Call for Participation

placekraft has been dormant for some time now. This will most likely be the last placekraft project and we are happy to be working with InCUBATE on our "farewell tour." This site will remain active as an archive of past activities as we continue to slowly add backlogged material (writing, documentation, etc.).


InCUBATE and placekraft are interested in the colloquial ways that people reference “the art world” as if it is a monolithic entity. We resist this idea, instead hoping that in figuring out personal relationships to the public sphere that we participate in, we can address imaginative spaces, matters of inclusion/exclusion and locality through specificity. Terms such as “site,” “location,” and “place” should no longer be abstracted as simply the generic “borders, boundaries, margins, peripheries, migrations and centers,” but instead used to reaffirm and reclaim the importance of actual location in terms of the physical, social, political and geographical local in reaction to a globalized [art] world. As Brian Holmes writes, “[The] illusion that a single, globalized, or “networked” logic could account for the diversity of conditions across the world has come to its close. We must go back to making careful judgments that assess our own local situation with respect to very different ones.” We agree with this, and for this reason we must consider the state of arts and culture in Chicago by asking those involved in the equation of artistic production to articulate how they fit within their own real or imagined artworlds with Chicago as a geographical starting point.

InCUBATE and placekraft seek articulations that depict, in varying ways, relationships to the Chicago art world created by individuals, groups and institutions. These maps are a way to situate differing viewpoints within local worlds, establish historical and contemporary connections and will work to assemble a collection of broad perspectives that undermine the notion of a monolithic art world. In addition to the mapping of art worlds, this collection will make visible the modes of working, systems of relationships and other infrastructures that wouldn’t be easily observable.

Submissions/Maps can take any form, whether it’s a traditional two-dimensional drawing or three-dimensional spatial analysis. Submissions will be presented via an Atlas/book in addition to an appropriate public display based on the nature of contributions.

Those wishing to participate can submit their maps via email at youarehere@incubate-chicago.org or drop them off at InCUBATE located at 2129 Rockwell Chicago, IL 60647 by Sept. 1

From Memory (was: Maps From Memory) [on Flickr]

Land's Sake

"Founded in 1980, Land's Sake is a private, nonprofit corporation dedicated to responsible stewardship of suburban farmland and forests. By combining ecologically sound land management with hands-on environmental education, we provide a powerful model of how public open space can be effectively used and enjoyed by the community. Our efforts are centered on three themes:

* Sustainable Land Management and Open Space Preservation
* Environmental Education
* Community Building and Care

Within this framework, we focus on farming, forestry and educational activities."

Land's Sake leases community owned land from the town of Weston, MA to operate an educational farm to promote local, sustainable food systems in the suburban landscape. They conduct forest ecology walks, farm tours, provide food for Boston area food banks, and host high school environmental science programs. They also design, promote and provide support for area resident gardens and landscaping projects.

Further information can be found in Brian Donahue's book - Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town and via their website.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, agriculture, farming, commons.

Baudrillard on 9/11

I cite recently had this post quoting Zizek on 9/11. This inspired us to offer our notes of Baudrillard's provocations on 9/11:

[Ground Zero] What prevails there is merely the American people’s immense compassion for itself…

Consternation, but ultimately eternal gratitude for this divine solicitude that has made us victims.

Compassion as the national passion of a people that wants to be alone with God, and prefers to see itself struck down by God than by some evil power.

The twin sister of compassion (as much a twin as the twin towers) is arrogance. You weep over your own misfortune, and at the same time you are the best. And what gives us the right to be the best is that from now on, we are victims.

And it is the real victory of terrorism that it has plunged the whole West into the obsession with security – that is to say, into a veiled form of perpetual terror.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, 9/11, Baudrillard

What is neogeography anyway?

We posted this elsewhere, but forgot to post it here...

Neogeography, in its most basic sense means - new geography. New in relation to what it might be asked? We would offer that the prefix "neo" implies more than just new in its usage. Neo also has a connotative meaning, something akin to "in the manner of." Well, in the manner of what is the next question.

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. For an example of the personal application of mapping one need only look at the impetus behind founding Platial in the first place:

"We ended up with a kitchen drawer stuffed full of these notes. It was our collection of Places, plus menus for take out, magazine articles listing kid friendly museums, schedules of parades, and a few brochures and tour books for attractions that seemed interesting enough. A few maps got lost, loaned out or recombined, others got photocopied or emailed or taped to front doors as invitations...We wanted a way to preserve all that knowledge in a powerful, useful, contextual way.

We started asking my friend Jake about the technology side of building something to address this, and discovered he'd been working on, and thinking through some of the same issues. Our talks got more and more exciting as we saw the potential for a broad, useful way for people to share contexts and meanings of Places.

So here we are, launching a service that we hope can do some of these things (and maybe a whole lot more) for people."

Platial is just one example of a broad field of activity that includes urban exploration, site specific sculpture, land/earth art, geo-tagging, guided walks, ephemeral cities, imaginary urbanism, altered maps/radical cartography, travel writing, psychogeography, place based photo blogging, etc. What connects all of these activities? There may not be a clear answer, but we would say they all comprise, or fall under the rubric of, neogeography.

Hopefully, this provisional definition will allow us to start a discussion, to share, in the spirit of Platial, our collective ideas and resources to build something interesting and meaningful.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, neogeography, psychogeography

Hybrid Fields

From the announcement:

"Hybrid Fields is a group exhibition of contemporary artists creating socially engaged art that explores philosophies for growing food, distributing food, and consuming food. Their art inhabits a hybrid space where art and life, art and agriculture, converge."

