Temporary Travel Office

A Crooked Border

2011-11-29T13:19:00.001-06:00

Joe Burgess/The New York Times

The New York Times' Frank Jacobs has a great post on the Borderlines blog about the fallacy of the straight border between Canada and the US, noting that the clear-cut demarcation "deviates from the 49th parallel by up to several hundred feet." It proceeds to deliver an abbreviated history of how the border became what it is today, and that rather than one giant straight line, it's a series of smaller straight lines between a series of border monuments. It concludes with a remark on how colonial forces along the 49th parallel (in Russia's Far East and North America) have created these imaginary lines, with very real consequences, at the detriment of indigenous peoples:

Another (ahem) parallel: Both sets of powers divided the territories between each other irrespective of the native peoples present in those areas. In the case of Sakhalin, Japanese/Russian occupation was disastrous for the Ainu, Gilyak and other local tribes.
In the 1870s, Sioux fleeing the might of the United States Army provided the straight part of what is now sometimes known as “the longest undefended border in the world” with its most poetic epithet. Seeing how an invisible force seemed to stop the American cavalry dead in their tracks, they called that imperfectly demarcated boundary the Medicine Line.

Occupy Maps

2011-11-12T17:24:00.000-06:00

We just picked up the new book by our friends' at AREA Chicago, Notes for a People's Atlas: People Making Maps of Their Cities, which we strongly encourage anyone reading this to check out. The book contains a collection of maps of Chicago (as well as a handful of other cities and neighborhoods from around the world) made by residents, visitors, activists, artists and others, along with short essays that provide some historical context for informal and artistic map making. The Notes for a People's Atlas project began 7 years ago, facilitating the mapping from below of the city of Chicago. One thing that emerges from the collection of rather random mappings of the city (from the politically motivated to the idiosyncratic and comedic) is an understanding of how much our spatial understanding of where we live has to do with how we live in it and what we imagine is possible.

The People's Atlas starts by asking people to mark up blank maps, and it becomes extremely clear that what remains blank in the maps produced is as important as what gets filled in. Through the process of mapping what is known, we also map what isn't known. How can we deal with gaps in individual and collective experience if we don't know those gaps even exist? The immediate, micro moments that define our everyday lives (where we eat, go to school, or get unnecessarily harassed by the police as one map narrates), put into the space of a map, can be projected onto the social fabric that is woven from the experiences of those surrounding us, whether we know them or not. The individual maps in People's Atlas give us an incomplete visual index of a city that isn't some kind of static, naturally defined terrain, but rather is a living entity with permeable boundaries. Various entities flow in and out of its walls, not unlike genetic material breaching cellular walls, struggling to make it a habitable place. Notes for a People's Atlas, encourages us to make this a more just process, realizing in maps our connections to others who are also fighting to make the city inhabitable.

Disaster Tourism is for the Birds

2011-11-03T16:02:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the Atlas Obscura blog, we came across this story about several species of birds (Tiger Bittern, Black Bittern, Little Egret, Pond Heron, Indian Pitta and Kingfishers) that plunge to their deaths in Jatinga, India. Apparently, it's not the descent that kills the birds, but the people on the ground. Conservationists and wildlife advocates have been working on figuring out what the cause of the birds' behavior is, and stopping the killings (deaths have supposedly dropped by 40%) At any rate, a tourism agency for the state of Assam is attempting to turn the phenomenon into a tourist attraction.
We should probably apologize for the horrible pun in this post's title.

RIP Parking Meters

2011-09-21T13:02:00.001-05:00

The NY Times just ran a story on the removal of NYC's remaining coin-based meters. We've written about this change that has been happening to the administration of car parking in cities across the country, a shift from municipal to corporate operations. Often this is done as a form of short term revenue generation (ala Chicago) that ends of being a pretty bad deal for both the city and those trying to park in it. We see the shift to privately managed public services like this as simply one (extremely) mundane element (along with things like E-Z Passes and biometric travel security) of what some call the "control society," where behavior is regulated by pay-to-play mechanisms rather than (or along with) traditional disciplinary measures. A "kinder, gentler" form of enforcement, if you will.
The NYT story ran just a couple of days after the International Park(ing) Day, a day where people transform parking spaces into open spaces of gathering, like a pocket park. We wonder what the shift in parking administration might mean for this kind of temporary reclaiming of space, that pretty much depends on a shared practice of public space and understanding of a public good. As long as metered parking spaces operate as a municipal function, one can at least expect a certain amount of latitude in behavior. Many city planners and bureaucrats are actually advocates for non-automobile uses of space after all. But what happens when that space is managed by interests that actually have no stake in maintaining a public beyond one that is a paying customer, and property lines (and the power they engender) extend further beyond the confines of corporate walls?
If you're really interested in the history of parking meters and their rise in cities, check out this report from a 1958 volume of The Patent, Trademark and Copyright Journal of Research and Education on the Parking Meter Industry (pdf).

The Journey West (via a journey East)

2011-07-26T17:37:00.000-05:00

Travel Office friends Stephanie Rothenberg and Dan Wang recently opened a travel agency in Beijing called "The Journey West." Along with fellow guides Steve Brill, Sarah Kanouse, Trevor Paglen, we offered our tour of parking in Hollywood, CA. Of course, we really love this, as it's a kind-of store front parallel to our Stories in Reserve guide book series. We also love the tension between the believability of the tours as purchasable, the experiences the tours offer, and the unbelievability of them being offered in the first place.
This reminds us of a 1995 film by Marlon Fuentes titled Bontoc Eulogy (mostly because we recently re-watched it). The film is a meditation on identity and post-colonial violence, by way of the display of Filipino peoples at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and the story of the film maker's grandfather's experience as an object of that display. It presents itself as a personal investigation into family history, a tour through history in the form of a documentary. And the film is a tour of sorts, but is anything but a straightforward document of history. What is gained by the slippage in belief, truth, evidence and experience offered by the film? We might offer that the experience of the film as documentary could be considered equivalent to the experience of place one expects from a guided tour. As John Berger once said of the difference between seeing a painting in reproduction and seeing the painting in real life, I am in front of it. I can see it.
The film, as documentary, functions as evidence of a story that happened, just as the tour functions as evidence of a place that exists.
Guided tours are being used in many ways that start to unravel the conventions of their mediation, as films like Bontoc Eulogy do. The physical experience of place offered by tours, however, offers some interesting, and we think productive, tensions not found in film. The Journey West is one great example, and one that shows the power of simply offering the experience as possible.

Wishful Thinking In Government

2011-05-02T20:27:00.000-05:00

Some of our colleagues in the business of providing unsolicited consulting services to government agencies, the Institute for Wishful Thinking, have been seeking proposals from artists, designers, architects, educators and community leaders.
We have offered our ongoing work in Northeast Florida's Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, and there are some other great proposals to browse, including the National TLC Service (Toxic Land/Labor Conservation)!
Their call for proposals is open for another 6 days, until May 8, so get your wishful thinking on.

Architectural Hot Zones

2011-03-24T14:35:00.000-05:00

A recent Citiwire editorial by Roberta Brandes Gratz takes up a critique of the bio-science industry that we dealt with in our tour of the Chicago Technology Park. Brandes Gratz's piece takes on initiatives to construct a BioDistrict in New Orleans's Mid-City Neighborhood. We tried to understand the spatial impacts of the biotech industry through the metaphor of "spatial eugenics," a metaphor that looks like it might be equally, if not more so, applicable in NOLA.
The NOLA Defender has a short piece on the clearing of the land that has occurred there, along with a photo essay. The Christian Science Monitor has a more detailed story from December.
Image above from the NOLA Defender's Kat Arnold.

Underground Migration

2011-03-20T16:39:00.000-05:00

So, when we proposed an underground walkway for visitors to be taken from a contaminated lot at Fifth and Hill in Champaign, IL to our proposed mMigration Research and Recreation Center, we couldn't have imagined that an underground pipe leaving the site was already present. Thanks to investigations by the Champaign County Health Care Consumers, a pipe once used to transport toxic coal tar from a coal-to-gas manufacturing plant into a local creek was found. From the CCHCC press release:

Yesterday, we released the environmental test results from samples of a pipe (and the soil around it) at Boneyard Creek. The pipe is one that belonged to the former manufactured gas plant at Fifth and Hill Streets in Champaign, which is now the Ameren toxic site. Our concern has been that this pipe could be an ongoing source of toxic contamination into the Boneyard Creek, and along the 5-block stretch of the neighborhood where the pipe runs, til it ends at Boneyard Creek.
When the plant was in operation, from the late 1880s until the late 1950s, the pipe was used to dump tons of coal tar and other petroleum-based wastes into the Boneyard Creek. The environmental experts working with the 5th & Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign learned about the existence of this pipe after only one day of conducting background research. The pipe and the gas plant's use of the pipe to dump coal tar was detailed in a 1915 report by Ralph Hilscher. The environmental experts working with us asked the IL EPA and Ameren to investigate the existence of this pipe, because of its potential threat to human health, the environment, and Boneyard Creek.
The IL EPA refused to investigate, saying there was no evidence for the existence of the pipe. It should be noted that in the 15 years that IL Power/Ameren have "investigated" the toxic site, they apparently never found evidence of this pipe.

