ISSUE 11: MAP TO THE STARS
.this issue.
metaphor | geometry | choreography | geography | maps and journeys | infiltrating | loitering | walking slow | driving fast
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AT FULL SPEED
This book is written for the silent majority of people who have important places to go, but want to enjoy and learn about nature as they travel. What good is a field guide that relies upon the characteristics of tiny hairs or even minute differences in leaf or petal shape when a flower is seen from a car traveling 70 miles per hour?
A Field Guide to Roadside Flowers At Full Speed - Chris Helzer (The Prairie Ecologist)
(via Christopher LG Hill)
LOCATE LABYRINTH / LOSE YOURSELF
An easy-to-use database of labyrinths around the world.
As our awareness of labyrinths expands, it becomes more and more important to keep our terminology consistent. One example of an inconsistency is that some call the Classical seven-circuit labyrinth the Cretan labyrinth. Thus began an ongoing dialogue with the goal of providing clarity for a working labyrinth typology.
And for those who celebrate World Labyrinth Day is coming up on the first Saturday of May.
HEY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING DOWN THERE?
Rather than passively consuming entertainment, urban explorers strive to actually create authentic experiences, by making discoveries that allow them to participate in the secret workings of cities and structures, and to appreciate fantastic, obscure spaces that might otherwise go completely neglected.
Access All Areas: a user’s guide to the art of urban exploration
CITY PARKS
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships?
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
The Philosophy of SimCity: An Interview With the Game's Lead Designer - Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley (The Atlantic)
COLLECTIVE GEOGRAPHIES
Subjective Atlases are bottom-up cartographic publications mapping a country, region or city by the inhabitants themselves.
The project offers a platform for collective visual dialogue to challenge social, political and cultural circumstances of our day to day realities. The bottom-up approach questions dominant ways of representing territories and demystifies map-making itself. It is an exploration of the individual in relation to the collective, the subjective in relation to the apparently objective, the personal in relation to the political. This is an emotional geography of lived experiences that opens up political scopes, and contributes to a more pluralistic and sensitive territorial identification.
DESIRE PENTAGRAM
The "rotor" Roundabout in Zagreb, Croatia.
(via Gian Manik)
CLOCKED
Hostile architecture round the world