the culture fields / blog

While I think having discussions of “community” are important and can be facilitated through projects such as Spacing, it’s not my goal or interest at this point. My interest, as of now, is in observation of immediate environments, of creating activities based on my interest in documentation, research and observation in a specific area of Chicago.

• Photo documentation on how space is used. A series of series. Sites of information (street signs, posters, graffiti, posting places). Sites of “unused” land. Types of land covering (gravel, grass, brick).

• Observation/recording of physical movement within space. Number of steps between certain points. Estimating the average steps per minute people walk down a certain street.

Posting site: Armitage and Franciso

friday, april 13, 2007

Did a bit of a dérive on my bike, even though I had somewhat of a goal of riding the perimeter of the area I’ll be mapping and working in. Snapped a few photos, felt very aware of the “artist as ethnographer” feeling.

I find it curious that my aerial map will centralize InCUBATE and move outward but I was inclined to interact with the area starting from the outside and moving inward. Two very different ways of experiencing and navigating an environment.

I took photos of the four corners of the area:

Northeast corner (Fullerton and Western)

Northwest corner (Fullerton and California)

Southwest corner (Armitage and California)

Southeast (Armitage and Western)

I was reminded of the Chicago Mile by Mile project done by Fake is the New Real, which documents almost every corner in Chicago. The presentation of actual images over an aerial map of the city is really effective – it allows for simultaneous views “above” and “in”.

Neogeography (from placekraft):

Neogeography, as we see it, is a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in the manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and or artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of “real” geographic techniques. This is not to say that these practices are of no use to the cartographic/geographic sciences, but that they just usually don’t conform to the protocols of professional practice.

Center for Land use Interpretation:

Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface. The Center embraces a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling the stated mission, employing conventional research and information processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools.

Platial: The People’s Atlas

Platial enables anyone to find, create and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them. We hope it can connect people, neighborhoods, cities and countries through a citizen-driven common context that goes beyond geopolitical boundaries.

From the InCUBATE website:

SPACING will consist of a series of mapping projects of the immediate area surrounding InCUBATE, and the adjacent Congress Theatre located in southeast corner of Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, bordering the neighborhoods of Bucktown to the east and Humboldt Park to the south. The first part of this project details an aerial map of the area. One map will outline the built environment of the area and detail the use of the physical landscape: residential, commercial, mixed-use, etc.

The second aerial map will outline roads, sidewalks and alleys, all typical routes of travel to and from InCUBATE and the Congress whether by auto, bicycle, bus or elevated train. The goal of the aerial map is to visualize the space around InCUBATE and the Congress Theater through social and economic data to begin to understand the demographics of the neighborhood and pinpoint possible areas of gentrification and socioeconomic divisions.

The third map will be a psychogeographic map constructed at street-level in order to fully understand what the Situationists described as the “precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

This map, constructed through images, recordings and objects collected from the same defined area, is an attempt to create a map of an environment as it is lived every day. By increasing the level of awareness of the immediate environment around InCUBATE and the Congress Theatre, a critique of the present conditions of daily life (typically interpreted through maps such as the first one, based on statistics and data) can be fully formed.