounced "clue-y", 'dough I don't know if dis is how dey do) is a research organization that has been around since 1994 and is, according to its mission statement, "neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization." It seeks to create "common ground in 'land use' debates." What they actually do, for those of you getting frustrated with all this language, is collect and archive photographs, data, and other information about a variety of sites, where the diversity of human types of land use is demonstrated. Then they think about stuff. Then they put together exhibitions (they're pretty multidiscplinary so you can see their shows at transportation museums as well as art galleries), public tours, and books, and they make their photographs and materials available to journalists and other folks as a public resource.

They are also the lead organization in the development of the American Land Museum, a fascinating project using dramatic landscape exhibit sites around the country to create "a museum both situated in and made up of the landscapes of America."

The Cape Cod Canal, the widest sea-level canal in the world, is a site included in the "water" section of the Land Use Database.

The CLUI Land Use Database typifies my feelings about contemporary critical geography: it is unsatisfying. You'll probably smack your forehead when I say that "unsatisfying" isn't necessarily a negative term in this case, but it isn't. We're used to (or, at least, I'm used to) expecting from interdisciplinary work something that satisfies the demands of each of the disciplines it taps, as well as giving a satisfying overall feel.

But then, most of the "interdisciplinary" work I've encountered thus far hasn't been truly interdisciplinary (e.g.: inter-genre artistic work that claims interdisciplinarity through an artificial separation of the genres it uses), or else it crosses semi-artificial borders between neighboring disciplines that necessarily rely on one another (e.g.: history and archaeology.) In the latter case, the work itself serves to highlight both the fact that these disciplines are separated in the human mind, and the fact that they can't be rendered discrete for many practical applications.

Truly interdisciplinary work like CLUI's, to my mind, doesn't reveal artificial divisions or constraints, but rather forces a way through very real divisions and constraints. This creates a feeling of discomfort, of being cognitively fragmented when experiencing the work. For example, my expectation with the interactive map above would be that we remain inside the map's conceit: click on a state and get a larger map of that state with sites delineated within. Click on a site, and get a larger map of that site, with places on that map to link to information. That's my experience of interdisciplinary maps: the map is an overriding conceit; cartography is the ruling discipline, and other disciplines must work within its confines.

That's not what happens here. Click on a state, or click on a category (like "culture" or "water" or "military" or "industrial") on the side, and you'll get, instead of another map, a listing of sites, with a representative image of that site on the side. Sometimes the representative image of the site is a map, but usually it's a photograph. Click on the site marker on the list, and you'll get a brief site page, with the single photograph or image, a brief description of the site and its importance, and links to the site located on google earth, as well as to the site's own webpage, if there is one, at whatever institution is responsible for the site. You'll also get directions on how to get to the site, which are, quite possibly, the most important information in the database.

Nowhere are all these sites marked together on a map. It seems like a pretty obvious oversight, unless you consider the fact that you're not supposed to get all of your information about these sites from CLUI. CLUI's database only collects and points you to the sites. You're supposed to go see them for yourselves, not sit back and look at an overview map of all the pretty land art and feel good about it. The pointers to information cross disciplinary lines; you'll have to "code-switch" (switch your idiomatic protocols) when going from one to another. One will be a map, another will be text, another will be photographs (some aerial, some landscape, some detail), another will be driving directions.

It's complicated, CLUI seems to be saying, and there's no way we can satisfy you in the matter of land use, without oversimplifying to a criminal degree. We can't make it pretty, we can't make it overseeable, we can't make it easily comprehensible. All we can do is help you find the things you might want to find. Then do what you will with them.

waiting for amerigo

i mean Amerigo Vespucci, of course. (I'm using him as a stand-in for cartographers and cartography.) The theme today is people on the Gulf of Mexico waiting for maps so that they can get their interrupted lives in order.