Stories in Reserve Events in New York, February 9

2011-02-02T15:22:00.000-06:00

If you're in New York on February 9, we are presenting the first volume of Stories in Reserve at two venues and we welcome you to come and meet the contributors and check out the book if you haven't already.
The first event will be at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY from 2-4 pm. It will feature presentations by the Temporary Travel Office and all 5 contributors to the book: Sarah Kanouse, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel, and Sarah Ross. Attendees will be treated to behind-the-scenes virtual tours of three distinct social ecosystems.
Following that, at 7pm, will be a book launch at the great Bluestockings bookstore, where a more informal and intimate discussion of critical tourism and the specific tours in the book will take place.
We hope to see you there!

Touring Protest, Or Maps of Protest

2011-01-28T14:26:00.001-06:00

Following some of the reporting on the protests in Egypt by Aljazeera, we came acrossthis story that portrays the protests through maps.
Without getting into the problematics of this form of mapping and its rendering of space-time relationships as flat and simultaneous, we'd like to just think about the image of the map we are presented with. While maps have probably always included iconography as part of their pictorial funtion, the ability for the map's readers to change the scale of the map makes the role of virtual map pins (like those in Google Earth) more visible... maybe. At what scale is the location in question identified by the map pin? The image below suggests that an event took place in the middle of a street, perhaps at the scale of a building. If you zoom back enough, however, the whole city is on fire.

Can one understand the spatial distribution of protest by locating where its most visible events erupt? Is protest simply the events where direct confrontation occurs? And how does this kind of mapping portray the role of the state in such confrontations?
So, we've set this up as if we have answers, but we don't. Instead, we'll continue playing the tour guide and point to a few other places to look.
The image of a city on fire, depicted from space, immediately recalled Mike Davis's description of the 1992 LA uprisings as "seen" by satellite. Davis made the observation that, from space, the difference between a "natural disaster" like a forest fire and a political one, like the LA uprisings, is difficult to discern. The point being, not that the events of April 1992 should be considered "natural", but that so-called "natural disasters" facing Southern California should be considered political.
In the book Mapping Tourism, cultural geographer Rob Shields, discusses the role of mapping in creating an imaginary of protest and dissent, using the 2001 protests during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec.
And finally, media scholar Lisa Parks dissects the role of tools like Google Earth in portraying geopolitical events like the "Crisis in Darfur".

Taking in the Sights

2011-01-10T17:49:00.000-06:00

Dean MacCannell's "The Ethics of Sightseeing" will be out later this year, and the University of California Press website has the first chapter available for preview.
It seems MacCannell will take on the relative shallowness of most "tourism studies":

Few assessments have been made more often or contested less than "tourism is the world's largest industry." Several recent empirical studies qualify this statement, finding most trips classed as tourism began as family visits. If that is true, it would be no less accurate or more absurd to say "family is the world's largest industry."

We know little more today about tourist experience and tourist subjectivity than we did thirty years ago. Tourism researchers conduct surveys, form and test hypotheses, undertake ethnographic field studies, and make mathematical models. They seem to assume, in Goffman's words, "If you go through the motions attributable to science, then science will result."

MacCannell also seems to be offering a challenge for the practice of tourism, along with furthering his analysis:

Sightseeing can shift the foundations of existence and, as Stendhal never fails to remind us, establish new possibilities for shared subjectivity. This sharing is not limited to exchanges between tourists and their hosts. It extends to every relationship an ethical tourist will ever have.

This, of course, reminds us of one of our early influences, Gregory Ulmer and the Florida Research Ensemble. Here's a video of Ulmer discussing some of those initial concepts.

Rendering the Diaspora

2010-11-30T11:41:00.000-06:00

declare The New York Times has an interesting visualization of detainees released from the US "prison" at Guantánamo Bay. It maps where the 599 living (6 died in custody) former prisoners are currently—although they may still be prisoners in the new host countries. Unfortunately, these individuals are rendered as cubes that are stacked and configured as so many cargo containers in an international shipping logistics map.

(img above from NY Times)

Closer to home, they have a couple of articles addressing the continued disavowal by Southern states of slavery as a primary instigator in their 19th Century secession from the Union. In preparation for the upcoming 150th anniversary of the US Civil War, many states are apparently planning celebrations of the "glory days of the secession." With the continued rise of right-wing political nostalgia, this kind of revisionist historical tourism should be troubling.

Author and historian Adam Goodheart gives an anecdotal account of Harriet Tubman's last missions on the Underground Railroad as the war approached. In the current climate, where contemporary white Southern leaders are celebrating their states' rights to secede in order to keep people as property, the existence of the Underground Railroad and the many people who made it work is important to remember.

Stories in Reserve, Chicago Events!

2010-11-02T13:14:00.000-05:00

For those in the Chicagoland area:
Wednesday, November 10 - book launch and presentations by contributors Sarah Kanouse and Ryan Griffis at Green Lantern Gallery.
Thursday, November 11 - Exhibition opening at Trinity Christian College's Art and Communication Center. The exhibition will feature photographs not included in the book as well as interactive kiosks that present a virtual and illustrated experience of audio tours.

Stories in Reserve Events in Vancouver - Nov 4-5

2010-10-29T11:32:00.000-05:00

We'll be launching the first volume of the Stories in Reserve series with an audio-enhanced walking tour of False Creek (with Lize Mogel and Ryan Griffis), a public lecture at Emily Carr University of Art & Design and a reception/book launch at Emily Carr's READ Bookstore!
Get the full scoop >

More Parking Privatization Schemes

2010-10-06T13:05:00.000-05:00

So, Pittsburgh has already followed Chicago down the road of selling off future revenues from public street parking to the corporate sector, and now it seems New York is seriously considering it. Given the criticisms that have emerged from many of Chicago's local politicians and the local press (and are fairly well documented), it's difficult to see how such a move represents any good faith, democratic intention on the part of the city's administrations.

We may have to produce a tour of privatization of parking infrastructure... In the meantime, here's a graphic we produced for the recent AREA Chicago Number 10 issue on Institutions & Infrastructures (full PDF available). It looks at the history of parking in Chicago's Wrigleyville neighborhood, leading up to the impact of the privatization of the meter system.

Automobility Before the Civil Rights Act

2010-08-29T17:55:00.000-05:00

The New York Times ran a recent piece on the "Green Books" that once served as travel guides to North America for black Americans. The books (fully titled "The Negro Motorist Green Book") was published by Victor H. Green, a NY postal worker, from 1936 until the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The book is an interesting artifact on many fronts. It is simultaneously an indirect document of the everyday violence and exclusion faced by black Americans and of the desires for mobility. It also shows how the growing domestic tourism industry was seen as potentially interested in black tourism as a growth market—see the ad below asking potential service providers if they are represented (and if the clip art is not taken for granted, these service providers would have been white businesses).

The byline near the bottom of the cover, "Carry your Green Book with you. You may need it." is an unmistakable warning to those considering travel without a guide to refuges and accommodating businesses. While white travelers consumed auto-guides to the growing national park system (now linked by the expanding highway system), the "wild" for black tourists was white-ruled society itself. The 1964 Wilderness Act, passed on September 3, that created a system of wilderness areas "administered for the use and enjoyment of the American people..." would have only recognized the full rights to enjoyment of black Americans by two months, the Civil Rights Act having just passed in July.
Of course, the equitable implementation of those rights was/is another matter.
A PDF of the 1949 edition is available for download and an exhibition titled the Dresser Trunk Project looks further at the realities faced by black travelers in the US during segregation through sculpture (a downloadable catalog is also available for the exhibition).

More Parking Energy Mashups

2010-08-27T11:11:00.000-05:00

The latest newsletter from the National Parking Association highlighted yet another example of a parking structure incorporating a "green" energy feature (the last example was a surface lot with solar panels). This time, it's a garage in Chicago with a wind turbine. A description from inhabitat.com:

Designed by HOK, the wind-powered garage also features rainwater collection, electric car plug-in stations and placards throughout the garage to educate parkers on sustainable living.

We wonder if finding a way to convert political corruption into alternating current might be the ultimate source of renewable energy for the city (and possibly the entire state of Illinois), but wind will have to do for now.

Stories in Reserve Launch

2010-07-24T13:29:00.003-05:00

The Temporary Travel Office is pleased to release the first volume in its Stories in Reserve series of guidebooks.

The series will feature original guided tours created by artists, activists, historians and storytellers that span from polemic narrative to experimental soundscape. Taking its title from 20th Century scholar Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, the series will attempt to engage with “fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read.”

Stories in Reserve: Volume One presents three audio guides that take reader-listeners on journeys within the territory known as North America. Iowa City-based artist and educator Sarah Kanouse guides listeners into a National Wildlife Refuge in Southern Illinois. Kanouse’s tour, America Ponds, intervenes in the conventional knowledge of the Refuge as a preserved landscape, reminding us that the Superfund-classified land is “a place where our most romantic feelings about nature collide with the reality of near-total human engineering.”