Technorati Tags: placekraft, agriculture, farming, art

Recent Acquisition

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:



















Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Recent Acquisition

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:



















Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Recent Acquisition

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place (courtesy of Sharon Sadle):



















Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Biosphere Estates

NY Times reports that Jean Baudrillard predicts the future (yet again).

Jean Baudrillard from Maleficent Ecology (1994):

"...the fact is that the imaginary, or experimental, model is in no way different from the real functioning of this society. Just as the whole of America is built in the image of Disneyland, so the whole of American society is carrying on - in real time and out in the open - the same experiment as Biosphere 2 which is therefore falsely experimental, just as Disneyland is only falsely imaginary."

NY Times (2006) :

"As it turns out, the real science experiment was going on outside, as development conquered vast swaths of the Sonoran Desert...The Biosphere was designed to simulate the Earth's environment. By succumbing to sprawl, it may have done just that."

Sprawl "contaminates" the site, not with disease, but with the expansion of sterility. What threatens to rise in its place is Biosphere Estates - yet another environmental simulation. The desert is transformed once more into a proving ground for survival (which is distinguished from living.) Biosphere 2 was at its inception an example of what Baudrillard calls "the ruins of the future." And Biosphere Estates fulfills his prophetic imagining: "One can imagine entire towns put together not from the wastes of what has already served a purpose and therefore retained some trace of its previous usage, but of things that were waste 'from the outset'..." The new residents will move into a prototypical survival station much in the same way the "bionauts" of Biosphere 2 entered their own hermetic tomb, this time, however, there will be much less fanfare. Similarly, the ranch houses become small-scale versions of the facility itself without the scientific fanfare. And thus the fundamental impetus behind this "artificial survival" leads us further into a Baudrillardian death - "The real planet, presumed condemned, is sacrificed in advance to its miniaturized, air-conditioned clone...which is designed to vanquish death by total simulation. In days gone by it was the dead who were embalmed for eternity; today, it is the living we embalm alive in a state of survival."

Technorati Tags: placekraft, Biosphere, Baudrillard, sprawl, suburb, desert

Recent Acquisition

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:



















Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Small shelters and homes

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company makes low impact, elegantly designed, portable homes. This unit features "a retractable table and vanity, a desk, 100 cubic feet of storage, a cathedral ceiling, a six gallon water heater, a shower, toilet, stainless steel counter, refrigerator, sink, heat stove, a double burner, and a vented sleeping loft."

Additional sources for small footprint structures:
Tiny Houses
Small House Society
Walpole Woodworkers
Modern Cabana
Cavco Industries
ALCHEMY architects

Technorati Tags: placekraft, architecture, portable architecture, prefab, eco-architecture, green_building

The Land Connection

The Land Connection is an Illinois based food system resource. You can find information about buying organic and local foods, converting to organic agriculture, CSA subscriptions, farmland preservation and more. From their mission statement:

Our goal is to cultivate healthy farms, healthy food, and healthy communities by:
1) saving farmland at risk of loss to development and making that farmland available to new organic farmers trained by TLC,
2) facilitating rural-urban links that directly connect growers and eaters of local organic foods, and
3) educating farmers and the public alike on the many benefits of production and consumption of local organic food.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, agriculture, organic, farming, slow food

Old School Neogeography

Guthrie Lonergan shows his Lonely Los Angeles project in which he sorted through MapQuest to find open/empty spaces in L.A. and gathered them together for display.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, neogeography, cartography,

Architectures of Control

Architectures of Control in Design is a fantastic resource for thinking about the "other" side of design. Much of design theory focuses on how to enable users to accomplish certain tasks, so this site is a good way to think through how design can be used to disable users either intentionally or unintentionally. A brief synopsis from the site:

Architectures of control are features, structures or methods of operation designed into physical products, software, buildings, city layouts—or indeed any planned system with which a user interacts—which are intended to enforce, reinforce, or restrict certain modes of user behaviour.


Technorati Tags: placekraft, design, architecture, control,

Let the Dead Bury the Dead

Technorati Tags: placekraft, demolition, intervention, urbanism

Neogeography defined...

A SLIGHTLY MODIFIED DEFINITION OF NEOGEOGRAPHY IS NOW POSTED ON PLATIAL.

We're happy to see that neogeography is gaining momentum. As we mentioned in response to a comment in our previous post, we think that it's a much needed descriptive category.

To flesh it out a bit:

Neogeography describes, or names, a diverse set of practices that (mostly) fall outside the professional geographic domain. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of neogeography tend towards the intuitve, 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.

Neogeography is, or should be, broad enough to include, urban exploration and its Situationist offspring (like psychogeography), illegal architecture, site-specific sculpture, collaborative mapping, geo-tagging, guided walks, ephemeral cities (Burning Man for instance), imaginary urban planning (see Urville), altered maps, travel writing, place based photo blogging, etc.

When one asks what connects all of these activities, there may not be a clear answer, but they all fall, however tangentially, in the realm of geography (usually "humanist"). Neogeography, to rework Elizabeth Grosz, is an attempt to explore geography "from the outside."

Technorati Tags: placekraft, geography, neogeography, psychogeography, cartography, urbanism

Architecture from the Outside

From Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies by Elizabeth Grosz:

"How to think architecture differently? How to think in architecture, or of architecture, without conforming to the standard assumptions, the doxa, the apparent naturalness, or rather, evolutionary fit assumed to hold between being and building: how to move beyond the pervasive presumption that subjectivity and dwelling exist in a relation of complementarity, either of containment (space or dwelling houses or contains subjects) or expression (space or dwelling as the aesthetic or pragmatic expression of subjectivity)?"

A forbidding question, in both sentence structure and substance.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, architecture, space, subjectivity, Elizabeth Grosz