A cubic meter of fogged space


[Image: 1M3 Light, 1999, by Olafur Eliasson, described by Metropolis as “a cubic meter of fogged space.” From the article: “Using light as others might use bricks and mortar, Eliasson turns luminosity into an architectural element. Often water is the facilitator. He partitions space with curtains made of drops of water frozen by strobe lights… or he converts fog into a building material, neatly carving a cubic meter of emptiness by slicing through a foggy room with spotlights.” Photo by Jens Ziehe].

(Earlier: More Eliasson at Four-dimensional films).

Dolby Earth / Tectonic Surround-Sound

“In any given instant,” the Discovery Channel reminds us, “one or more rocky plates beneath Earth’s surface are in motion, and now visitors to a California museum exhibit can hear virtually every big and small earthquake simultaneously in just a few seconds off real time. Scientists have captured earthquake noises before, but this is believed to be the first instantaneous, unified recording of multiple global tectonic events, and it sounds like the constant, dull roar of the world’s biggest earthquake chorus.”

The planet, droning like a bell in space.

Of course, the musicalization of the earth’s tectonic plates has come up on BLDGBLOG before, specifically in the context of 9/11 and the collapse of the Twin Towers. Among many other things, 9/11 was an architectural event which shook the bedrock of Manhattan; the resulting vibrations were turned into a piece of abstract music by composer Mark Bain (more info at the Guardian – and you can listen to an excerpt here).

Meanwhile, if somebody set up a radio station – perhaps called Dolby Earth – permanently dedicated to realtime platecasts of the earth’s droning motions… at the very least I’d be a dedicated listener. A glimpse of what could have been: Earth: The Peel Sessions.

In any case, if I could also remind everyone here of an interview with David Ulin, in which he discusses the intellectual and philosophical perils of earthquake prediction – the topic of his excellent book, The Myth of Solid Ground. One of the predictors discussed in Ulin’s book, for instance, spends his time “monitoring a symphony of static coming from an elaborate array of radios tuned between stations at the low end of the dial.”

Dolby Earth, indeed.

(Thanks to Alex P. for the Discovery Channel link! Related: Sound Dunes).

Greenwich Emotion Map


[Image: From Archeology of the Future].

In response to an earlier post, Mark Brown from Archeology of the Future pointed out the Greenwich Emotion Map, a hand-held, GPS-based cartographic project centered around the soggy parks and traffic crossings of London’s meridian peninsula: “Artist Christian Nold has been invited to collaborate with local residents from the Greenwich Peninsula to explore the area afresh and build an emotion map of the area that explores people’s relationship with their local environment.”


[Image: A “Bio Mapping device,” from Greenwich Emotion Map].

“The project is set up as a series of participatory workshops that invite people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.”
The map itself, colored like a graph of heat-imprints, thermal tags of emotion moving through southern London’s space, is actually quite beautiful.
More tangentially, Mark Brown’s own description of his day out with the biomappers is worth a read, especially this geo-emotional tour through New Labour’s failed Millennial geography, the tarnished corpse of the Millennium Dome stranded sadly in the background: “For all of the order imposed by the rigid, controlling architecture and traffic flow design,” Mark writes, “the Peninsula is still home to the higgledy-piggledy overlapping of different periods and types of industry so beloved of location shoots. We even saw a film crew huddled in the middle of a mud coated concrete yard, dwarfed by huge boilers, all pipes and ladders like primitive space craft now lying on their sides and rusting in the rain. There are deserted houses. There are twisting pipes and strange smells behind chainlink fences. Wharfs jut into the grey river with machinery corroded to a halt. Great machineries sprout into the sky, some with chimneys burning off excess gas. There are yards full of scrap, huge piles of rubble. We see a decaying warehouse, one side collapsed, a rusting boat nuzzling it from the water. Despite of of the rhetoric, despite the notions of control and renewal, the Millennium Project failed.”


[Image: From Mapchester].