In the West Coast border town of Tijuana, Mexico, artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga (New York) finds one example of transnational commerce in a rather unexpected place–a dentist’s chair. With Dentimundo, Miranda Zúñiga shares interviews with several dentists working along the Southern perimeter of the US- Mexico border, finding that their practices serve a broad clientele that include a large number of US citizens.

Siting Expositions: Vancouver, a walking tour of Vancouver’s False Creek, examines the history and impact of two global mega-events—Expo 86 and the 2010 Winter Olympic Games—on this rapidly-developed part of the city. Produced by artists Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel and Sarah Ross, Siting Expositions presents tourists with a conversation among voices that view the development through different lenses.

Volume One consists of one full-color, 36-page booklet and three audio compact discs.

For more information and to obtain the book (available in hard copy and in digital form), contact the Temporary Travel Office or see www.temporarytraveloffice.net/stories.

Do Shaded Cars Dream of Solar Powered Sheep?

2010-07-21T11:22:00.002-05:00

The New York Times has a recent post on their "Green" blog about one company that is building solar-panel-covered parking spaces. The company's (Envision Solar) CEO Robert Noble refers to their current efforts to produce tilting panels that optimize sun exposure as "solar forestation." He also notes that this will be a benefit to parking lot operators because “you can charge more for shaded parking.”
Why is it that these architects/engineers can imagine a future with automatically rotating solar panels, but can't imagine that future without surface parking lots?

Parking Public Tour of Wrigleyville (Chicago) Available

2010-03-21T13:22:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, we led some hardhatted folks on a walking tour of public parking in Chicago's Wrigleyville on a dark, chilly, early March evening. We now have a printed guide book for folks wishing to take their own, self-guided tour (download the 1.8 MB PDF), just in time for warmer weather.
The tour covers a broad range of stories and histories, but continues our investigations of the "front" and "back" spaces of public parking - where parking happens and where it is legislated, where the materiality of parking collides with its symbols and myths.
Chicago, and Wrigleyville in particular, offers a rich landscape in which to view and consider the role that public parking has played in transforming urban space and how we live in it. In the one block area around Wrigley Field, we find passionate battles over land use, government and corporate corruption, Native American struggles for economic and social equity and creative informal economies - all taking place in and around the spaces of parking. The tour concludes at a location where we can consider the past, present and future of the city's public parking infrastructure, namely the development and growth of the municipal parking meter program that was recently leased to a private corporation for 75 years.
Our tour was commissioned by Deke Weaver for the DIRT: Land/Use Festival at Links Hall in Chicago. We thank Deke and the Links Hall staff, as well as everyone who came out for the tour.

Chicagoland - Parkingland

2010-02-16T22:37:00.004-06:00

We are really happy to be a part of a series of events coming up at Links Hall in Chicago's Wrigleyville area this March. The series, organized by artist Deke Weaver, is called Dirt: Land/Use and takes place over 3 weekends, featuring a great line-up of video, performance, dance and other aesthetically challenging art forms. For some reason, amidst all of this exciting activity, we were asked to give a tour of public parking - a subject that may induce increased heart rates, but not the kind we usually want from art.
Chicago does, at least, have some interesting parking stories. As you may expect, the business of parking in Chicago is riddled with corruption and violence, but that's not the most interesting part to us. Our walking tour will be relatively brief - just 30 minutes, but will touch on a few instances where parking has become a visible site of struggle.
We'll also be conducting a workshop on parking, creating a kind of "People's Atlas" of parking in Chicago, while looking at parking lots as a form of wealth accumulation and property conservation.
The tours are Saturday March 6 (starting at 7:30pm) and Sunday March 7 (at 7pm) and the workshop will begin at 1pm (on Saturday only). We REALLY encourage you to attend the entire 3 weekend program if you can. Check the Links Hall Website for the full schedule of events.

Contaminating the Preserve Takes a While...

2010-01-25T22:14:00.004-06:00

Our ongoing, unsolicited consultancy for the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve continues in spurts. Not having a permanent base in Jacksonville, FL has made our progress slower than desired. But we now have five proposed additions to the Preserve that we firmly believe would expand its geographic boundaries in productive directions. Eventually there will be some distributable artifacts and more complete tours available. For now, please have a look at our suggested directions for the Preserve in their more incomplete form.

The Ash Site Annex - an almost 42 square mile area that served as a solid waste burning ground for the city for the first half of the 20th century, largely due to racist demarcations of space. How would the city's conception of history and ecology change if communities (that have been forcefully marginalized and made toxic) used the mandates of ecological and historic conservation and preservation?
The Wilson Armstrong Memorial to the Timucuan Rebellion of 1656 - What can a failed 17th Century Timucuan insurrection possibly have in common with a failed mid 20th Century Jacksonville City Council campaign?
1964 Climatological and Civil Unrest Learning Center - 1964 was a turbulent year for Northeast Florida. Along the coast, efforts to achieve racial equality were being met with extreme violence, a devastating hurricane wrecked havoc, and somehow the Beatles managed to play a concert to a racially integrated audience in a football stadium surrounded by flood waters.
Eartha M.M. White Trail to the Acosta Electoral & Ecological Platform - Take a walk through the history, present and future of electoral and climate monitoring technologies, while learning something about the personalities and events that helped shape the political and physical landscape of Jacksonville.

Opportunistic Vistas

2010-01-15T14:49:00.005-06:00

We just received an announcement for an exhibition of video work by Cynthia Hooper titled "Opportunistic Vistas", opening at the Center for Land Use Interpretation January 22. Hooper has done work with Simparch and at CLUI's Wendover Residency program.
CLUI's announcement:

Exhibit open January 22 - February 28, 2010
Cynthia Hooper creates short films that observe sites such as waste disposal landscapes, effluent pipes, and salt mines. This CLUI Independent Interpreter exhibit features seven of Hooper's films: CESPT, Cuyahoga, Bay Dredge, Cummings Road Landfill, Lazaro Cardenas Electrizada, Basura Quemada, and La Morita Enamorada.

Opening night event - Cynthia Hooper will talk about trans-border water issues in the Mexicali Valley of Mexico and the Imperial Valley of Southern California, and will screen her latest film, Meximperiali on Friday, January 22 at 8pm. Please arrive early - seating is limited.
We were particularly drawn to her video of the Cummings Road Landfill that slowly reveals the technology subtly, and not-so-subtly, manipulating the landscape. Both humorous and insightful, it presents squirting pumps as geysers and bubbling methane fields as geothermal springs.

Cummings Road Landfill from Cynthia Hooper on Vimeo.

Power Plants

2009-12-16T22:43:00.006-06:00

Some folks working in the region generally referred to as the Midwest, under the name the Compass Group (including one of our own Travel Office agents), published a 2 sided map and quiz-card set that attempts to unpack the geography of corn and coal around the Great Lakes and Midwest. Coal-based utilities are identified by ownership type, and both coal mines and corn-based ethanol production facilities are located. Amidst this pretty overwhelming and depressing data are select organizations and communities who are exploring other forms of power generation. You can see a larger image of the map on Flickr and download the cards but if you'd like a paper copy of both the map and card, they're available this Winter at the Smart Museum in Chicago as part of the Heartland exhibition. The map is also available in the 9th issue of AREA Chicago: Peripheral Vision.
If you can't make it to Chicago, write us and we'll try to get one to you.

Retouching Colonialism

2009-12-15T18:49:00.010-06:00

We just came across this advertisement for an art contest that is asking artists to repaint 17th century etchings depicting pre-European inhabitants of present day Florida. An initiative of the Public Trust Environmental Legal Institute of Florida, the contest is designed to promote the preservation of Florida's ecological and historical assets. The prints need to be repainted, they say, pointing to the obvious "errors" that are visible in the Theodor deBry etchings (supposedly based on observational paintings by French colonist Jacques Le Moyne), such as giant alligators with ears and European facial features on people who are not European.
The inspiration for the contest was apparently the work of another Theodore, a contemporary Floridian named Theodore Morris. He has embarked on a series of paintings of pre-European peoples of called "Florida Lost Tribes", in which he refers to current archaeological and anthropological knowledge to produce more "correct" visualizations. In a recent article on his work, Morris explains how he sees his project historically:

"I would like to create a body of work similar to George Catlin who painted early portraits of America's Western tribes," explains Morris. "My goal is to complete paintings that cover an entire community of people from each of the major tribes of Florida"

To get back to the art contest and its motivations, we are interested in the continued use of the ultimate Other - a people and culture that was exterminated almost 300 years ago - in the service of historical and ecological preservation. The Timucua and the European invasions that destroyed them were the narrative starting points for the eventual creation of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in 1988, an effort that started in 1920s. And now that much of the "evidence" has lost its claims to truth (the Fort Caroline Exhibit and the Ribault Monument never had much of a claim to begin with and the images attributed to Jacques Le Moyne have been severely questioned since at least 2005), the record has to be corrected. But, what is interesting is that it's being corrected without much in the way of more "real" data. Le Moyne's original paintings have not been found, and certainly no one has uncovered a frozen Timucuan. The Timucua are being treated like dinosaurs, their images updated as our theories and ideas about them (and colonization) change. As a colleague once said of the ever changing depiction of dinosaurs, the pictures of the Timucua will always be more of a depiction of those creating them than they can be of the Timucua themselves.
Of course, such things are never about accuracy. The preserve preserves a story and the space in which that story takes place. What we have been trying to propose with our unsolicited consultations for the Timucuan Preserve is to address stories and places that connect other ecological and cultural concerns with the historic narrative already being offered. How can the policy-practice of preservation facilitate active protection of ecological and cultural networks without preserving the ideology of colonialism and violence, with its very material consequences? Practical approaches like "environmental preservation districts" seem promising, and what we would like to see advocated by organizations like the Public Trust.
Perhaps we should hold our own contest...

