archive of desire

Occupy Providence and Mapping Utopias will be gathering to explore alternative and solidarity economies of the present and future throughout the month of March. The first meeting of this new series is this Sunday night 2/26 at 7pm. Then on Thursday nights March 8, 15 and 22. Place TBA – probably at AS220 in the Mercantile Building.

The workshop is open to all who are interested in exploring alternative economies, envisioning a just, sustainable and thriving future, and/or playing with the medium of mapping and diagramming.

TONIGHT is the next Interoccupy Arts call. 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. Highly recommended if you are an artist and interested in or involved in Occupy, and also highly recommended if you just want to lurk, listen and be inspired by a bunch of artists putting their heads together about art and cultural change.

“Artists as Bridges:  How are artists connecting Occupy and other movements for economic and social justice?

As Occupy and ‘The 99%’ movement expands, it continues to deepen its connections with communities and issues of all kinds. On this call, we will hear from artists who are doing powerful, innovative work of ‘bridging’, using the unique power of art, music, performance and spectacle, to connect Occupy to new issues and communities, and vice versa. “

Register for the call here.

I’ve begun a fellowship at Brown University with the John Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage for the Mapping Utopias project. Thanks, JNBC! The image above is from an initial mapping workshop with JNBC grad students. I will be hosting workshops for various segments of the Brown community (students and workers alike) and will post the schedule here soon.

The JNBC graduate students vision of utopia included many treehouses, dance halls in every part of town, and a vast public transit system in which train stations (which are numerous) are multi-use urban hubs. In other words, many of the things people travel around the city for can be found at the train station – groceries, libraries, post offices, and city services.

I have begun to speak to some amazing Providence artists about making new work using the growing collection of maps as raw source material. I will commission 4-6 artists to make work for an exhibit I am organizing which will open in June. Drop me an email if you would like to be considered. I will post an official call for proposals soon.

A map I unearthed deep in the underground caverns of my Flickr account. More early map studies here and here. I made many of these when I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be mapping, but was interested in developing a visual language that included map imagery. Now I am overflowing with projects involving generating content for maps, and helping others create amazing collaborative maps, but with little time to just get down and play with materials on my own. Soon I will get back into my own personal mapmaking, and see what happens. Looking forward to it!

As a nice followup to the last map of the week post, a present-day effort to reintroduce urban agriculture on a large scale to Brooklyn and eventually Manhattan and the other boroughs. 596 Acres is a group which has identified (yep) 596 acres of vacant lots in Brooklyn alone that would be suitable for urban farms and gardens. They are working on multiple strategies to release these properties to the public. Here is a little something from thier “About” page:

“596 Acres is a public education project aimed at making communities aware of the land resources around them. With the goal of a food sovereign New York City in mind, 596 Acres is helping neighbors form connections to the vacant lots in their lives — from the smallest (throwing a seedbomb) to the largest (hosting a public meeting with the head of a City Agency that owns a vacant lot that was promised to the community as a park, see myrtlepark.org).”

And…they’ve got a really sexy interactive map on their site.

What a great combo of BIG vision and practical present-day movement forward. Yay.

Occupy Wall Street’s Sustainability Working Group is working on similar projects right now. Double yay.

From Transition Culture, a map of the town of Guildford (England) in 1739. A gorgeous example of what it looks like when food grows everywhere: The hospital has huge vegetable gardens, the School has an orchard…it appears that this town was totally self-sustaining agriculturally, as were many of the time. The more detailed description of the map and a look at it in its entirely are available here. Worth the read and definitely worth visual study….beautiful.

Camilo Jose Vergara has been photographing poor urban areas for decades, and has produced Invincible Cities, an interactive “Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto” from his collections of over 14,000 slides. He explores the uniqueness, perseverance and adaptability of “ghetto” environments, through studies of ruins, the visual language of art and advertisements, vacant lots, failed revitalization projects, storefront churches, and much more as described in his 20+ page site introduction. The interface is really elegant, with the photographs addressed and connected to maps of the cities explored. Really great design – pulls you right into these worlds and the questions they contain with easy map navigation.

I was fortunate  to attend the first Interoccupy Art conference call (held this past wednesday night). There were occupiers from dozens of cities there, mostly in the US and a few in Canada and Australia. I announced the Mapping Utopias project there and heard about some other amazing local and national (US) occupy-based projects. Its thrilling to see how central arts and culture projects and processes are to this movement, and to watch artists become more organized and expand their reach going into these winter months. Soon I will post a summary of highlights from the call, and you can also read the minutes here.

In my 90 second presentation there was little time to get into the details of this project. So if you are visiting here from the shout-out on occupywithart.com or from the conference call, have a look around at the about pages here and here and especially HERE, and browse through the blog.

We are looking for full collective members, point people for cities and towns, and people wanting to be involved to any degree from small to large. We are working on a small guide full of ideas about getting started doing collective mapping projects with your group, your friends, or your occupation. I’d love for more people to get involved in experimenting with these tools and models, and helping build this work…both the maps themselves, and the facilitation tools and workshop activities that support people to produce them.

I would like to host another conference call for anyone interested in this project. I can explain more about it and open the floor to questions, and then hear your thoughts and ideas in a big group brainstorm. If you are interested in being on the call, please email me at awalsh09 at gmail dot com.

I am so excited  about the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science and their important work of making rad, DIY aerial photography and critical mapmaking tools available to the average person. Their applications of this groovy helium-balloon powered mapmaking are varied and radical. They have aerial-mapped within the no-fly zone of the Louisiana Gulf Coast and gathered data about the oil spill that wasn’t being published, they have done aerial maps of Occupy events for accurate crowd counting, and more. The ecological, political and social possibilites are endless. Who needs satellites or private helicopters to look at the land from above?

Happily, the project has already reached its Kickstarter funding goal with 18 days to go. But I am going to contribute anyway: because the rewards are awesome. Fold-out maps, how to guides – you can even order a whole map kit for yourself. Give ‘em your money!

Here’s an example of a map someone made using one of these kits which investigates whether or not the logging company in their area was in fact practicing “controlled logging.”

Just found these intensely detailed map drawings by Steven Walter. They seem delicate and ephemeral in their total view, but the detail shots are very cartoony and chunky like they were made with Sharpies. Would love to see ‘em in person.

A new geologic map of the Sabine Region of the Moon. The Sabine is a large crater.

So many maps now are made of layers of photographic material and hand-drawn or digitally-drawn lines, but the way this one does it really charms me. Even though the lines are computer generated one is very aware of the relationship of drawn line to (candy-colored) photographic topography. Yummy.