Unorganized Territories

Olafur Eliasson

2007-08-14T19:22:00.000-07:00

Olafur Eliasson created this book of his own home using laser cut paper.

via - Your Daily Awesome

Community Topographies

2007-08-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Christian Marc Schmidt
Community Topographies
Web Application (Processing)
2007

Launch Community Topographies

Branded communities are the latest chapter in the narrative of the ideal or utopian city. They are also the outcome of a changing relationship between identity and community. Community is a reflexive concept: just as identity is a product of community, communities are a product of identity. Supported by the changing role of location, we are more enabled (and therefore perhaps more inclined) to choose our communities from the standpoint of how they might complement or contribute to our sense of self.

Identity goes beyond brand: the character of a community is largely determined by its plan. This visualization of 12 new communities around the world seeks to address the question: How is identity expressed in the design of the branded communities appearing in or adjacent to cities around the world?

via - rhizome.org

Which Chicago do you come from?

2007-05-24T15:13:00.000-07:00

I discovered this project by way of discovering the new (very new and apparently a little glitchy) service Platial. I'm not sure exactly how it differs from other mapping services. Google maps now has a "My Maps" feature but perhaps they're not searchable in quite the same way. I'm open to enlightenment if any of you are familiar with either service.

Mapping thought.

2007-05-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

I suppose that Megan and Murray McMillan are really mapping their process rather than their thoughts, but in such a way that is distinctly subjective. The careful cutting, cropping, layering, and labeling reveals a thousand tiny decisions and indecisions that ultimately lead to their installations and videos. This is a great example of documentation as art object itself, rather than simply support materials. It reminds me of Matta-Clark's photo documents of his ephemeral or hazardous cutting projects that locate us within the work but destabilize the architecture to suggest (to me) his thoughts on deconstruction and relation between spaces and materials.

Here's a couple of audio clips of an interview with Megan and Murray McMillan about their work and their collaboration.

Symposium Monday, April 23

2007-04-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Alfred Watkins and British Imagination of Landscape
Symposium, 23rd April 2007, 2-5 pm, DFA 2.204, University of Texas at Austin

Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) made several inventions in photography and was himself an accomplished photographer whose books are extensively illustrated by his own works. He will always be remembered, however, for his contributions to the understanding of British prehistory. These contributions have never met with any academic approval or endorsement, but their extraordinary popularity with a non-professional audience (people who are not archaeologists) has proved to be impossible for the academics to disentangle themselves from. While the main area of contestation has been Britain, Watkins’ conclusions have implications for our understanding or imagining of landscapes elsewhere in the world, including Peru.

In 1921 Watkins perceived that ancient prehistoric Britain had been criss-crossed by a system of straight trackways that were aligned on prehistoric monuments such as standing stones, stone circles, and ancient earthworks. He called these alignments ‘ley-lines’. He published four books explaining his discovery, of which The Old Straight Track (1925) has become the most famous. Ignored at the outset by the ‘professional’ archaeologist O.G. S. Crawford, Watkins’ ideas have never been accepted by the archeological establishment. Yet he could point to plentiful evidence on maps, or shown in his own photographs, or demonstrated in sketches, that suggested the justice of his views. After a period of post-war abeyance, his trackway alignments powerfully re-emerged in the 1970s, gleefully seized upon and transmuted by the popular activities of enthusiasts into the form of ‘lines of earth-energy’ with mysterious impacts on life, sometimes with a UFO or magical connection.

The symposium will examine several matters with respect to Watkins, who has up until this point been the subject of relatively little scholarly interest. His photographs and their impact on the imagination of fiction-writers will be discussed, as will his vexed relations with the British archeological establishment, and his impact on land art.

Larger questions implicated here include science and folklore, science and fiction/art, the popular versus the academic, the nature of landscape, mapping and photography, and the intermedia character of imagination.