Touring With The Torch

2009-12-07T23:19:00.005-06:00

The Olympic Flame really gets around. After it's ceremonial ignition in Athens, it gets a whole row of airline seats to itself, then it's onto a mountain bike, across frozen bays, some tundra, and even for a surf in the Northern Pacific. The expense of keeping this little chemical reaction going across thousands of miles and in deliberately ridiculous situations is fascinating and disturbing. We'd like to see this whole process somehow re-enacted... what would it take to convince an airline to let you bring on six burning lanterns?
Thanks to Mr. Hamilton for forwarding this.
Photos credits AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Jonathan Hayward

Parking Public: Second Edition DVD Available

2009-12-06T13:56:00.004-06:00

We just got our second edition of the Parking Public DVD back from the printer/duplicator, so if you didn't get one from the first run, you can get one now!
It might make for an odd holiday gift for the parking enthusiast in your family.
We'll also be leading a Parking Public tour in Chicago in March, so look out for upcoming information on that.

Real, Desired & Recreated Geographies

2009-11-12T12:29:00.004-06:00

Along with our recent proposal for the mMigration Recreation and Research Center to top the iHotel and Conference Center, we also produced a micro exhibit to occupy one wall of the Conference Center Lobby area. The space of the conference center and hotel is one conceived for consumer-users that are frequently mobile populations who occupy the space for very specific and short periods of time. Not unlike airports, conference center hotels are places designed for people who are assumed to be universally mobile and act as temporary, modular inhabitants. We don't agree with conceptions of such places as non-places, put forward by scholars like Marc Auge, however. While such ideas provide a way of understanding a form of architectural and relational instrumentalization and homogenization, they only deal with the space from the position of mobile consumption. The idea that such non-places are spaces in which "no lasting social relations are established" overlooks the production of these places in very basic material and human terms. Airports, subways and hotels are places of work for large numbers of people who are not temporary, transient inhabitants. The workers who produce these places, or at least keep them operating, create and maintain meaningful, interpersonal relationships as most of us do when we work with others. Our mini exhibit at the iHotel Conference center was one way for us to think through this reality. Below is a basic description.

A Study in Migration Through the Real, Desired & Recreated Geographies of 8 Employees is a commissioned exhibit for the iHotel & Conference Center in Champaign IL.

Although we have maps of the world that show us the forms of oceans, land masses, and political boundaries, such maps can only be aggregations of the experiences and hypotheses of specific social formations. The flattening of the globe requires projections.

This map, for example, charts the experience, both real and imaginary, of land by eight employees of the iHotel Conference Center in Champaign, IL. These employees responded to short surveys, answering questions about where they have lived, where they have visited and where they desire to go. Land masses not named, are not pictured. They also described valued souvenirs collected from these locations. Some of these souvenirs are on display in facsimile form - they are represented by approximations purchased from the online auction house Ebay. The origin of the described souvenirs, and the location from which their facsimiles were obtained, are also located on this map.

Touring a Year in the Life of a Shipping Container

2009-10-14T12:33:00.004-05:00

For the last year, the BBC has been tracking a shipping container as it travels the world. As it traverses the sea and land, reports on its status were logged: "Economic hardship greets the box in LA"; "Scotch wiskey exports buck downturn". But tracking the box has not been without problems, as the GPS tracking device installed on it has had to be repaired and, even after repairs, its signal has been intermittent. The story that this journalism-cum-locative media project points to however, is an extremely interesting and overlooked area where the economic crisis and global commerce intersect, at least it was for us.
As the BBC reports:

After 53 years of annual growth, the volume of cargo carried by container ships may record a fall in 2009. The May figures for westbound Asia-Europe services were down by a fifth on the previous year - an indication of the severity of the slump. The problems for the industry have been compounded by a boom in building large new container ships.

We're reminded of our favorite precedent to locative-media projects, the critical documentary project of Alan Sekula, particularly his expansive Fish Story and Lottery of the Sea projects:

It struck me that Smith (speaking of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations") introduces the concept of risk entirely through examples drawn from seafaring and sea trade: the sailor who risks all for meager pay, incommensurate with his skills; the wealthy ship owner who "insures himself" against risk by funding a fleet large enough to offset the inevitable loss of individual vessels. The concept of risk emerges with a measure of human sympathy and understanding, based no doubt on Smith's own life-world at the edge of the North Sea, that is completely absent from the musings of our contemporary apostles of the free market.

As is the case in Fish Story, I follow a meandering path from ocean to ocean, and from ocean to sea, but with different landfalls and departures. The film begins in Japan, moves to Panama and concludes in Spain, stopping first on the oil-fouled Atlantic coast of Galicia, and ending with the redeveloped Mediterranean littoral of Barcelona. Along the way, there are a number of detours, to the ancient agora in Athens and to the port of Piraeus, to a "millionaires' fair" in Amsterdam, to a number of demonstrations in different cities against neoliberalism and then against the war in Iraq. In each of these contexts, "risk" takes on new meaning, is refracted differently by circumstances. The narration asks a question: "What does it mean to be a maritime nation, to harvest the sea, or to rule the waves?" This is posed for the inherently unstable power relations of the western Pacific, but applies less literally to choices faced in Panama and Spain, choices having to do with sovereignty and our fragile dominion over the sea.

From an interview in Bomb Magazine

Parking Public in Columbus, OH

2009-09-17T11:25:00.003-05:00

We were invited by the Bureau for Open Culture's James Voorhies at the Columbus College of Art & Design to present our Parking Public tours there. A "virtual" version of walking tour of Hollywood CA will be on display within the Agency for Small Claims (seen above) until October 3.
On October 23, we'll be presenting a screening of our short Parking Public video essay and giving a brief illustrated talk on some of the other guided Parking Public tours. We will also likely have a discussion about parking in Columbus that ties into the work of Learning Site, who are in residence at the Bureau as part of the exhibition Descent to Revolution (also featuring Red 76, Claire Fontaine, Office of Collective Play, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT and Tercerunquinto).
image below: a drawing by Learning Site for their work Audible Dwelling.

House of Cars

2009-09-10T15:11:00.002-05:00

Believe it or not, there are some benefits to being on the mailing list of the National Parking Association. At least if you're into parking. One benefit is finding out about things like an upcoming exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. titled House of Cars. Opening October 17, the exhibit takes a look at the architecture of parking garages as an overlooked, yet important element of the built environment in the U.S.. The Museum is planning to host a lecture series and film screenings that survey "the many roles played by the parking garages on screen, from extreme action to avant-garde expression".
The NPA is the "presenting sponsor" of the exhibition, which opens immediately after the NPA's Annual Convention and Expo, also happening in D.C. this year.
image above: First LEED certified parking garage, the Santa Monica Civic Center parking structure (from Inhabitat.com)

Radical Hip Hop Tourism

2009-08-13T11:22:00.002-05:00

We were just sent a link to the Emergence Travel Agency, "the world's first hip-hop travel agency" and a project of Emergence Music, a DIY hip hop enterprise by Detroit-based MC Invincible.
On the site, they have videos that cover the history of displacement and resistance in Detroit ("Locusts" see below) and Palestine/Israel ("People Not Places"), mixing music video and documentary interviews to some pretty great effects.
Also check out their collaboration with the Detroit Summer Collective on an audio documentary on the effects of Superbowl XL on the city.

mMigration Research and Recreation Center Proposal

2009-07-31T15:35:00.004-05:00

Our proposal for an architectural addition to the iHotel Conference Center and a site owned by Ameren in Champaign, IL has finally been "released," meaning the poster and model of the proposal are currently on display in the iHotel. Below is a brief summary of the proposal, more info and images here.

...it is necessary to examine the social relations that the means of mobility afford and not only the changing form taken by the forces of mobility.
-- John Urry, Mobilities

For we live in the maps that the colonial surveyors bequeathed us.
-- Paul Carter, Dark Writing

One of the problems in studying "cancer clusters" - statistically high rates of cancer in a given area due to environmental conditions and contamination - is the increasing rate of migration of people over the course of their lives.
-- Richard Huggett, Fundamentals of Biogeography

The mMigration Research & Recreation Center will be a multi-use entertainment and educational facility serving the greater Champaign-Urbana area, and would be focused on various forms of migration. Multiple narratives of human, animal and geological movement in the region would be explored and documented through a media library housing videos, books, oral histories, photographs and digital archives.

