atlas(t)

sources of white stress

just another quick drop-in here: the somewhat controversial Village Voice article "White America Has Lost Its Mind" (quick aside: love that the title is declarative rather than interrogative, as most such articles are) had the above map of the fearful white mind included. Kinda fun.

mapping stereotypes

via Woffy, this hilarious collection of maps showing how Europe looks to various Europeens. Not a new idea, but still a funny one. Fortunately, this all doesn't really require commentary, but you might be interested to know that this is all the work of one UK-based designer.

Below is the map of how Europe looks to the U.S. Enjoy!

the secret powers of time

this is a space blog, but I just wanna stick my head in here and post this video about time.

It made me immediately buy the Kindle version of Geography of Time to read, partly out of sheer interest, but also partly because this particular talk is so intensely Euro/Amero-centric. Past/Present/Future? Seriously? All people?

And even if that were true, what about how the past and future aren't always behind and before you? In Cantonese, the past is in front of you -- literally, the language for "last Tuesday" is "front weekday two" -- and the future is behind you. Which argues that you're either walking backward through time, or more likely, you're standing still and time is moving past you, with the wind at your back.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting vid. It fits in with the research that shows how children who can delay gratification even for a few more seconds are more successful in life ... in the West, in a capitalistic society. After all, that's what capital is: it's not material, it's the accumulation of value over time. So the more control you have over your own spending habits (spending of money, material, and value) over time, the more power you have over a resource that is based on time.

Capital is not spatial. That's why feudalism is based on land (and how people belong to land, not how land belongs to people) ... and that's why capitalism is not based on land but rather on currency; and land is valuable only in how it is translatable into units of currency, and how it collects value over time.

I'm currently trying to buy property right now, and a place I'm looking at is being sold by the beneficiaries of the recently deceased owner. The place is mortgaged up to about 90% of its value, so the agents say about it that "there's no more equity in it" for the current owners. I've picked up the language as well. Because the land and house "have no more equity," they are in a particular way, worthless to the owners and may as well be sold. Understand, the land and house are the same as they were before the place was mortgaged. They'll still house people and grow plants, and contain air and emotions. But they hold no more equity, something that rules life but has no substance.

I have to get my head around this before I can become a property owner.

Equity is a time-based medium, and has nothing to do with space. For me to "own" (and therefore have the right to occupy) the space, I must own the time, i.e. have a masterly handle on the equity. I can do that by having the money to buy the value outright (which means that the time has already been put in, either by my saving value over time, or by existing money collecting value over time in the past), or by contracting for a mortgage, in which I delay gratification so that I can put value into the land and house, bit by bit, over time.

Whether the time is behind me (I am rich and have the money already) or before me (I am mortgaged, and must spend the next 30 years paying it off) there is time to be paid, past or future.

Hm.

hyperart: thomasson

i'm so proud of our new book trailer!

I've been working with Kaya Press for about a year now, and we've produced two book trailers, each one for a book that it's really difficult to describe in words. The one above is for our new title -- available next week -- HYPERART: THOMASSON by Genpei Akasegawa. Akasegawa is a Japanese conceptual artist -- a contemporary and colleague of Yoko Ono -- who came up with the concept of "Thomassons" in the late seventies, early eighties.

When an urban structure loses its usage, but remains standing, attached to the property it used to serve, and still being aesthetically maintained, then it is a "Thomasson." We're talking about staircases that lead to nowhere, bricked up ticket windows, outside doors in the third story of a building, etc. Akasegawa contends that these things are not stairs, windows, and doors, but rather art shaped like stairs, windows, and doors: unintentional art created by the city; hyperart.

He and his colleagues refined the name to "Thomasson" because at that time, 1982, American baseball player Gary Thomasson was playing for the Japanese team the Yomiuri Giants ... or rather, NOT playing, because he couldn't seem to manage to hit a ball. Yet they still paid him to be there. Akasegawa thought him the perfect, living hyperart, and named the whole phenomenon after him.

In the mid-eighties, Akasegawa had a column in a Japanese photo magazine about Thomassons, where he accepted submissions of thomassons: photographs, and descriptions. He published these and discussed whether or not they were thomassons, why, and what kind. These columns were eventually collected into a book in the 80's which quickly became a cult classic among Japan's youth.

This publication is the first time that Hyperart: Thomasson has been translated. To mark the occasion, translator Matt Fargo created a Thomassons website where people can submit their own thomassons, as well as vote on whether or not submissions are thomassons, and discuss these.

And I'm working with Kearny Street Workshop to develop a guided performance tour of local San Francisco thomassons. The project is called "SF Thomassons" and there's a special page on Matt's Thomassons website for local exemplars from our stable of photographers.