Participating scholars:
Professor Stephen Daniels, cultural geographer, University of Nottingham
Dr. Adam Stout, archaeologist, University of Wales Lampeter
Dr. Michael Charlesworth, art historian, University of Texas at Austin

Pathogeographies

2007-03-27T19:09:00.000-07:00

More shameless self-promotion... Saturday, April 14 at Commerce Street Artists Warehouse I'm contributing to a show called Goin' Mobile curated by Kimberly Aubuchon of San Antonio's Unit B Gallery. Mine uses satellite photographs and architectural models as a starting point to craft a tangled, disoriented highway system floating in space. From the press release...

Goin’ Mobile ventures in every direction to guide the viewer on a trip to those familiar and unknown places along our traveled and explored routes. Paying special attention to the driver’s seat view of landscapes in our daily and worldly travels; Goin’ Moblie is a memoir to places we expect to know.

I can't wait to participate in another show, Pathogeographies, this summer put on by the multi-talented collective, Feel Tank Chicago. They've created a blog with teaser pics and artist bios and all of the projects sound great.

How Cool Is This?!

2007-03-22T19:25:00.000-07:00

Since I haven't actually read this book, I'm really just sharing my blind enthusiasm for this discovery. The Playbook, by Alex S. MacLean is chock full o' aerial photographs of amusement parks! The disorienting angle on environments that are disorienting to begin with opens it up to a host of new readings: biology, machinery or circuitry, and abstract painting. In this case, as details fall in and out of recognition, the overhead view fluctuates between the authority of the God's eye-view (the plan view), and something completely place-less and wildly strange. The radical cropping, like the fragmentation of the kaleidoscopic-city artists, contributes to the disorientation.

Nikolas Schiller

2007-03-21T08:57:00.000-07:00

These come from the website of Nikolas Schiller. Although massively productive (206 maps in 2006), he saves this from becoming a one-trick pony by identifying interesting site (oil refineries, capitols) and by reinventing the process, adding and subtracting elements of the image and disrupting the pure geometry of some to create tensions. This reminds me of Andrea Zittel's guache reflected maps as well as the cut-and-paste distortions of Nina Katchadourian's Geographic Pathologies series. The repetitions create new possibilities and associations but also make the search for the familiar and "correct" dimensions and orientation more intense.

Strategies of Engagment

2007-03-19T21:31:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd reproduce here the list that Renate mentioned of Mel Ziegler and Kate Ericson's methodologies and strategies for engaging new audiences and framing information in new ways in Bill Arnings contribution to the catalogue America Starts Here.

Many of Ericson and Ziegler's main themes and methodologies emerge clearly, at least in retrospect, in the major works from the early years of their collaboration. The list of strategies Ericson and Ziegler used to make artworks seemed very unusual at the time, though today's young artists regularly employ these methods, which include the following: 1) Researching arcane areas of knowledge and pursuing a passion for the aura of the archive; 2) Using mapping and other similar ways of schematizing life; 3) Creating a system that dictates all significant visual decisions about a work's presentation; 4) Employing found elements rather than causing something new to be made; 5) Viewing the entire country as a test to be read, engaged, and decoded; 6) Using natural materials, like stone, leaves, and water, as tey are inflected or coded by culture; 7) Critically engaging decoration and architecture for what they reveal about society; 8) Using Americana as topic, material, or motif; 9) Engaging cultural institutionis, museums, and monuments, such as the Supreme Court, libraries, and universities: 10) Investigating government decisions about urban space nad making them public; 11) Collecting and collating found language, which can subsequently function as a type of found poetry; 12) Using the practical business decisions of others as a structuring device for works; 13) Designing projects as they exist in multiple states, each of which creates meaning, from the first research to the final use of materials; 14) Inserting delays into a process that unnaturally extends the in-between period of a simple task such as landscaping or cleaning, rendering otherwise invisible processes conspicuous and examinable; 15) Allowing works to disappear through transformation, making them cease to be "art" and instead begin to fulfill a useful function; 16) Cooperating with people outside the specific disciplines of the art world in a way that gives them a non-artistic reason to participate; 17) Choosing to work with each other as collaborators.

It's midnight now, but I'm going to have to come back to several of their works to help flesh out our discussions of the politics possibilities of labeling, performing the map in the physical environment, and more examples of the use of map language to provoke the mental process of mapping in non-map situations, and also their use of models and miniatures for the new fall semester course at Glassell: 3D Maps, Models, and Miniatures!