The form of the mMigration Center will further visualize and encourage thinking about migration and mobility. Its primary facility will be prominantly located over the current iHotel and Conference Center South of the University of Illinois's flagship campus. Entry to the center will only be available through a satellite portal, located approximately 2 miles to the North, in a lot at the intersection of 5th and Hill Streets. From there an underground walkway and elevators will take visitors under the city and up to the center's 120 ft high facility.

The structure of the main building itself, hovering over the iHotel and Conference Center, is based on soil samples that document ground contamination of the lot at 5th and Hill Streets, where the entrance to the center will be located. This lot was once a manufactured gas plant that operated during the first half of the 20th Century, supplying lighting for Champaign and powering its interurban rail system.

Superfund or Superfun?

2009-07-20T11:52:00.002-05:00

We were recently in New York, where we took a really great tour of the Flushing Meadows Worlds Fair site (Now the NYC-run F.M. Corona Park), and also checked out Damon Rich's intervention (as part of his exhibition Red Lines) into the Queens Museum of Art NYC Panorama, built by Robert Moses for the 1964 Worlds Fair. It's pretty spectacular on its own, but Rich's intervention provides a less utopian chapter in the development of the city - - mapping the geography of foreclosures onto the Panorama.
We also attended an event about the initiative to get the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn designated as a Superfund Site by the US EPA. We won't go into that initiative here... readers can look into it more at the previous link, but we were inspired to make this post after reading a story in the New York Times about a "secret" (how secret can something in the NYT be?) urban pool made out of dumpsters. The pool is a project (dare we say, business venture) of a company called Macrosea, that appears to be a sort of avant garde development firm. Interestingly, one of its key partners (as Project Director) is artist and writer Jocko Weyland, whom some readers may recognize for his writing on skateboard culture, or for his contributions to the art-culture-intellectual curiosity magazine Cabinet. The NYT story on this much blogged about trendier form of dumpster diving discussed an after party for Cabinet magazine held at one such dumpter-derived swimming hole located in Gowanus, and featured sound bites from artists and curators like Nina Katchadourian and Aaron Levy. Macrosea is, along with their more lucrative ventures, working on plans for re-uses of strip malls, perhaps putting to practice the research of Julia Christensen's Big Box Reuse project. The story also alludes to the abundance of unused dumpsters as the result of construction lulls during the recession/depression.
Perhaps it's simply an indication of our reading art and culture sources, but the recent instances of artists colonizing economic misfortune in such parasitic ways (such as artists buying cheap houses in Detroit) is both interesting and troubling. This seems markedly different from what is generally thought of as gentrification. The construction of party pools for neo-bohemians out of dumpsters on vacant industrial sites next to a potential Superfund site merges the utopian and dystopian in a way that makes cynicism seem completely ridiculous. We think it would have been even better if the pools were made as party ships, complete with glass bottoms, so party goers could swim in fresh water (trucked in from a New Jersey aquifer, of course) while looking down through the murky, inhospitable canal below and the wreckage of capital all around.
image of the Gowanus Canal by Listen Missy!

Taking Earthwork to the Streets of Chicago

2009-06-14T09:20:00.005-05:00

Some colleagues from Chicago and around the midwest recently completed a political street stenciling project in support of the Tamms Year Ten Campaign. Tamms is shorthand for a supermax prison located in a town by the same name that has been operating under conditions considered torture by many human rights organizations and Tamms Year Ten is a grass-roots campaign to bring attention to it and at least bring it back to its original, legal mandate. As you can see from the pictures, they created an outline of the state of Illinois locating the location of Tams within in. To make the image they used giant stencils and mud, a technique learned and borrowed from artist Jesse Graves. Chicago-based art historian and writer Lori Waxman has written on the action, discussing the relationship between the stencil action and the issue of Tamms in more detail.
image above from Jesse Graves' blog.

London Olympics Runs Over Iron Age Britons

2009-06-12T16:45:00.002-05:00

Looks like a road being constructed for the 2012 Games in London has been built atop a mysterious, ancient mass grave, speculated to be the remains of Britons killed by invading Romans. From Reuters.

Staging Stadiums

2009-06-12T09:53:00.002-05:00

We have been following (of course) NPR's Anne Garrels' coverage of the build up to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, and other reports about the economic situation there. Of course, the official Russian line is that everything looks good, and the Olympics are being touted as the means to convert Sochi into a world-class resort town, with all the amenities it currently lacks.

We also ran across this Denver Post article on a Kansas City firm named Populous (formerly HOK Sport Venue Event) and their role in designing Olympic venues (along with other mega sporting facilities). Apparently, the firm has been involved in every Olympic Games since 1996, including the Chicago 2016 bid and the upcoming London and Sochi games. The firm is responsible for projects like the Autodrome in Dubai, design for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and the new Yankee Stadium.
For anyone wanting to follow the role of construction in mega sporting events, we highly recommend Neil deMause & co's blog (and book) Field of Schemes.
image above: Populous' designs for London 2012 Olympic Stadium.

Upcoming Event, June 25

2009-06-03T00:00:00.002-05:00

We'll be giving a presentation on June 25 at the Orientation Center in Chicago, as part of the Public Culture Lecture Series organized by InCubate and Randall Szott.
We will be talking about some newer developments and projects as well as discussing our broader interest in tourism as a form of public critical culture. Perhaps a teaser image from a recent project will entice you into coming?

Pocket Guide to Hell Tours

2009-06-01T17:17:00.003-05:00

We've posted before about the walking tours by Paul Durica (aka Pocket Guide to Hell) of the "Crime of the Century" - the infamous Chicago murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb. We've since been in touch with Paul, who also lead a tour recently titled "A Working Man's Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition", an exploration of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. While we haven't been on one of Paul's tours (yet), we're really excited by them and hope to have the pleasure of touring Chicago with him soon.
Perhaps we'll attend his next Crime of the Century tour which will be June 7 at 11am, starting at the corner of 49th and Ellis in Kenwood (the tours are free, but Paul would really benefit from $5 donations). Email him to reserve a spot.
And read up on Paul's tour to see what you're in for.
image from Distances Between Ports

Freshkills Park Blog

2009-05-20T15:36:00.003-05:00

We just came across this blog (via) for the Freshkills Park in NY. It's maintained by "members of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation team working to develop Freshkills Park."
While we may suffer from blog overload, this is a really great find, with posts ranging from Freshkills specific topics to larger issues of ecology and renewable energy.

World Information City Conference, Paris

2009-05-19T10:43:00.003-05:00

We just received an announcement for what promises to be an amazing conference in Paris, hosted by World-Information Institute for Futur en Seine. The conference title is "In/Visibility, Access and Urban Zoning," and features John Urry, Eyal Weizman, Brian Holmes, Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Stephan Graham, and more. Takes place Saturday May 30 and Sunday May 31, 2009 14:00-19:30, and admission is free.
We don't think we could have dreamed up a more interesting line up. Unfortunately, we're not in Paris and it doesn't look like there are any simultaneous broadcast streams. Bummer.

Regime Change in Love Land

2009-05-18T23:11:00.002-05:00

A sex theme park, called Love Land, set to open in October in Chongqing, near the Yangtze River in China will, alas, not get the chance to greet visitors with its sexy statue.

via NY Times, China Daily and News.i63.com

Tours for Tough Times

2009-05-16T12:54:00.002-05:00

Our friend Nick recently sent us the Mother Jones list of tourist destinations for recessionary times. Definitely some good suggestions - we visited the Herbert Hoover Museum and Presidential Library earlier this year, and it's definitely worth the trip to Iowa (really great models!).
If none of these are your cup of tea, there's the suggested "Drug Tunnel Museum of Nogales, Arizona". Or, if you prefer your drug tourism above ground, and can get to Spain, take really, really deep breaths.

Scouting the War on Terror

2009-05-16T12:26:00.006-05:00

The NY Times reports on an Explorer Scout program that "trains" young scout to "fight terrorists".
Here's how the article describes the program and its attraction for youth:

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out "active shooters," like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.
"Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up."

And what attracts youth?

One participant, Felix Arce, 16, said he liked "the discipline of the program," which was something he said his life was lacking. "I want to be a lawyer, and this teaches you about how crimes are committed," he said.Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns.

We could go on about the convergence of individualistic/libertarian fantasies, digital games and the dual role these fantasies play in reproducing legal and illegal violence... but that's not really our goal here. But we can't help but be reminded of the stories from a couple of years ago about the production of touristic experiences surrounding illegal border crossing.

