The Electro-Map Menagerie → Chicago By Night

Since Chicago is my new adopted home I thought it best to start the Electro-Map tour here. Scott Howard has created an elegantly simple portrait of Chicago by night which is comprised of 194 individual photos, all taken within a 58 minute period on the night of a full moon. This zoom-able, scalable composite photo is more like a still-life than anything else. You can almost count the number of books on people’s shelves in the Ebony Jet building, yet every lamp-lit room is mysteriously empty.

I’m also very fond of his daytime overhead shot of Machu Picchu. I have never been, but several years ago I visited a friend’s parents who had just returned from a trip to Peru, and I think it’s the only time I’ve wished that someone’s home videos would never end. They showed me sections of a lengthy train ride, and I am a sucker for trains…my favorite way to travel. None of the nausea of buses or cars & so much easier to appreciate the scope of a landscape.

Machu Picchu’s section of their video was very emotional.  Hearing their memories, impassioned descriptions of the stonework, and seeing the mythic misty imagery…  Howard’s online portrait is a fantastic first step towards realistic armchair tourism, with no ecological damage.

Tomorrow, I sing the body electro.

The Electro-Map Menagerie → prologue

This week I would like to highlight inventive cartography, impossible visions made real through digital technology. I am a big fan of Katharine Harmon’s book You Are Here: personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. In her book she details beautiful examples of abstractly representative map making, or maps interested in showing systems of relationships not geographic in nature. Her collection is great, worthy of a place in any personal library, but sadly for us it is bound by ink and by paper. This week, I hope to bring you a sampler of works available only to an electrified world.

In order to inaugurate this series, however, I will start with a traditional form of imaginative map; click for a readable view.

You can visit the original Flickr page here.

This one, supplied by Orli Yakuel, is (inaccurately) called the New York Subway Map of the Internet. It’s actually a modified Tokyo map, but who’s counting? Either way, Orli’s map is a good entry point into this weeks’ upcoming Electro-Map Menagerie, hearkening all the way back to Simon Patterson’s 1992 London Underground mash-up The Great Bear.

Come ride with me the tubes of the Internet, and in so doing we shall visit fantastical realms of uncertain geography.