Bird's Eye View

2007-03-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

As Carlisle pointed out a while back, it's often hard to get away from the omnipresent, flat, overhead view in the mapping conversation. There is no coincidence to that as it speaks to human desire to see everything in an attempt to "know" the city. Remembering the orientational metaphors, to "know" means we must rise up, transcending the muck of the street to see the city from where it cannot reach us. From a distance, the city can be properly idealized. Of course, this kind of knowledge reduces "the city" to an abstraction, and Michel de Certeau, the Situationists, and many others take issue with this simplification.

In Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939, John R. Stilgoe discusses the evolution of "The Heights" in exactly these terms. (p.64)

Power, especially aesthetic power, lay uphill..., the power of the observing, discerning, ordering eye far enough removed from urban complexity to arrange complexity into a view, to ignore the shadows of the city. "Lines Written on Proespect Hill," an 1826 Rural Repository poem, exemplifies a whole genre of verse announcing the hilltop vision, the prospect:
The city lies beneath my feet,
The tallest trees are yet below,
And yonder smiling country seat,
It seems a fairy palace now.

These themes are reinforced and expanded by Michel de Certeau:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it acording to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as a player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervouness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.
The desire to see the city preceded by means of satisfying it. Medieval of Renaissance painters represented the city as soon in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an "all-seeing power"?
p.92 The Practice of Everyday Life

And, after our conversations about the difference in spatial perception between walking and driving through the city, this quote was from the opening to a chapter titled "Walking in the City" which discusses ways of operating on the ground and "escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye" (p.93).

"Map Language"

2007-03-14T07:45:00.000-07:00

Renate had another interesting find! I love these. Check out the animations on artist Brian Piana's website. They are as cute as abstracted webpages can possibly get. These fall into a category I call "Map Language." We are able to recognize all of the devices of maps, (regions, routes, borders, keys, etc.) but there is no actual information. The results are that the imagination of every viewer fills information in, evoking past experiences and forging new possibilites. The artist's tools are small cues in colors, compositions, media, etc. It works by extrapolating information from maps (or graphic layouts in Brian Piana's case, or by appropriating non-map imagery and presenting it as something that visually suggests a map, as we did with cracks, sticks, and textures surfaces recently. Lordy Rodriquez uses this both ways.

Side note: Lordy is originally from Houston and Brian may be showing here soon.

Renate describes:

These images are derived from web pages. For example I really enjoy "The Rise to Power of Tom Delay" which shows the descent from an orderly web page to a disorderly
page as Delay fell under scrutiny (I may be biased about that since I live
in an unincorporated part of Sugar Land). Anyway I find them evocative of
web pages, diagrams, printed circuit boards, etc. www.spillsomepaint.com

Kerry James Marshall

2007-03-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

Not map-related but my e-mail is failing me at the moment. I wanted to let you know about a lecture Thursday night by Kerry James Marshall at Freed Auditorium in Glassell.

Kerry James Marshall is both accomplished and extremely clear and straightforward communicating about his work.

Here's a link to an audio clip of an excellent conversation with him by the Bad at Sports crew!

Core Spring Lecture Series

Kerry James Marshall will discuss his work

Thursday, March 15, 2007
7:00 p.m.
Eleanor and Frank Freed Auditorium
Glassell School of Art
_____________________________________

Chicago-based artist Kerry James Marshall has exhibited his work for over twenty years in the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions including Documenta X (Kassel, Germany); Heart, Mind, Body, Soul: American Art in the 1990s, Whitney Museum of American Art; Carnegie International (1999-2000), Carnegie Museum of Art; and traveling exhibitions Kerry James Marshall: Mementos, The Renassiance Society, and One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Kerry James Marshall´s work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Los Angles County Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Corcoran Museum of Art.

In 1997, Marshall was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant.

Go to www.mfah.org for more calendar listings.

Overlay

2007-03-11T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm using Google Earth as a reference for a project I'm working on currently and discovered that some historic maps have been included in the default settings if you dig far enough. They've stretched these maps, in this case an 1833 US map as a giant eagle, across the globe which you can navigate and turn, same as always.