Photos: Todd Krainin for The New York Times

The Nude, the Dark and the Slightly Off

2009-05-12T23:33:00.001-05:00

The Nude:
A nudist hotel opens in Germany and, just in case, the Swiss make sure visitors don't wander into the alps in their birthday suit.
The Dark:
A British firm plans a cruise to celebrate the anniversary of the Titanic disaster.
Apparently, the Killing Fields are good for gambling?
Nebraska needs a tourist site really, really bad.
And the Slightly Off:
Did you visit the four corners? Ooooh, so close.
image via

Olympic Round Up

2009-04-08T16:04:00.002-05:00

Whew... there's a lot of media being churned up around the Olympics! Here's a quick report back from some of the recent material that we've been trying to keep up with.
The Chicago Sun Times on Mayor Daley's gambling Chicago's future on the 2016 games. Interesting that he cites all these international cites as success stories and none in North America. Wonder why that is? Could it be that Montreal JUST paid off it's Olympic sized debt a couple of years ago?
The Chicago Trib on how the games would actually obstruct recreation for Chicago residents.
Obama is the "quarterback" of Chicago's bid, according to Mayor Daley, as quoted in USA Today.
The AP covered the IOC visit to Chicago, and mentioned that 205 volunteers held up flags to show the footprint of the proposed stadium. If anyone has pictures of this, please let us know! We'll be looking for them.
The Trib on the pothole protesters, apparently foiled when the city "coincidentally" headed them off by filling potholes on Garfield Blvd just before the protests were scheduled.
Japan's answer to the Chicago bid... we're more peaceful than you. Tokyo's governor says: "Japan hasn't been in any kind of war or conflict since the end of World War II. That's why Tokyo is the most appropriate city to stage the Olympics."
Despite the Oprah, Obama, Michael Jordan endorsement team, some Chicagoans aren't convinced. Maybe they've actually looked at what happens in Olympic host cities.

In news closer to home (for us at least), we'll be working on more tours and analysis of Olympia with collaborator Sarah Ross, now teaming up with long time comrade Lize Mogel to look at the spaces of Olympics and World's Fairs together. Vancouver and Chicago will likely be first on our list of comparative projects.

Adventure Tourism in the Colonial Present

2009-03-24T14:15:00.002-05:00

We're currently reading Derek Gregory's The Colonial Present, so the recent NY Times story and video on the development of tours in Iraq was particularly interesting. Gregory's historical analysis of the "war on terror" and its ideological foundations as ultimately colonial in nature (especially as it continues and reanimates Eurocentric Orientalism) got us thinking about the development of commercial tourism in this geography of the colonial present.
The statement from the first gentleman interviewed in the video, essentially that his favorite trips have been based on State Department warning lists, is echoed in the question posed to readers by the Times: "What is the most dangerous place you have ever traveled to?" Some of the comments point to what could be considered obvious places for US-based tourists: Uganda, USSR, Vietnam, Albania, North Korea...
But some people made some interventions into such expectations - suggesting that Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, Jersey City. Of course, such interventions mostly followed the conventional depiction of urban centers (especially where there is a relatively large non-white population and/or large disparity in wealth distribution). One Berliner's comments sum up this sentiment:

Most terrifying experiences I had visiting San Francisco the multiculture city of love in the 90ies.
Iraq is changing and although I would not go there on my own I am pretty sure that you are much more safe on a well organized tour in Iraq then in some quarters in US cities (to be fair this goes for other cities like Paris ot Rio too)

These comments reveal the colonial present within the local spaces of empire, but are rarely called upon as authentic in the same way. They remain spaces that have simply resisted control and management, or perhaps more accurately that have been abandoned by colonial interests, except for attempts to cordon them off as much as possible until they're needed for something else.
The travel company featured in the story, Hinterland Travel, offers packaged tours through Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Kashmir and other contested spaces. There may be something useful in a comparison of adventure tourism in spaces of extreme military intervention and the "internal" spaces of organized abandonment. We're not sure yet...
Image above from Hinterland Travel

Shame Tourism

2009-03-22T16:18:00.002-05:00

After reading the NY Times story on the Working Families Party sponsored tour of bonus-receiving AIG executives' homes (such as Douglas L. Poling, who allegedly received the largest bonus of $6.4 million), we thought there had to be some other people who have written about "Shame Tourism".
There are lots of examples: Michael Moore's Roger & Me, a documentary travelogue of his quest to find and confront former GM Chariman Roger Smith, followed by all of his other similarly shaming film and television antics; various instances of activist organizations like the San Francisco Bay Area Toxic Links Coalition's Cancer Industry Tour; and of course, it relates to the age old protest tactic of taking the complaints to the door of the oppressor.
Like other forms of tactical tourism (e.g. toxic tourism), shame tourism is about located witnessing, conditioning our view of something through an experience in a place. Where toxic tourism locates the abject in spectacularly polluted landscapes, shame tourism locates the abject in morally compromised individuals and companies. The visible disparity between the wealth of the exectutives and the economic hardships of the tourists, shifts from jealous admiration (that is the basis for the Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous and tours of celebrity homes) to moral outrage. As in toxic tourism, a major rationale of these tours is to draw attention to the spatial aspects of inequity and conflict - it's easier to confront something/someone if you know where they live. And the tourist act marks these spaces/places as somewhat "public", at least open to public (re)viewing.
But a more usful tour might link the homes of AIG exectutives with those of legislators who own AIG stock. Or maybe with the myriad other businesses that are AIG's lenders. The questions for us are, "How can the shaming of exectutives also add to our spatial understanding of economic inequity? What are the missing components that can be added to the itinerary? And what do we do when the causes of inequity are impervious to shame?"
Image above: activists/tourists pass the home of James Hass, an AIG executive, Saturday, March 21, 2009 in Fairfield, Conn. From AP Photo/Douglas Healey, via the Huffington Post

An Olympic Sized Problem

2009-03-19T22:23:00.002-05:00

With the 2010 Olympic Games bulldozing ahead in Vancouver, we've been trying to keep up with the news surrounding resistance there and in the other upcoming host cities of London and a likely Chicago.
We just watched The Five Ring Circus, a story about resistance in Vancouver to the 2010 Winter Games, specifically focusing on the environmental battles at Eagle Ridge and struggles over housing in the city. The film portrays a diverse group of citizens engaged in direct action, from squatting evicted low-income hotels and apartment buildings to campers blocking the construction of roads to vocal protests at city council meetings.
One thing that we were surprised was left out, however, is the claims of indigenous communities, specifically that a good deal of the province of British Columbia is actually non-surrendered Native lands.
Just a few days ago, on March 8, indigenous protesters disrupted an Assembly of First Nations meeting where tribal bureaucracies were apparently making deals with Olympic organizers and developers.
The BBC, as part of it's Building the Olympic Dream series, featured a story about resistance to development around the historic (going back over 100 years!) Manor Garden Allotments in Hackney Wick. The area would be surrounded by the proposed Olympic Park.

Meanwhile, down the road to the speculative 2016 games in Chicago, the problems of that campaign are becoming more and more visible in the media. Just today, the Tribune ran a story about controversy surrounding the improvement of select roads in preparation for an early April visit by the International Olympic Committee.
Philip Hersh over at the LA Times Sports Blog, has an interesting post about the IOC's threats to the Chicago bid over the ratio of revenues shared between the IOC and the USOC. Basically, the IOC is threatening to withdrawing its revenue sharing contract with the USOC unless it agrees to a cut in its share. Hersh points out that the USOC probably holds an advantage when it comes to holding sway with the largest advertisers, i.e., as goes the USOC, so goes Coca-Cola. While we think Hersh's main point is largely irrelevant - we don't think either the IOC or the USOC should be getting ANY revenues at the expense of anyone - it only goes to point out what the Olympic Games are all about from the get go.
We hope that orgs like Communities for an Equitable Olympics 2016 get more coverage as the likelihood of Chicago winning the bid becomes larger. But we also don't put much weight on promises for community benefits. Games after Games have revealed the willingness of host cities to reneg on any and all promises.

Today Your Host Is...

2009-02-26T20:56:00.003-06:00

Recently, we've re-encountered some familiar artists that have got us thinking about the politics of mobility and privilege in relation to our interests in tourism. Specifically, they've got us thinking due to the unflinching confrontational nature of their gestures.
A writer friend reminded us of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, as we were talking about Stephanie Black's documentary film Life and Debt that borrows from Kincaid's book. A classic post-colonial work, Kincaid's 1988 polemic (critiquing both colonial Antigua and its "independent" tourist-destination descendant), uses "You" and "I" to such direct ends that it's hard not to squirm in your seat. Even if we can believe we are "better" than the narrator's accusations, we are reminded that it is simply because we haven't been there.
Last week, we had the extreme pleasure to be in the company of Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, who was visiting the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Heap of Birds installed a new sign project titled Beyond the Chief along a prominent campus street and was here to deliver a couple of talks about his work. Beyond the Chief, like his previous sign works uses the orientation of written language - specifically writing words backwards - to call into question the subject position of the viewer in relation to the land they occupy. Heap of Birds' work reminds us that, even for those if us staying at home in North America, we are already invaders, colonizers and tourists, occupying land that was never really "free".
Both Kincaid and Heap of Birds present the humanity of confrontation in the face of indifference, inertia and a past that simply cannot be reasonably reconciled. The humanity they ask us to consider can never be universal, as it is always grounded in the reality of displacement and violence that takes place by taking a place. The specifics of the colonized matches that of the colonizer.
So what is the potential for the tourist? For those that offer only a mobile gaze? We'll get back to this with a discussion of John Urry, Gregory Ulmer, Dean MacCannell, Renee Green, Phaedra C. Pezzullo and some others...