Two other projects of note, pointed out by Régine of we make money not art: 1) Mapchester (more info here) and 2) OpenGeoData’s London GPS animation, assembled from coordinates taken from bike couriers riding their routes through London. Have fun.

Islands of Total Cartography

[Image: Archaeological traces on the surface of the Isle of Wight].

Islands are ideal testing grounds for the weird, the puzzling, the crazed – even the miraculous. The Biblical Book of Revelation, for instance, psycho-cinematically revealed itself to John in a dark grotto on the Greek island of Patmos.
But an island’s spatial limitations also give it a kind of intellectual thrill: by limiting your territory for you, an island seems to promise total knowability. You could walk the whole thing, memorize every detail.
This, in part, may have been at least one motivation for an upcoming event in southern England, hosted on the Isle of Wight. There, New Scientist explains, “satellite mapping enthusiasts from all over Europe” – and beyond – hope to produce “a completely free digital map of the whole island. These high-tech cartographers will drive, cycle and ramble all over the island, using their GPS receivers to record the co-ordinates of roads, natural landmarks and points of interest. They’ll use this data to create a completely digital map which will be available online to anyone.” An entire island, digitized.
Check out their website if you’d like to get involved.
Meanwhile, a much more analogue example of this impulse toward total cartography comes to us from Ireland’s Aran Islands, off the coast of County Clare.


[Image: The Aran Islands].

There, a totally fascinating and almost impossibly ambitious example of modern cartography – a truly encyclopedic knowledge project – unfolded.
“In the summer of 1972,” the Guardian tells us, a man, named Tim Robinson, “came from London to Árainn, the largest of the islands, to live.” The living wasn’t easy: “Big Atlantic storms, brief days, and ‘an unprecedented sequence of deaths, mainly by drowning or by falls and exposure on the crags,'” almost forced Robinson and his wife to return to the city.
“But they stayed, and Robinson – a mathematician by training, an artist by vocation, and a draughtsman of skill – began to cast around for a way to respond creatively to the islands. So began one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried out. Robinson conceived of a two-volume study of the islands – a local epic – which would be accompanied by a new map of the islands that he would survey and draw.”


[Image: The Aran island of Dun Aonghasa; note, of course, that half the fort has crumbled into the sea].

Robinson mapped everything – the locations of buildings, what those buildings housed, who owned them, how often people visited, what their local history was, even what tectonic and mineral lineage the rocks themselves contained.
“Long before psychogeography became a modishly over-used and under-comprehended term,” we read, “Robinson was out on the dérive – talking to the islanders, walking the rimrock, surveying, dreaming, recording. In bad weather, of which there was plenty, he would hold his notebook and pencil inside a clear plastic bag, tied shut at his wrists, and proceed in this manner: a deranged dowser wandering the mists and the storm-spray.”
Robinson recorded “the deep entanglement of the human and the mineral” via “the fading mazes of the past.”
“In exploring this terrain,” Robinson wrote in volume one, which I read several years ago, “it is best to let oneself be led by its inbuilt directionality.”
But pen and paper, along with superhuman energy, are not the only tools one needs in order to map every inch of an island. There is GPS, as we’ve seen – and there’s also CCTV.
Surveillance.
Cartographic interests of a more Orwellian kind were tested on a small island off the coast of Maine a few years back. As Wired informed us in May 2004, “Ayers Island, the site of an abandoned paper and textile mill in Orono, Maine, will be spied upon by a comprehensive network of video cameras, motion detectors and sensors. Lurking behind all of those sensors will be an artificial intelligence system that will decide who can be trusted and who is deserving of greater scrutiny.”
This will apparently prove “that AI, combined with ubiquitous sensors, may be able to provide civil authorities with comprehensive, real-time intelligence about the whereabouts of individuals and cars, and the status of buildings and other structures within a particular geographical area.”
In other words, whether through surveillant videography, satellite mapping, deep local history, or even epic poetry, islands respond well to the cartographic impulses they themselves seem to inspire. Just look at The Odyssey.

(Earlier: The Island of New Ephemera. Gunkanjima Island).