It's interesting to see historical documents in modern ways but particularly when you can experience it simultaneously with three-dimensional terrain, current roadmaps, and models of current architecture!

Cosmologies

2007-03-09T21:25:00.000-08:00

Great Jerry Saltz article, courtesy Renate (I've been mis-spelling it "Renata").

Andy Goldsworthy

2007-03-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

Andy Goldsworthy, of sticks and stones fame has done some interesting projects that raise other topics too. We mentioned, and I tried to draw, the piece which graces the cover of one of his many coffee table books, Time. Mud slathered onto a wall with carefully choreographed straw underneath appears to be even and consistent until it gradually dries and cracks according to the hidden choreography.

Time and also plays a key role in his series of silhouettes that he makes by lying his body on the ground long enough to alter it visually by preserving dew, melting frost, shielding dry ground from rain, etc. Though time is the evident device, and part of the quality of the subject, the subject itself is the physical mark of his self on the land. This is a mark that, like a mark on a map, signifies both the psychological presence of self on the land as placemarker and also the historical record of past experience though the body itself is physically absent.

Re-mapping

2007-03-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

Diana Sofia Estrada, though I just stumbled onto her, grew up in Texas and now ( I think ) lives and works here in Houston. This piece is part of a body of work that uses maps to address cultural identity and body image. The inversion of South America recalls Joaquín Torres-García's from '36.

I noticed that the image had been folded and un-folded like a map and like how she connects that idea to the processing, manipulation, and degradation that our own multi-faceted self-image goes through.
Here's a statement about her work I lifted off of DiverseWorks:

Artist Statement:
I use maps, photographs of skin tones, images of geographically specific diseases, and language to show how people create borders and divisions. I compare and contrast to understand how these themes affect one's body, location and experience. I explore these ideas through a process of degradation that occurs through the scanning of images, cutting up photos, and folding paper. This process helps me to reconstruct ideas I have about culture-defined identities and memory: destroying memories and an identity presented in the visual imagery present in the work.

Francis Alÿs

2007-03-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

Francis Alÿs is the first artist to get me thinking about the idea of performing a map. He's an artist based in Mexico City whose done a number of pieces called "Paseos" that involve walking and making, collecting, or documenting experiences of the walk itself. The pieces where he steadily drops paint from a punctured paint can are powerful as mapping pieces because, like MOMO's Manhattan graffiti tag, they visually mark a path, simultaneously creating and crossing borders of various sorts.

ArtForum

2007-03-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

The most recent (March 2007) edition of ArtForum has an article by Tom Vanderbilt on page 119 about Christian Nold, "a young London-based artist who--as someone deeply interested in capturing and visually conveying our moments of psychological 'arousal' in the city,... has for the past few years been investigating a practice he calls 'emotion mapping' or 'biomapping.'"

He's basically layering biological data linked to psychological states (lie detector stuff) with GPS data, journals, and snapshots taken by volunteer subjects on walks around the city and then dumping it all into Google Earth. The completed map is available for free download on his site but when I did it, all photos open blank. The journals are too brief to be evocative and the routes are more legible when viewed individually, rather than as a collective forest, though the forest itself is rather lovely.

Though visual, it is less powerful in some ways than audio walking tours such as those created by Janet Cardiff and others for the last decade and a half (Cardiff mp3). Important factors in these are the intimacy of the voice of the recording individual, the layering of background sounds from the recording with background sounds from the present, and (what is most lacking in Nold's maps) the real-time experience of the path as a journey. It's too easy to simply jump to the next labeled waypoint when I come to a lull, rather than slog it out, waiting for minutes at a time with nothing but the expectation of what might come next.

This is one of the tools that is perhaps uniquely available to "performing" the map, where the physical experience of moving through a place becomes paramount and personal.

