placekraft

Call for Participation

2007-06-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

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]

2007-02-28T16:08:00.000-08:00

Land's Sake

2006-10-29T13:12:00.000-08:00

"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

2006-09-12T07:03:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-09-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

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

2006-09-08T07:26:00.000-07:00

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

2006-06-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Recent Acquisition

2006-06-14T09:36:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Recent Acquisition

2006-06-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Biosphere Estates

2006-05-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-22T10:39:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Small shelters and homes

2006-05-15T16:33:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-08T21:53:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-04T06:46:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Technorati Tags: placekraft, demolition, intervention, urbanism

Neogeography defined...

2006-04-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

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

Recent Acquisition [Vintage]

2006-04-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Orange and Blue

2006-04-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

Just caught wind of this project via Land+Living. It's a simple, but seemingly effective (as evidenced by this communication from the people involved with the project) attempt at addressing urban decay in Detroit.

Or if you prefer blue, and an entirely different social context, look at what we found via we make money not art.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, urbanism, demolition, art, sprawl, decay, Detroit,

Illegal Architecture

2006-04-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

From Jonathan Hill's essay An Other Architect:

"My agenda is a dislocation of architecture from the narrow confines of professionalism and its development within an expanded cultural field."

He outlines a program for supporting the development of illegal architects. An intruder's practice, but "not simply a person who produces architecture without a professional qualification." These architects may very well be licensed, but choose to operate in the "liminal space" at the edge of architectural activity. placekraft imagines itself as operating in this border zone, taking to heart Hill's advice "that anyone wanting to produce architecture should, first, discard the preconceived boundaries of the discipline and, second, be prepared to learn from architecture wherever it is found, whoever it is produced by."

Technorati Tags: placekraft, architecture, illegal architect

Opolis

2006-04-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

Opolis is an upcoming exhibit put together by Flux Factory. It's conceptualized as a comic/installation hybrid that constructs an imaginary city:

"Individual city blocks will be assigned to individual cartoonists. These cartoonists will design the buildings and environments that will fill the city blocks (apartment buildings, libraries, factories, zoos, museums, slums, prisons, etc), and will invent characters to populate these environments."

It's an exercise in imaginary urbanism and what we at placekraft call speculative cartography. Exhibition opens June 24th 2006.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, cartoon, comic, urbanism, cartography, installation

Food Systems

2006-04-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

Critical Spatial Practice is impossibly good. This post about food systems is a great resource for research on the topic. placekraft offers a few supplements from our own research:

Project for Public Spaces - Public Markets - information on community building, local economic development, family farm/urban relationships, etc.

Baum Forum - sustainable food and farming are explored through a variety of presentations and workshops documented here. Read the announcement for the upcoming Putting Food Systems on the Urban Map presentation to see what you're missing or to make plans.

Food Share - Canadian group engaged in a number of food system projects from community gardening to cooking classes and nutrition training.

City Farmer - Another Canadian site focused on all aspects of urban agriculture. A nice essay from 2000 outlining urban planning's need to address food systems is here. Thankfully, progress has been made in this regard.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, community, farming, foodsystems, urban, agriculture, place

Recent Acquisition

2006-04-12T11:36:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Psychogeography vs. Neogeography

2006-04-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

We have to credit the people at Platial for coining (we believe, or at least popularizing) the term neogeography. It's a much needed term to replace the often overused psychogeography. The term is sufficiently abstract to serve as a broad category of un/non-professional geographic practices (walking mapping, tagging, etc.). It would often be appropriate to replace a number of activities/projects currently denoted as psychogeographic, with neogeographic. Psychogeography could then be a narrower term evoking the implicit political ambitions of the Situationists.

UPDATE HERE.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, psychogeography, neogeography, platial, situationist

G-RAD, PLANT!, and URBN*KNG

2006-04-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

via, and hosted on G-RAD:

"PLANT! is an exploration of "place," consisting of six neighborhood-centric sites, chosen and maintained by Calvin College students, that have been converted from unused space to urban gardens."

PLANT! is just one of many thoughtful and engaging projects/blogs hosted on G-RAD. Part sculpture, part community gardening, and part situationist-hippy-science project, PLANT! is 100% smart.