And finally, Kaya and KSW are having a book launch partay on December 18 in San Francisco, where you can get a free preview of the tour. Yay!

census of marine life

they're almost done. In one year, they'll be releasing the results of a decade-long survey of ocean species called The Census of Marine Life. The LA Times just did an article about this amazing project (with nifty photos):

The scientists set three goals. First, they would build a global registry of every marine life form, worms to walruses, as a baseline for research and public policy. Second, they would map where each species lives and travels to better understand its habitat. Lastly, they would assess the relative abundance of each organism -- past, present and future.

Most marine biologists are specialists who work alone or in small groups. The census has changed that. About 2,000 scientists in 80 countries have joined forces in the largest collaboration in the history of ocean science. ...

"This was a field in need of a revolution," said Ann Bucklin, who heads the marine sciences department at the University of Connecticut. "It has opened up global oceanography."

By next year, the online database will contain photos, DNA codes and websites for at least 230,000 unique species, including more than 16,000 fish, scientists said. ...

The list would be longer, but researchers used DNA analysis to cut more than 50,000 "aliases" -- different names for the same creature -- from the species list. The worst case of multiple identity was a breadcrumb sponge, Halichondria panacea, which had 56 names around the world. Now it will have one.

The whole project cost $650,000,000 (yes, that's millyuns.) I love the scope of the project alone. And the fact that it's (aptly) being compared to mapping the human genome. I love that this brings together my two original obsessions: taxonomy and mapping. But you know (you know) what I love the most. That's right, the actual maps.

The one above is an interactive map of the projects they're running. Click on the dots to get an incomprehensible overview.

Here's one of the cooler maps. Created by satellite tagging 47 white sharks, they discovered an area of concentrated activity between Hawaii and Baja they call the "White Shark Cafe." Awesome. Unless you're a surfer.

There are also a number of super depressing ones like this one, which tracks the "relative abundance of marine life by human cultural period," and another one which shows concentrations of life in the ocean in 1960 and 1990. But you knew there couldn't be a marine-life census without a save-the-whales mentality, didn't you?

But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything? I mean, I know what it is: it's useful; it's necessary. We can't do science, we can't understand ourselves or the world without numbers and measuring and diagrams and charts. And maps. And that's part of it. But there's also the intuitive obsession, the part that just loves binding the world in the lines drawn on a piece of paper. Not needs to, loves to. It's what we drool over in these blogs.

And the lines aren't the same as the artist's lines, although we draw them quite beautifully, often. The lines aren't there for their own sake, but for their relationship to something in the real world: a number of actual creatures, a route of actual migration of actual creatures, an area of concentration of scaly, cold, swishy bodies. And yet we love the lines more than we love the slimy, cold bodies; as much as we love what they mean.

taxonomy of pasta

i know I don't do taxonomy stuff anymore, but Wikipedia is such a treasure trove of hierarchically categorized random shit.

Check out this taxonomy of pasta.

Hungry yet?

map animation viii

this one maps the growth of Walmart in the past 40 or 50 years. Wow. Effective. And scary. It's really like a cancer.

Here's another version of the same thing:


This is probably because flowingdata.com, which did the first animation, made the code available. Very cool.

after sesshu foster

sad America, who will hold your Entropy Hand?

I will hold your Entropy Hand with Old World Simulacrum nestling your Adolescent Limbs.

I will hold your Entropy Hand with Airport Plaque sacred on your Haunted Asphalt.

I will hold your Entropy Hand with Jeepney Triumph remaking your Guilty Garbage.

I will hold your Entropy Hand with Crisp Canal Map logging your Lovely Bleeds.

 

I will hold your Entropy Hand with New World Simulacrum, spice for your Sand Foundation.

I will hold your Entropy Hand with Dried Tears Windshield for your Mourning Horizons.

atlas(t) is on twitter!

yes, it's finally happened. I've joined the internet age and started a twitter feed!

It's an experiment, obviously. I'll probably just be posting links to stuff I find on the internet that I somehow don't have the wherewithal to post about. If it works, the feed might be where I do most of my work. Or not. Who knows.

Ennyway, I make no promisses, and if it doesn't work out, no skin off.

By the way, you can find me at: atlastweet.

And the image above is a twitter map of somebody's social networks. It's an interactive map, so go there and double-click on any of the feeds and that feed will show up in the lower window. Cool, huh?

shoe map

via a tip from my new best friend, Rob Duncan, comes this map from online shoe seller Zappos.

The picture doesn't look like much. That's because the map isn't static.

You're watching orders placed on the Zappos website, from all over the United States, coming in and being mapped to the location the order is being shipped to, in real time.

That's right, it's a hack that shows you where someone has just ordered an item from Zappos. It's weird, and weirdly cool, and as my new BFF puts it "weirdly compelling."

Go to it (during the day, when people are actually buying) and let it sit there for a while and watch the commerce happen right before your eyes. I can't exactly articulate what it tells you -- certainly nothing you can say in words. But it gives you a perspective I haven't seen anywhere else ... something about the velocity of internet commerce ... or the quiet incidence of consumption ... or how people nearly pass like ships in the night, on an ocean of pixels and electrical impulses, their bodies far away from each other and all unaware of what they, in that instant, have in common.