The above image is a NASA image of New Orleans in August 2005 (above) and in 2000 (below). The darker color of the above image shows flooding through the urban areas. We're looking at this today because the much-trusted FEMA is again delaying issuing maps of New Orleans' most flood-prone neighborhoods. Home-builders and rebuilders have been waiting for these maps for months so that they'll know how much flood insurance they'll have to pay for their plots of land. Many fear that they won't be able to afford the financing if their new houses fall into a high-risk zone. FEMA is supposed to be issuing new building standards "as early as this week" (and as late as ...?), and says that builders don't need to worry. If they build before the new maps are issued, they won't be liable for the higher insurance rates.

Yeah, and they're gonna get that in writing, right?

Just to add a little critical distance to this issue, though: blackinformant.com discusses the recent CNN poll on whether or not people should even be allowed to build in flood-prone areas. The essence of the argument is that if FEMA continues to cover for people who insist on building homes in disaster-prone areas, then they're basically subsidizing risky behavior with our taxes. Taking his cue from a Cato Institute report, he compares California building in landslide and fire-prone areas to NOLA building in flood-prone areas.

I find this a somewhat specious argument. Landslide and fire-prone California areas tend to be up on the hills and on the margins of more developed residences ... i.e. expensive, wealthy suburbs, whereas flood-prone Gulf Coast areas are, of course, low-lying ... i.e. the less healthy, poorer neighborhoods in town. Disaster-area Californians have a choice where to build; flooded New Orleanians often don't.

And here's an article from Brazoria County, Texas, where local emergency management agencies are waiting for the governor to make up his mind about who gets to make decisions on evacuations. The local agencies are trying to map out evacuation routes (they're not waiting to do this, thank goodness) but will need to know who calls the shots -- and orders the evacuation -- to be able to proceed to put the structure of their evacuation plan in place. Local authorities, who traditionally get the decision to call for evacuation, would prefer to keep it that way and not centralize that authority (with the governor). But with hurricane season only two months away, the key thing right now is that a decision be made.

Check out the article for detailed information about how local emergency management works.

window seat

above displayed are sample pages of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, a fabulous book by my fellow Other magazine staffer, Gregory Dicum. The book is so cool I got it for my Dad for Christmas without once looking at the name of the author, and didn't realize who had written it until I was directed to his website by a link he posted on the othermag blog.

The book is a guide to reading the landscape of the United States from the window of an airplane. This includes maps, lots of aerial photography, and information about geology, geography, history (especially of land use), as well as explanations of how to recognize what you're looking at. It's heavily designed (without corners!) and easy on the eyes. It almost gives me a reason to sit in the window seat, despite my mild claustrophobia. (I said, "almost" ... that's why I gave it to my Dad.)

Window Seat was published in 2004 and a European Window Seat is due out this year.

who owns the internet?

what you see here is a map of who controls the internet, created by Ben Worthen and Bill Cheswick at CIO Magazine. Worthen wanted to find out if there was a burgeoning monopoly on internet control and router ownership and ask Cheswick to create this map.

What is this ball of colors? It is the North American Internet, or more specifically a map of just about every router on the North American backbone, (there are 134,855 of them for those who are counting). The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S.

He notes:

it is not geographic. Things on the right aren't on the East Coast and so forth. It looks the way it looks for readability purposes. The lines are actual connections between routers, but the length of the lines, again, do not correspond to geographic distance.

He ends with:

So what can we conclude by looking at this? For starters, while AT&T and Verizon are clearly the two biggest owners at the core (they dwarf Qwest, the other remaining baby bell), they don’t own anywhere near enough for us to be worried about a monopoly. Also, the cable companies really own very little of the core, which isn’t much of a surprise since they are primarily focused on the last mile. Nonetheless, it is startling to see. ... You can see which company each router is registered to. Many still have old names like alter.net (now Verizon) and it is pretty interesting to see the extent to which the telecommunications market has consolidated over the last decade.

So which is it? Are we heading toward monopoly of the internet are are we not? Despite his placating language, it sounds, in fact, like we are. The map we see here, he does not make clear, is a picture of an internet in ownership flux. It's in the process of consolidating; soon enough, the pretty colors will become fewer, and the areas each infects will become larger.