If you haven't been to Grand Rapids (placekraft hasn't), this "loveletter to Grand Rapids" will make you miss it anyway. It is a shining example of community blogging along with its "big brother" URBN*NKG.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, community, gardening, place, art

Hard Ankle 10-20

2006-04-05T17:44:00.000-07:00

It has come to our attention that our Hard Ankle 10-20 project got a little hype on the Platial blog.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, platial, cartography, trucker

Recent Acquisition

2006-04-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Recent Acquisition

2006-04-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Recent Acquisition

2006-04-03T11:59:00.000-07:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place [Courtesy of S. Sadle]:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

City of Glass

2006-04-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

Six years after the fact, placekraft obtains a copy of City of Glass - a book that in some sense, barely exists. It is perhaps appropriate that Coupland's take on Vancouver appears insubstantial. The city is, after all, still staking out its identity in global culture.

Coupland is especially skilled at mapping out surface impressions. Employing this, we are given glimpses of the city in fragments that oscillate among memory, mythology, and observation.

There is a particularly compelling map of "Parallel Universe Vancouver" which reconfigures a conventional city map by re-drawing and re-naming its neighborhoods. The University of British Columbia becomes subdivided into two new neighborhoods - Microsoft, and Monterey, CA which are bordered to the east by Vermont and Pasadena, CA. This map typifies the "psychogeography lite" that Coupland utilizes throughout the book. "Lite" is not used pejoratively here, as City of Glass is instructive in showing that psychogeographical writing needn't be serious, or self-aware as such, to be useful or effective.

The book is best read as a guidebook then, not for the sights and points of interest in Vancouver, but for how one might approach creating an observational framework for one's own exploration of place.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, travel, city, vancouver

Urville

2006-04-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

via urville.city.free.fr and too many blogs to list:

Do you know Urville?

A french city of 11.5 millions inhabitants located outside the french Riviera, its architecture having been designed by illustrious people like Oscar Laballière (1803-1883), and which includes among others a well known Column of the Human Rights Declaration and 150 skyscrapers, one of which culminates at 540m. Urville, whose name has been inspired by the scientific research site in Antarctic comes out of the imagination of Gilles Trehin...

Technorati Tags: placekraft, city, urbanism, architecture, urville

placekraft @ Version>06

2006-04-02T15:19:00.000-07:00

placekraft will be presenting at:

Version>06 :: Parallel Cities
April 20- May 6, 2006 Chicago IL

Please be sure to stop by and say hello if you are attending the NFO XPO.

Technorati Tags: placekraft, Version06, NFO,

Conflux/Glowlab

2006-04-02T15:13:00.000-07:00

via Glowlab:

Conflux is the annual New York City festival where visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers and the public gather to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city.

The Village Voice describes Conflux as a “network of maverick artists and unorthodox urban investigators...making fresh, if underground, contributions to pedestrian life in New York City, and upping the ante on today’s fight for the soul of high-density metropolises.”

Participants in Conflux share an interest in psychogeography. Projects presented range from interpretations of the classical approach developed by the Situationists to emerging artistic, conceptual and technology-based practices.

At Conflux, participants, along with attendees and the public, put their investigations into action on the city streets. The city becomes a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities.

Conflux events are free and open to the public. They include:

walks and tours
lectures, workshops, and panels
street games and tech-enabled expeditions
interactive performance
social / environmental research
public art installations
audio / video / film programs

APPLICATION DETAILS.

Technorati Tags: Glowlab, psychogeography, art, urbanism, Conflux

Vintage Map

2006-04-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

Technorati Tags: placekraft, cartography

Recent Acquisition

2006-04-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

Recent Acquisition for Non-Place:

Technorati Tags: placekraft, non-place, cartography

Semapedia

2006-03-03T07:28:00.000-08:00

Semapedia is one of a number of systems that utilize tagging to link the physical word to the internet. It is a small piece of the internet of things puzzle. An excellent starting bibliography on the internet of things can be found at Purse Lip Square Jaw. Julian Bleecker at techkwondo provides a useful supplement to this from a design perspective.

Images tagged semapedia on flickr.

Technorati Tags: techkwondo, semapedia, tagging, internet_of_things

Non-Place

1992-03-31T09:18:00.000-08:00

Radical Cartography hosts the placekraft project Non-Place. The project is an ongoing collection of maps of non-places. The collection began as a way of documenting actual visits to shopping malls and gradually expanded to include stores, airports, and museums, visited or not. The notion of non-place is theorized in detail by Marc Auge in Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.