More interesting is the article's attention to the bond between the body and the city as "two great electrical entities." The bodies nervous system serves us mechanically by connecting and communicating signals along lines as the city's electrical grid maintains the flow of energy and information. I like this idea, but I'm still not convinced that I'm looking at the most effective formal solution for the data collected. Although many scientific extrapolations are, or appear to be, available by pursing this analogy, Nold defends them as unscientific and Vanderbilt supports this notion by concluding that "despite all the rationalizing power of the various urban grids, Nold's emotion maps show that the swoons of urban walkers are still random and unpredictable, commanded by involuntary memories, changes in thought, new directions."

The Truth about Google Earth...

2007-03-05T08:04:00.000-08:00

This funny video clip from a fascinating site I've just stumbled upon, Urban Cartography.

Gordon Matta-Clark

2007-03-05T07:06:00.001-08:00

The Whitney Museum of American Art in ole New York City is hosting a Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective. There is lots to read about Gordon Matta-Clark, here and here for example as his ten years of work before succumbing to cancer is well-known and influential to both artists and architects.

Matta-Clark is one of those iconoclasts whose boundless and often destructive energy comes across as liberating, celebratory, even sublime. It is punk in that it gives voice to the sentiment that all accepted paths are unacceptable. The heart of the work is not the cut alone as a negation, but what the cut lets in or out.
There is an ecstatic transcendence in seeing simultaneously inside and outside, public and private, artificial and natural, construction and destruction, past and present as one, collapsed into a visceral perception of the immediate moment and its inseparability from all other moments. Heady stuff.

Without risking life and limb, Matta-Clark's unfinished "Fake Estates" project is equally effective in generating that peculiar condition where the viewer suddenly looks at the world around them as if for the first time, in wonder and suspicion. The illusion of integrity is splintered into fragments.

Fabric Map Links by the Yard!

2007-03-03T17:51:00.000-08:00

I know that Leslie e-mailed these all to you but these will be preserved for posterity here and should come up anytime you click "Fabric" keyword to the right, along with any other posts that mention fabric. Nifty, huh?

And for you and the rest of the "mappers," here are some links for the silk and fabric maps I mentioned in class:

History:
http://www.mapscarves.com/history.html (a brief history of silk maps)
http://www.mapforum.com/04/escape.htm
http://www.silkmaps.com/history.html

Military maps---silk and fabric:
http://www.ima-usa.com/index.php/cPath/152

More escape maps:
http://www.aviation-antiques.com/maps-1.html
http://www.omnimap.com/catalog/access/silkmaps.htm

Some Civil War maps on fabric:
http://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=any&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=/gilmer&CISOBOX1=Fabric

Not quite sure what this is---it showed up when I googled maps and fabric:
http://www.geocomputation.org/1999/096/gc_096.htm#Fig_12 and
http://www.geocomputation.org/1999/096/gc_96_12.htm

This also came up. They do direct printing to fabric---anything from aerials to blueprints to family photos
for a durable, tear resistant, flexible, and foldable
.banner-like print.:
http://chapters.ccim.com/louisiana?action=show_newsInformationsDetail&eid=37

And finally another fiber artist----a quilter who uses textiles (embroidery, crochet pieces, etc.) that she finds at garage sales. Scroll down a bit to A Map of Hometown Perceptions:
http://www.dianesavona.com/quiltcollection.html

Welcome!

2007-03-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Unorganized Territories, the unofficial blog of the workshop on mapping strategies used in the creation of artwork.

There are some format issues with e-mail that we might get around by posting images and links here instead. There is also the issue of sharing all of your wonderful ideas and losing old links and things to depths of our inbox.

Technical issues aside, it has been a pleasure to work with you all in this workshop and I would like to make it as easy as possible for us to continue the many interesting discussions and works that have come up during our class.

I'll begin collecting some of the links we've talked about for the sidebar. I'd love to include any participant websites or photo galleries, too. I'll certainly add a gallery from our final day photoshoot and our upcoming exhibition.

It may, eventually be a way to organize some of our various unorganized territories, through the use of some searchable keywords. I'll work on that, later.

By the way!
I am delinquent in my self-promotion duties! Lawndale is having a closing reception for the current show tonight including myself, Richie Budd, Jimmy Kuehnle, Benjamin Entner, and Anderson Wrangle, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.