Again, he doesn't sound the alarm because this map focuses on the core, and not on the "last mile". But it really doesn't matter which part -- the center or the terminal -- you control, you can still block information from passing. In fact, it's easier to do from the center.

So ... yes, pretty picture ... no, not unscary.

You can download a really detailed pdf of the map by going to the link above and clicking on the image of the map.

via boing boing.

bufferzone japantown

i posted this originally on my personal blog SeeLight but have cross-posted it here because, well, it belongs here.

Hyphen magazine's blog reported recently that San Francisco's Japantown is up for sale. The commercial center of SF J-town is mostly owned by one company, Kintetsu of Japan. Their holdings comprise two malls and two hotels, and there's also an AMC movie theater nearby. The malls house around forty small, Japanese American-owned businesses. Kintetsu is offloading the malls and hotels and AMC is selling the theater ... and the Asian American community feels its center is threatened.

Okay, yawn, who cares, right? I mean we're at war, fer godssake. Plus, you didn't even know San Francisco had a Japantown. Obviously it was pretty much dead already if you didn't know about it. So really, why should you care?

Well, it's not a quick answer. To understand it, you have to know something of the history. You see, SF J-town is only ... already ... a hundred years old. After the earthquake and fire of 1906 leveled San Francisco's Western Addition, a 40-some-block Japantown sprang up like weeds in the cracks. The usually celebrated Federal Housing Act of 1934, an attempt to offer Depression-impoverished whites a new chance, also identified racial districts and made housing loans available to minorities only in their specific ethnic enclaves, encouraging geographical racial segregation. So in the first half of the century, the new influx of Japanese American immigrants found its locus in this district.

In 1942, the SF "Little Tokyo" community was cleared when Japanese Americans on the west coast were rounded up and sent to internment camps. Here's not the place to write about the cultural and personal devastation wrought by this chapter of history. Suffice it to say the JA community never fully recovered. The Western Addition's multicultural Fillmore District, which included Japantown in the north, received a huge influx of African Americans migrating from the South to industrial jobs on the West Coast during WWII; many of them took over areas vacated by interned Japanese. After the war, the Fillmore corridor was largely African American to the south (and thriving at that) and Japanese American to the north.

Thriving or not, the urban renewal projects of the 1950's began a systematic clearing of both the Af-Am and JA sections of the Fillmore, often using eminent domain, which left formerly thriving community members propertyless. Especially when Geary Street was widened into an 8-lane street right at its intersection with Fillmore Street, a huge geographical barrier was driven (literally) between the JAs and Af-Ams. Subsequent organizing in the 1960s slowed the "slum clearances" in J-town, and later investment by the Japanese government and Japanese businesses brought Japanese-American-centered commercial development to the area.

The Asian American Movement of the late 60s and early 70s (modeled after the Af Am civil rights movement) was the background for much of this community organizing. The children of interned JAs who grew up knowing nothing about internment were rediscovering this history and creating a treasury of information, documentation, and cultural expression about Asian American history and identity. In 1971 the city-sponsored Japanese American Community and Cultural Center of Northern California was founded, giving the community a cultural locus and putting the official seal of approval on Japanese American community continuity. By this time, however, most of the JAs had moved out of J-town. J-town became more of a cultural and commercial center than a residential one.

During this time of JA consolidation, the African American community was being displaced by wave after wave of clearings pushing them farther south, into the Bayview district, or containing them in smaller and smaller areas of the Tenderloin and the Fillmore. The still-thriving segment of the African American community moved to the suburbs, especially across the Bay, and the rest were contained in housing-project-heavy areas.

Have a looky here now:

This map shows income levels in San Francisco from the 2000 Census. The darker the green, the poorer the area. The two darkest green values form what is roughly a large "Y" shape on the right half of the map. The upper right tip of the right arm of the Y is Chinatown. Below that , on the diagonal, is the African American and Vietnamese immigrant-heavy Tenderloin (above Market St.) and the South of Market warehouse district (below Market). The trunk of the Y is the Latino-dominated Mission District. the square to the bottom right (off the Y) is the Potrero Hill Projects (Af Am heavy). And the left-hand arm of the Y is the Af Am dominated Fillmore District discussed above. (The poorest, darkest green areas aren't showing up on this map because they are to the south of here.)