Auge describes circulation, communication, and consumption as key features of these non-places. The networked retail environment of standardization becomes the dominant model for organizing social space. In addition to Auge, a particularly useful "handbook" for contextualizing the collection is Project on the City 2: Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Chung, Inaba, Koolhaas, and Leong eds.

An essay in the volume, "...And Then There Was Shopping" by Sze Tsung Leong details how shopping has become the pervasive and defining feature of contemporary life. Leong notes: "...shopping is expanding into every program imaginable...Airports and malls are starting to look indistinguishable. The experience of the museum is becoming increasingly seamless with that of the department store. Even the city is being configured according to the mall..."

This collection is itself a map of these transformations. It is intended as an archive of the various ways that non-places are constructed graphically, physically and discursively. If you would like to contribute maps to the Non-Place Archive, please contact us: [placekraft] [at] [yahoo] [dot] [com]

Dead Bury the Dead

1990-04-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

90.001 - 90.010

1990-04-15T14:37:00.000-07:00

90

1990-04-15T14:27:00.000-07:00

[This will be the Space Coast Archive - Description in progress]

90.001 - 90.010

Back to:469689.5

Anomaphenomenological Case Study 2.02

1990-04-02T22:53:00.000-07:00

In 2002 we continued our research of gravitational anomalies at Gravity Hill in New Paris, PA (N40 06' / W78 41'). Due to previously mentioned resource diversions, the report is no longer available. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The Enigma Project, however, issued a report in 2005 of their extensive findings at the site here.

Return to: Anomaphenomenological Gravitology

Anomaphenomenological Case Study 1.01

1990-04-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

Location: 27 54' N / 81 35' W - Lake Wales, FL
Date: 7.07.01
Time: 11:35

Report [only an excerpt]:
Proceeded to make the 4 minute drive from Chalet Suzanne. Test subject was well sated by broiled grapefruit and King Crab Thermidor. Speculation as to possible hallucinatory effects of Soup Romaine® aside, it was deemed the appropriate nutritional fueling for the experiment. Soup Romaine® "has received international acclaim as one of the outstanding soups of the world. It has been served in all the Governors' Mansions and aboard the Apollo flights to the Moon." If it's good enough for the space program, it should suffice for a terrestrial gravitology experiment.

Test subject reported site to be dreary and unremarkable aside from two dilapidated signs, one read "SPOOK HILL," and another detailed the legend:

Many years ago an Indian village on Lake Wales was plagued by raids of a huge gator. The Chief, a great warrior, killed the gator in a battle that created a small lake. The chief was buried on the north side. Pioneer mail riders first discovered their horses laboring down hill, thus naming it "Spook Hill." When the road was paved, cars coasted up hill. Is this the gator seeking revenge, or the chief still trying to protect his land?

Anomaphenomenological experience confirms the existence of a gravitological anomaly at the site. This image from INTALEK, Inc. illustrates the findings and links to their study of the site.

Return to: Anomaphenomenological Gravitology

Anomaphenomenological Gravitology: Sources

1990-04-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

Some sources that have aided our exploration in anomaphenomenological gravitology:

Intalek, Inc.
[The greatest source of gravitological, radiant energy, and temporal anomaly research. Papers available in the Intalek Library range from space-time engineering to negative resistance and beyond. Research equipment and video documentation of experiments conducted at the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot are available for purchase here.]
Wisconsin State Cartographer's Office
[site features Gravity Anomaly Maps of Wisconsin, including the Iron River 1 x 2 quadrangle, Michigan and Wisconsin]
The Enigma Project
[site has extensive catalog of gravity hills and over 20 years of research on the topic]
Space-Time
[site is devoted to the structure of space-time with special section on anomalous behaviour of pendula, gravimeters, etc. during eclipses.]
Phenomenology Online
[excellent starting point for phenomenological research/methodologies]
VortexMaps
[comprehensive listing of vortex sites (often gravitological in nature) worldwide, as well as maps, books, and videos available for purchase]
The University of Texas Center for Space Research (UTCSR)
[see specifically the GRACE - Gravity Anomaly Maps]
Nova Institute of Technology
[especially the work of David Yurth whose paper "A New Approach to a Unified Field Theory" presented at the 4th Annual International Symposium of the New Energy Society, University of Utah in 1998 develops torsional field theory to accommodate phenomenological anomalies.]
American Antigravity
[Site features latest updates in the field]