Park and Fly

2009-02-07T19:32:00.002-06:00

Our lovely friend Sarah Lewison just sent us a story about expats living in Dubai, who are now in trouble due to the global economic crisis. Apparently, airport authorities there have found more than 3,000 abandoned cars, left by people fleeing debts that they can no longer pay.
Some stats from the story:

3.62 million expatriates in Dubai
864,000 nationals
8% population decline predicted this year, as expatriates leave
1,500 visas cancelled every day in Dubai
62% of homes occupied by expatriates 60% fall in property values predicted
50% slump in the price of luxury apartments on Palm Jumeirah
25% reduction in luxury spending among UAE expatriates

We wonder if that explains this.

When Will Iraq Be Safe For Tourists?

2009-02-07T18:39:00.002-06:00

That's the question a recent NY Times article asks, inspired by an odd Italian tourist named Luca Marchio, who decided taking a public bus to Falluja sounded like a good idea. That question should have been followed by: "Who cares? When will Iraq be safe for the folks who live there?"
According to Iraq Body Count, the number of civilian deaths caused by violence since 2003 is just under 100,000. While the number of civilians killed seems be going down - the number for January 2009 was 254, the lowest since the invasion in 2003 - it still seems a long way from being considered anything near "safe."
A friend of the office, Chicago-based artist and organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War Aaron Hughes, has made some emotionally provocative comparisons between his tour of duty in Iraq as a soldier and the process of sightseeing as a (involuntary) tourist. Along with the analysis of the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures as being quintessentially tourist pictures, presented by many writers (and Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure film), there is certainly a more complex relationship between tourism and Iraq (and contemporary war waged by post-industrial societies like the U.S. in general). As Dean MacCannell wrote a few decades ago, "Our first apprehension of modern civilization, it seems to me, emerges in the mind of the tourist."

The Final Parking Spot

2009-01-28T17:00:00.002-06:00

A friend just sent us a link to a blog post by Wesley Treat about cemeteries that have become surrounded by parking lots... a land use conflict we hadn't considered in our Parking Public research. Of course, there have been plenty of land use disputes involving sights of significance, including burial sites and heritage-related claims, but this is such an odd way to see such a conflict "resolved". Also such a strange way to remind ourselves that there is earth under there, and it has a history.
Lots of comments to that post point to even more examples.

Touring Urban Food Production Zones

2009-01-24T15:00:00.002-06:00

The Futurefarmers have just launched a "garden registry" component of their extensive San Francisco Victory Gardens initiative, which will enable a map and connectivity tool for city gardeners there. The online map shows the area's micro-climates, visualizes how much land is farmed versus available and also shows "surplus alerts" - when someone has an overflow of produce.
We have been working with some folks in our own 'hood on some neighborhood growing strategies, and have been looking at Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell's past Amity Works projects as a source of inspiration.
The production of these "everyday" produce-places as simultaneously exploratory and touristic is something we'd like to look more into, as it's something we've been engaged with for a while in various ways. The relationship between these more DIY, participatory forms and more conventional agri-tourism (which occurs at a variety of scales, from the small to global) is equally interesting.

Military Natures

2009-01-15T15:38:00.002-06:00

Last October, the Travel Office presented with some other fine folks at the Public Memories Project's Visible Memories conference at Syracuse University. Our session, titled "Remembering Military Natures" was co-organized, and included presentations by Nick Brown + Sarah Kanouse, Laurie Palmer and Shiloh Krupar, along with ourselves. One of our goals was to discuss the manners in which environmental languages and policies are utilized for militaristic and otherwise violent regimes. In order to help facilitate and distribute our concerns and ideas a bit more, we (the organizers/presenters) produced a poster/map. We've decided to make it available here as a document/record. Download the PDF.

Positive Speculation

2009-01-14T21:20:00.002-06:00

So, we just got a message from the Yes Men - their much anticipated (at least by us) self-directed follow up film to Chris Smith & Sarah Prices's 2003 film is apparently completed. You can read more about it and see a trailer on their site. The Yes Men have crafted a combination of critical irony, satire and utopian gesturing that is hard not to appreciate. While their work has rightly been discussed in terms of tactical media and pranksterism, including the problems that plague a lot of that work, we think it deserves to also be considered in terms of speculative fiction, utopian prefiguration and uncoventional documentary. The Yes Men may be responding to current developments in capitalist disasters, but their ironic speculations certainly recall aspects of literary disaster fiction, like Poe's Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, even as they ironically pretend to "fix the world" rather than depict its spectacular end.
We'll be thinking, and writing, more about speculative fiction and pre-figuration in the near future, as we continue our "consulting" work with the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, FL.

Black Gold, Texas Tea

2009-01-14T21:19:00.000-06:00

Lots of great announcements coming into our inbox! The Center for Land Use Interpretation has been busy down in the land of big hats and armadillos as the first artist-in-residence at the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center. They've been working from a field station (built with the help of students in the School of Art, College of Architecture and the Creative Writing Program) at the site of a former junkyard, located near a metal scrap yard at the juncture of the bayou and the Port of Houston Ship Channel, an important nexus for the refining and transportation of oil in America.
The exhibition at the UH's Blaffer Gallery, Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry will be the culmination of the CLUI’s study of Texas and will show how the extraction and refining of oil has sculpted the state’s terrain. The exhibition will open with a “landscan” video, an extended aerial shot of petroleum refineries and shipping yards that shows the massive scale of these places. In addition to this projection, the galleries will be filled with CLUI photographs and texts on many different sites across the Lone Star State from west Texas oil towns such as Odessa and Kermit to petrochemical processing centers on the Gulf Coast and everywhere in-between. These places tell the incredible and often surprising story of an industry that fuels our civilization by using deposits of hydrocarbons to create gasoline, fertilizers, plastics, and many other products.

An Unnatural History of the Golden Gate Bridge

2009-01-01T14:58:00.002-06:00

The SF based Studio for Urban Projects has produced an audio tour of the Golden Gate Bridge area. At their project site, you can download PDF maps and download the audio tour (via a podcast) or access it with your mobile phone by calling a provided number.
image above by Anirudh Koul

Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb

2008-12-09T22:45:00.002-06:00

Via the NY Times.
Also, check out their map of Manhattan Project and a video walking tour.
And for a broader exploration of the visual culture of the bomb, check out Joy Garnett's long running Bomb Project.

Tools for Actions

2008-12-09T15:44:00.002-06:00

The Centre Canadien d'Architecture in Montreal has an exhibition currently open titled "Actions" that includes work by Travel Office collaborator Sarah Ross. The exhibition includes Sarah's much blogged "Archisuits" that humorously present luxury track suits as a means for visualizing anti-loitering architecture in Los Angeles.
The show also includes work by the Futurefarmers, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, and many more.
Actions: What You Can Do With the City - 26 November 2008 until 19 April 2009
Image top: muf architecture/art (Liza Fior, Katherine Clark, Melanie Dodd); children of Tilbury; Countryside Agency Local Heritage Initiative, from CCA's "Actions"
Image bottom: N55 PROTEST Rocket

Preserving Preservation

2008-12-02T10:44:00.004-06:00

We've been looking at the politics of preservation quite a bit lately, as part of our continuing (unsolicited) work in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, FL. Over the last week or so, the NY Times has produced a series of articles looking at the Landmarks Preservation Commission in NYC and just today released a photo annotated map of locations discussed in the article that links to their 4 part series. The articles mostly focus on the conflict between redevelopment-minded plans and those valuing historic aesthetics and values. One of the preservation advocacy groups working in NYC is humorously called Citizens Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation. But despite the seeming redundancy of the name, it does point to what's at stake for protectors of architectural history - the fight is over preservation as an ideology, rather than over any specific building or history. And it's a highly aesthetic ideology, of course.
One of the more interesting pieces in the series discusses churches and other "houses of worship" that are being mostly lost to redevelopment. According to the article, many religious organizations are making deals with developers, choosing to avoid historic landmark status, in favor of new construction that allows for mixed use architecture. A big part of this is the inability for these organizations to fund the costly rennovations that are required of historic landmarks.
Much of the arguments for historic preservation focus on the desire to save some kind of cultural heritage, believing that the material presence of the architectural form is a link to a shared past. Likewise, nature preserves are believed to serve the purpose of protecting some natural space from the process of human encroachment, freezing it in some specific moment in time. Of course, both forms of preservation take extreme amounts of capital and social energy to maintain. What is interesting to us in the articles is the conflict between utopian values. Both the preservationists and the developers are realizing an aesthetic vision laden with ideological value - mythic-historical for the preservationist, mythic-futurist for the developer. And where do those who just need a space to practice their religious services fall in this conflict? Well, they seem to be threatended by both sides:

A year later a bill was introduced in the New York State Senate and Assembly exempting houses of worship from local preservation laws. The measure was defended by the New York Board of Rabbis, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the Council of Churches of the City of New York. But it faced fierce opposition from preservationists.
At West-Park Presbyterian on the Upper West Side, the active membership has dwindled to 20 who now worship at a church nearby, and homeless people camp out in the building's doorways. The pastor, the Rev. Dr. Robert L. Brashear, said he simply wanted to see his congregation endure, even if that means worshiping in a new, more modest setting. "It's not just saving one small little church," he said. "It's preserving a place of active and vital ministry for the future."