Now go back to the tip of the left arm of the Y, where that big Fillmore rectangle of dark green is. It is bounded in the north by Geary Blvd., and just north of Geary is a medium green, medium-income strip, two blocks deep and about ten blocks long, pressured on three sides by the white and tan of upper-income communities, and on one side by the dark greens of the impoverished. Guess what that is. Right, that's Japantown.

What I'm trying to get at is that J-town is that thing, that geographical model minority buffer zone set up between more affluent white communities and impoverished black communities. When you look at Asian American enclaves all over the US, you'll see that they are geographically, literally, buffers between black and white, poor and rich. This was apparent from New Orleans' 30-year-old Vietnamese American community, which was destroyed in Katrina (Wendy Cheng writes about this in issue 8 of Hyphen magazine and you can access maps of racial concentrations here), and it is apparent in every major American city.

When you look at the destruction of traditional Asian American enclaves all over the US, you'll see that they are inevitably inner city or centrally located areas that are being pressured either by financial districts (as is San Francisco's Chinatown) or by wealthy residential areas (as is San Francisco's Japantown). The population of major ports of entry has reached a critical mass. At this point, people care less about their neighborhood being buffered from poor and dark people, and more about having a place to live in at all. Thus, the middle-income, middle class, middle race zone gets pushed out because they can afford (barely) to go elsewhere. Only the wealthy and the destitute (who will be out on the street otherwise, and often end up there anyway) can stay.

Now that we know where the money is, let's look at where the Asians are:

Remember while you look at this: the darker the green, the more Asians. The darkest greens are in the upper right and the lower left. The upper right is Chinatown, where impoverished new Chinese immigrants go, and below that the Tenderloin where impoverished Southeast Asian immigrants abound. The lower left is the outer Richmond, which is heavily middle-class East Asian immigrants, 1.5's and second generation. The dark olives are in the Tenderloin (poor, immigrant Vietnamese) and the heavily middle-class East Asian Richmond and Sunset (lower and upper left).

By the time you get to medium green, you're down below thirty percent Asian. Funny, isn't it? You can still see the little strip of J-town (the little strip of medium green in the center, right where it says "Geary Blvd.") but this time it's not because it's a buffer economic class between rich and poor, but rather because it's a strip of bridge connecting the working class immigrant Asian communities of downtown (right) with the middle class immigrant and second generation Asian communities of the Avenues (left).

J-town has become a connective corridor.

Before doing this analysis that you see here, I didn't realize that J-town was geographically a bridge between poor, crammed ethnic enclave and wealthy, nominally ethnic suburb, but I was aware that it was exactly that culturally. For years, the pan-ethnic Asian Pacific American community of San Francisco has been using J-town as a center of organizing and meeting for a number of reasons. By virtue of its geographical centrality, it's easily accessible from all points of the city. It's pleasantly middle-class, not cramped and dirty and drearily poor like Chinatown. You can find parking there. Plus you can go there to be entertained. There are bars, restaurants, shops galore, a movie theater -- there even used to be a bowling alley.

But it's not just geographical. Because of the history -- the clearing of the Japanese Americans and their partial return; the city-approved cultural and commercial centers -- J-town has become a kind of cultural/commercial/organizing center for the entire Asian Pacific American community of San Francisco. The J-town merchants have close ties to Asian American organizers and will let us organize cultural events in their commercial spaces. There are several nonprofit cultural organizations with their own spaces in J-town, who produce their own events, activities and classes, and who will offer space to other non-profits for the same purpose. In J-town I've organized and participated in: creative writing classes, a low-income teen web design class, multiracial advocacy meetings, readings, film screenings, dance performances, language classes, bilingual newpaper redaction, zine workshops, panel discussions, angry community town hall meetings, 9/11 vigils, days of remembrance, and on and on. And that's not to mention the karaoke.