Return to: Anomaphenomenological Gravitology

Anomaphenomenological Gravitology

1990-04-02T16:49:00.000-07:00

In 2001, placekraft commenced its phenomenological research of known and purported sites of anomalous gravity in the United States. There is no shortage of research being conducted in this field, but a majority of it is scientific in methodology, and thus our research is distinguished by its focus on the qualitative properties of these anomalies. NOTE: The future status of this project is uncertain as funding streams have been redirected towards other research. We welcome volunteers to help us catalogue sites and, after proper training in anomaphenomenological research protocols, produce their own field reports for this research node.

The catalogue of sites.

Anomaphenomenological Case Study 1.01

Anomaphenomenological Case Study 2.02

Research Sources

Reading List

A note on methodology

1990-04-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

Pennies on the Tracks.

This photograph is of a display at the Marion County Historical Society in Marion, OH. It depicts coins run over by a train carrying Warren G. Harding's body.

These ordinary items are transformed by the train passing over them. They now literally embody the weight of history.

Banal objects as relics - tainted by their history and haunted by potential disasters in their future. This is the methodology of 469689.5

Back to:469689.5

Field Notes Index

1990-04-01T14:16:00.000-07:00

The field notes for 469689.5 can be found here:

2.23.04-2.25.04

3.1.04-7.15.04

9.5.04-9.7.04

9.15.04-11.13.04

11.21.04-12.4.05

2.4.05

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Field Notes 2.4.05

1990-04-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

2.4.05

WTC attackers belief in going to heaven? [re: pamphlet]

souvenir as nostalgia for lost moment – a materialization of memory
what if the object predicts, fortells the loss it is meant to sate?

souvenirs transfigured into visits from the future rather than totems of the past

souvenirs/artifacts as a perpetual present

the pathological re-enactment of trauma
an eternal disaster [Baudrillard tie here?]

the fantasy of tragedy – how much time must pass? how many deaths are too many?

Warhol’s death and disaster series – the image of tragedy – not the reality per se

references to heaven and WTC

the Bermuda Triangle is not an actual place, but a way of establishing boundaries for disaster – a way to encapsulate tragedy in the popular imagination – a perfectly rational geometric form enveloping the irrational, the unspeakable

a tool for sifting through the shockwaves of tragic events – an associative matrix of forensic analysis, nostalgia, critical theory, superstition, and disaster as bounded/constructed by memory, popular culture, and illegitimate juxtapositions

a disciplined diversion

the structural “center” of the triangle, its 90 degree backbone born on the space coast

the abstraction of geometry as particularly suited to embodying the abstraction of media events

the abstraction generated by technology – technology AS abstraction

all deaths neutralized in this field as the curvature of the earth is in Euclidean space

forensic analysis as abstraction
bullet path through Kennedy’s body becomes a mathematical problem of velocity and trajectory – similarly, the space shuttle and WTC become physics problems

what indignation about these “explanatory” modalities?

narrowing the explanatory or empathetic frame as a means of “understanding” or simply processing an event

media archeology – cultural archeological dig, sifting through strata of residue in order to reconstruct events, but of course, this “reconstruction” is itself contrived – sorting out the meaningful debris from the mere rubble – the ordinary transformed via death into an honored relic

kitsch becomes monument

Bonnie and Clyde death car etc.

pennies squished by train carrying Harding’s body transformed by mere penny by the weight of the train and further pressed into meaning by the weight of history

pennies on the tracks: a note on methodology

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Field Notes 11.21.04-1.24.05

1990-04-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

11.21.04

Tang as the gastronomic Titantic – the impregnable technological food – no spoilage, no failure, a resounding victory of the space age

1.3.05

Ronald and Faye launched a dream on 12/17/71

could Jeannie have seen the Twin Towers?

1.16.05

presidential reports as travel guides

Jeannie disappearing into smoke
shuttle explosion
image from greeting card as shuttle disaster

Dallas equivalent? J.R.’s wheelchair?

Kennedy/J.R. shot – oil derrick

Mary Kay pink Cadillac as Kennedy death car as Jackie’s dress!

