dreams - Salt Lake, Utah

Salt maps

dreams - White Sands, New Mexico

Gypsum sand, New Mexico

Repetition - San Joaquins

Just north of Bakersfield on the Amtrak train to San Francisco.

Flatness. In SF people were perplexed not only to why I spent time in Bakersfield, but why I didn't take the coastal train. The coast is lovely, but the interior was entrancing. There was a lulling monotony; a repetitiveness - of right angle crossings by roads and rails; telegraph poles, fences, barriers; fields, furrows, tracks; bells, doppler effects. Space etched by rail.

"He is telling all of this while he keeps fixed to his map, and
as he speaks, he draws in the ties of his tracks, a couple hundred little hash marks. At first I see them as tallies of wrongs, but when he keeps marking them even after the topic changes, keeps laying down those little sleepers, I think: of course, the most important elements in a trackman’s work is the crosstie—that piece holding the railroad together, the predicate between subject and object, the linking between soil and rail. A trackman’s days go to battling ties; as feet are to a walker, so ties are to a train"

Prairyerth: A Deep Map - William Least Heat Moon

Nostalgia II

Sketch of Childhood + airport + CN railway

On Exactitude in Science

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Maps

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans."

Matt Woolman - Digital Information Graphics at Visual complexity