Being an in-between class/race, Asian American communities have been pushed hither and yon throughout the last century and a half, now serving as scapegoat, now serving as protection. We have adapted and adapted. Since the late 60s, one of our methods of adaptation has been to form nonprofits which turn the locus of the community culture from a geographical space into a virtual space -- located in the idea of the organization rather than in a particular storefront or building. The internet revolution took this one step further, by placing the idea of the organization online. Asian Americans took to online organizing like fish to water, mainly because we were already organized abstractly, virtually ... because our history in this country has not been a history of owning the ground beneath our feet.

But adapting to geographical containment in this manner is not enough. We stay alive by compromising with racist government policies, but we thrive when we can come together in the flesh. When we have a geographical space to go to, we have an actual connection to people not directly involved in online/virtual organizing, which is necessarily a province of the thriving middle-class, latter generations. Since Asian American organizers were driven out of Chinatown in the 70s by rising rents and evictions, we've lost touch with the poorest immigrants of our communities. But through J-town, which has big Asian grocery chains, big Asian language bookstores, and even Asian-style dollar stores, we can at least connect physically, if only passingly, with all of the Asians, of all classes and ethnicities, in San Francisco. And they, brought near the centers of cultural organizing, have the opportunity to connect with us.

J-town, pushed by the city to become a buffer zone between poor African American Fillmore, and rich, white American Western Addition/Marina, made of itself a bridge between classes. Now that real estate pressure in the city is such that buffer zones are no longer needed or wanted, the city will allow -- or even push -- J-town to die. The destruction of Japantown's commercial center, through a laissez faire policy from the city, would result in a loss of this opportunity for different classes and generations of Asian Americans to connect physically. Whites don't need J-town anymore, but J-town still needs J-town. Because J-town, for a century now, has offered much much more than merely a space for the people who actually live or conduct business there. It's become a center of pride and identity for a community that is still almost entirely ignored by mainstream America at its upper levels, still stereotyped and mocked at its middle levels, and still excluded and disadvantaged at its lowest levels. Asian America still needs to do its thing, and as long as that is the case, we need J-town.

(Check out all this data on American Factfinder, an extremely cool website with maps and data breakdowns of the US Census.)

you are here!

welcome to atlas(t), a blog about mapping of all sorts, anything that reminds us of mapping, and anything taxonomic, categorical, or otherwise made to delineate or define.

We know ... that's pretty broad. We're assuming this field'll get slimmed down a bit as time wears on, and this project takes on a personality.

The title "atlas(t)" is stolen from a 2001 exhibition organized by Jaime Cortez and Claire Light at the San Francisco Latino community arts space Galeria de la Raza. (Artist e-mael, one of the curatorial committee for the show, first suggested the name.) The exhibition -- a collaboration between Galeria's young Latino artists program, and Kearny Street Workshop's young Asian American artists program -- featured conceptual maps in 2-D, sculpture, installation and video by Asian American and Latino artists. The show was pretty damn cool, and fun to curate -- especially since so many artists created work specifically for/to the show -- and ever since then, we've been a bit proprietary -- bonkers -- about maps.

The quote at the top right -- from Irit Rogoff -- was the epigraph we chose for the show, and characterized both the intentions of the exhibition, and of this blog, beautifully.

Here's the rules:

We will, when we're feelin' high on the horse, use the royal/editorial/diva "we", partly because that is our mission in this blog and partly because we hope to convince one or two very cool friends to post here as well and make this a grammatical "we". (We'll keep you updated on this.)

We will post once a week, at least.

We will post pictures of maps, charts, and diagrams, as well as other stuff.

We will talk and opine about these, sometimes at great length.

We will be explicitly and unapologetically political; we will speak/write from our own cultural context and perspective and not pretend to any impossible journalistic objectivity; we will rant and complain all we like.

We will behave as if this blog is in itself a political act, and furthermore as if the "real estate" or virtual space occupied by this blog is of socio-political and cultural importance ... as if, in fact, our being here mattered.

That is all.