Reagan/J.R. in wheelchair

time was one second longer in a million years standing on the twin towers

time flattened – gravitational time – NYC
suspended time of the film – JFK
time travel- space coast
primordial swamp meets space age technology

1.24.05

Jeannie disintegrating to enter bottle
space capsule as protection from disintegration
role of the wish and rhetoric of service
ocean beach origins
one from distant past to distant future

disruption of circular time
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Field Notes 9.15.04-11.13.04

1990-04-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

9.15.04

Big apple
Big D

Big: 47.3 – 42.7
Star: 42.7 – 90
Island: 47.3 – 90
Hagman: 42.7 – 90
Football: 47.3 – 42.7
Conventions: 47.3 – 42.7

space shuttle/WTC trivia

elevator speed/shuttle speed
altitude/building height
occupancy – Space Coast population/Tower pop/ Stadium capacity
technical innovations/special materials

9.16.04

Jackie was wearing a Halston hat…

9.24.04

city as celebrity

disaster – technological marvel – media saturation – hidden congruity – memorializing – forensic investigation – pop culture Imagineering

10.4.04

“…inductive, anthropological aggregation of examples…” (description of Venturi and Brown’s approach in Signs of Life) [source not noted]

10.5.04

12/71 – Hagman and Eden reunite for A Howling in the Wooods
1990 – LeAnn De La Vega (mentions maiden name as Nelson)

10/91 – I Still Dream of Jeannie airs – i was watching the Bay Area fires burning
9/18 – first episode airs (mother’s birthdate)

10.12.04

Towering Inferno – other high-rise disaster sources

10.18.04

chart relationship between media visibility and disaster

11.11.04

space capsule = genie bottle

11.13.04

The magic bullet era
The o-ring era
The ground zero era
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Field Notes 9.5.04-9.7.04

1990-04-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

9.5.04

Kennedy shot in November – mystery begins
J.R.’s attempted assassin revealed in November – mystery ends

we now know who pulled the trigger

[no presidential commission needed]

11/62 Jodie Foster born
11/63 Kennedy Shot

3/80 J.R. shot
3/81 Reagan shot

04 Republican convention in NYC
84 Republican convention in Dallas

“…an eidetic fiction constructed from factual observation. As both analogue and abstraction, then, the surface of the map functions like an operating table, a staging ground or a theatre of operations upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, relates and generally explores. These surfaces are massive collection, sorting and transfer sites, great fields upon which real material conditions are isolated, indexed, and placed within an assortment of relational structures.”

mapping places bound with moments
historic/popular/personal imagination
mythologies of destruction/loss

9.6.04

Greyhound based in Dallas

[appearance of pod idea]

9.7.04

fuel tank capacity of vehicles
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Field Notes 3.1.04-7.15.04

1990-04-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

3.1.04

where is the Ground Zero of theoretical thought?

is it possible to be critical? or is that an adequate approach to the event?

We are not convinced that any critical apparatus is adequate as a response, and therefore provocation is our only hope – to shock ourselves into engagement…

an attempt to disrupt the banality of bumper sticker empathy
to reject the notion that to die is necessarily heroic
to approach the asymptote of representation
to defend provocation as a legitimate form of cultural engagement

From Cultural Metaphysics – Charles Levin
p.3 “It is a conceptual holding room for paradox and nonsense, for everything in the contemporary social imaginary that is illegitimate, unpleasant, or inadequate.”

absolute zero cannot actually be attained – a temperature is reached at which nothing can happen – a theoretical limit – ground zero as absolute conceptual zero?

an attempt “..at participant observation of the cultural unconscious.”

3.22.04

“It’s hard to be down when you’re up.” - WTC

6.18.04

one person in marriage dying shortly after the first – the towers

balls of twine the length of the towers – the twine towers

7.8.04

[Dallas added to project]

cities as figured in a blend of personal and popular imagination – cities as “celebrities” and thus in Warhol’s death and disaster tradition

“they hate our freedom”

7.15.04

J.R. shot 3/80
Reagan shot 3/81
Kennedy Shot - ?
J.R. beer – Hagman liver date? 8/23/95

Challenger date? 1/28/86 STS 51-L

Hinckley born? 5/29/55 moved to Dallas 1959 leaves 1973
Foster born? 11/19/62

Jeannie born in Baghdad Iraq 4/1 64 B.C.

Barbara Eden/Iron Sheik

wrestled as The Great Hosein/Hussein Arab – 12/26/83 (wins WWF title in MSG) - 1/23/84

JFA

technological failure/marvel

[Space Coast added to scope and emergence of triangle structure]

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Field Notes 2.23.04-2.25.04

1990-04-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

2.23.04
passion plays as ritual re-enactment of transformative historical horror.

What happened at the point of impact? A singularity exploding into spectacular repetition – an eternal moment.

hidden prophecies

the limits of destruction
an absolute limit of representation
the asymptote of representability

2.25.04

FROM: The Spirit of Terrorism by Jean Baudrillard

p.17 “…a death which is symbolic and sacrificial – that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event.”

p.26 re: images

p.28 “…the fascination with the attack is primarily a fascination with the image…”

p.30 “The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us.” re: inability to interpret or impose meaning

p.31 re: media complicity

p.37 re: Baudrillard’s assertion that it’s impossible to explain an “absolute event” - offer an analysis that is “as unacceptable as the event”

p.41 “…these architectural monsters…have always exerted an ambiguous fascination, as have extreme forms of modern technology in general – a contradictory figure of attraction and repulsion, and hence, somewhere, a secret desire to see them disappear.”

“There is admittedly, in this cloning and prefect symmetry an aesthetic quality, a kind of perfect crime against form, a tautololgy of from which can give rise, in a violent reaction, to the temptation to break that symmetry, to restore an asymmetry, and hence a singularity.”

p.52 re: the event as that which “creates a zone of impossible exchange.”

p.57 re: terrorism’s lack of meaning constitutes it as an event

p.60 re: 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.”

p.61 “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.”

p.64-5 re: devastate vs. destroy

p.62 “A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power.”

p.81 “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.”

p.96 re: singularities “…invent their own game and their own rules.”

p.99 re: the criminal origin of the cold snap
“It is unacceptable for modernity to be rejected in its universal pretensions.”

p.101 “War is a response to the aggression, but not to the challenge.”

p.31 “…they are part of the terror…” [the media]
p.60 “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.”

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469689.5 Diagrams.3

1990-04-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

469689.5 d:celebrity/death/technology

469689.5 d:zero/annhilation/terror

469689.5 d:memory/mythologizing

Diagrams.1 - Diagrams.2

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469689.5 Diagrams.2

1990-04-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

469689.5 d:absolute event

469689.5 d:meaning

469689.5 d:arrogance/compassion

469689.5 d:devastation/destruction

469689.5 d:god/evil power

Diagrams.1 - Diagrams.3

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469689.5 Diagrams.1

1990-04-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

469689.5 d:visibility

469689.5 d:icons

469689.5 d:wwf/e

469689.5 d:fame

469689.5 d:trajectories

Diagrams.2 - Diagrams.3

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About 469689.5

1990-04-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

469689.5 is a tool for sifting through the shockwaves of tragic events – an associative matrix of forensic analysis, nostalgia, critical theory, superstition, and disaster as bounded/constructed by memory, popular culture, and illegitimate juxtapositions. Perhaps it is an exercise in what Charles Levin calls cultural metaphysics - "...a conceptual holding room for paradox and nonsense, for everything in the contemporary social imaginary that is illegitimate, unpleasant, or inadequate."

It is an exercise in mapping places that are bound by moments etched in the historic, popular, and personal imagination. The archive/research constructs new histories and pre-histories for these events, as well as augments existing histories. It is media forensics – or a cultural archaeological dig, sifting through strata of residue in order to reconstruct events, but, of course, this "reconstruction" is itself contrived – sorting out the meaningful debris from the mere rubble – the ordinary transformed via death into an honored relic is always a matter of perspective.

Various cultural artifacts are gathered to thread together the social and personal narratives connecting these sites. Ultimately, it aspires to be a map as described by James Corner in The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique, and Invention - "...the map permits a kind of excavation (downward) and extension (outward) to expose, reveal and construct latent possibilities within a greater milieu. The map 'gathers' and 'shows' things presently (and always) invisible, things which may appear incongruous or untimely but which may also harbor enormous potential for the unfolding of alternative events...the function of maps is not to depict but to enable, to precipitate a set of effects in time. Thus, mappings do not represent geographies or ideas; rather they effect their actualization."

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469689.5

1990-03-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

[under development]

About the project
A note on methodology
The Bermuda Triangle
47.3
42.7
90
Diagrams
Field Notes
References