It is important to note that the buildings most preservationists want to preserve are usually (though certainly not always) extraordinary examples of building, rather than exemplary of common forms. And their significance is in their connection to some mythic and formal narrative of the past - the architecture embodies some kind of classic or novel tradition that can be placed on a timeline. The activities and values of the church are not what preservationists want to save. It's not even the history of the church's values that preservationists are interested in, only it's aesthetic connection to a mythic past. The church for them is a building, not a living group of people and their shared ideas.
We don't mean to suggest that preservationists are bad and developers less bad. The developers could care even less about the values of the church, except that they might become clients for new construction. And certainly, the homeless camping on the church's steps won't find any sympathy from developers and city planners.
We also don't mean to suggest that the values of religious institutions should be preserved. But an important question for us to consider is what it is we are preserving in architectural form (or nature, for that matter) when divorced from its active use. What preservationism seems to do is locate cultural significance in formal permanence, meaning that narratives that can be embedded in concrete, lasting form are privileged. And as preservation policy workers and critics, such as Antoinette Lee and Angel David Nieves, have pointed out, the ideological link between permanence and cultural significance in historic preservation poses problems for stories originating from minority and oppressed perspectives, where celebrated architectural forms are less common.
This is one reason why we were so excited by the Spectres of Liberty project's form of memorializing histories that recalled the architectural structure of a church, while placing emphasis on speech and action as what made the church a narrative site. Spaces and places were obviously an important aspect of the Underground Railroad - people had to gather, organize and move safely in real, physical space. But the materials that composed these places didn't become an unquestionable, fetishized replacement for historical narrative in that project. That the church building no longer exists is part of the continuing history of remembering the Underground Railroad and slavery, not as a discreet past, but something we still live with and recreate.

We Are Here

2008-11-30T22:52:00.002-06:00

Experimental Geography, the touring exhibition organized by Nato Thompson, has a catalog set to release this coming January. Since the Travel Office contributed a map to the "We Are Here Map Archive" component of the show (organized by AREA Chicago's Daniel Tucker), we received an early copy.
It's a really great publication in many regards. To start with, there is the full color reproduction of so many great projects, including Bureau d'etudes, Center for Urban Pedagogy, LA Urban Rangers, Hackitektura, subRosa and more. Then essays by Thompson, Trevor Paglen and Jeffrey Kastnor, supplemented by short contributions from Matt Coolidge, Iain Kerr, Damon Rich and Lize Mogel that introduce the works in the exhibition. One can always ask for more from a publication of this sort - there will always be gaps of some kind - but it really works as a concise collection of projects and contextual history/theory for beginning to consider where these practices might point for further development.
See also: An Atlas of Radical Cartography.

Invasive Irrigation Kits and Biological Agents

2008-11-30T17:18:00.002-06:00

This is a bit dated, but we recently revisited our Invasive Irrigation Kit project from a few years ago for a really great exhibition (curated by Christa Donner and Andrew Yang) at Chicago's Gallery 400 called Biological Agents. We say outdated, because the exhibition ended on November 22.
However, you can still get quite a bit of information from the exhibition web site, hosted by Ms. Donner.
The Kits were included in a mini exhibition within the exhibition titled Knowledge Virus, a collection of distributable projects including zines, stickers and other such things, like the Invasive Irrigation Kits. Some of our favorite items were the zines by the Small Science Collective and the love letter to the Hepatitis C virus by Caitlin Berrigan (who was in the primary exhibition along with Natalie Jeremijenko and Brandon Ballengee).
We produced a new poster that discusses the questions of "native" versus "invasive" species and Brassica juncea, a type of mustard that is considered invasive in most of the US but is also widely used as a food and spice (seeds of this plant are distributed in the kits).
And we have a few left, so if you'd like one, we'll send one to you (while supplies last) for the cost of packing and USPS Priority postage - (5USDin the US, 12USD International). Order via Paypal (see the bottom of this page).

More Electoral Tourism

2008-11-20T15:12:00.003-06:00

A colleague just sent us a link to a post on the Strange Maps blog that juxtaposes a 2008 presidential electoral map (by county) and an 1860 map of cotton production. The comparison reveals a correlation between the production of cotton in the antebellum South and counties that voted for the Democratic candidate. The obvious conclusion is that a higher concentration of African Americans would have lived in cotton producing regions, and that they continue to live in those same areas in high numbers today.
It turns out that the comparison was originally made by Allen Gathman a professor in Biology at Southeast Missouri State University. The Vigorous North Blog (A Field Guide to Inner-City Wilderness Areas) followed up on Gathman's comparison, noting the geological origins of the soil that made certain areas better for cotton growing.
Obviously this conclusion would have been made easier with simple census surveys, but this particular juxtaposition makes visible the combined narratives of geology, slavery and the contemporary intersection of race and space that the census does not take into consideration.
As our friend remarked when pointing us to the link, a larger question may be one of mobility.

Election Tourism

2008-11-19T13:07:00.003-06:00

The Important Project's "40 Houses in Bucks County" is a designed travelogue of sorts, documenting the door-to-door canvasing in Bucks County, PA.
The Important Project is an organization that addresses political issues through research, writing, and design, composed of James Reeves and Candy Chang. From their commentary on the canvasing:

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Kids play, dogs bark, lawnmowers growl, and I’m standing on a faded welcome mat, worrying about the politics of the porch. There's no doorbell. Do I knock on the screen door or should I open it and knock on the actual door? Should I address the person by name? It's written right here on my map, along with her age and party affiliation. I knock hard on the screen door frame and decide to stick with Ma'm. If a stranger knew my name, it would frighten me. Feet shuffle, voices mumble, and an elderly woman in a house dress answers.

"Hi, I'm a volunteer with the Obama-Biden campaign-"
"Go! Just go! Get the hell away from me!"

Hotel Tourism

2008-11-19T12:49:00.002-06:00

Rooms With a View is an archive of photos from the inside of hotel rooms, by Hetherington.

Yes We Can... Travel

2008-11-19T00:06:00.003-06:00

The Travel Geography blog has a list of stories on how the Obama election is impacting tourism. Like this:

From the Telegraph: 80 per cent of readers are more likely to visit the US now than they were before the presidential election. Until now many Telegraph readers have said they have been put off the US by its draconian border security arrangements and the foreign policy decisions made by George Bush.
Or the Wall Street Journal: Despite some rates surpassing the $1,000 per night mark, rooms are also booking, on average, three times faster than for the last inauguration, according to the travel Web site Expedia.com. Many hotels have imposed two- and three-night minimum stays.

It will be interesting for sure to see how the economic crisis will intersect with the political enthusiasm going into the Obama presidency.

Wars End, July 4, 2009

2008-11-12T09:57:00.005-06:00

One of our favorite forms of tourism is the speculative near future narrative, both utopian and dystopic. Some of our favorite people, who will eventually no doubt be revealed, have produced a fully simulated copy of the New York Times and released it to the public this morning - only it's a simulation of the paper from July 4, 2009. Below is the press release following its, um, release.

November 12, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SPECIAL TIMES EDITION BLANKETS U.S. CITIES, PROCLAIMS END TO WAR

* PDF: http://www.nytimes-se.com/pdf
* For video updates: http://www.nytimes-se.com/video
* Contact: mailto:writers(at)nytimes-se(dot)com

Early this morning, commuters nationwide were delighted to find out that while they were sleeping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had come to an end.

If, that is, they happened to read a "special edition" of today's New York Times.

In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.

Articles in the paper announce dozens of new initiatives including the establishment of national health care, the abolition of corporate lobbying, a maximum wage for C.E.O.s, and, of course, the end of the war.

The paper, an exact replica of The New York Times, includes International, National, New York, and Business sections, as well as editorials, corrections, and a number of advertisements, including a recall notice for all cars that run on gasoline. There is also a timeline describing the gains brought about by eight months of progressive support and pressure, culminating in President Obama's "Yes we REALLY can" speech. (The paper is post-dated July 4, 2009.)

"It's all about how at this point, we need to push harder than ever," said Bertha Suttner, one of the newspaper's writers. "We've got to make sure Obama and all the other Democrats do what we elected them to do. After eight, or maybe twenty-eight years of hell, we need to start imagining heaven."

Not all readers reacted favorably. "The thing I disagree with is how they did it," said Stuart Carlyle, who received a paper in Grand Central Station while commuting to his Wall Street brokerage. "I'm all for freedom of speech, but they should have started their own paper."

Tourism and the Economic Meltdown

2008-10-31T11:12:00.002-05:00

Various stories, linked from the Travelography blog + podcast.

Globe Trotting

2008-10-31T10:56:00.000-05:00

Ever wonder how globes are made?

Crime of the Century Walking Tour

2008-10-28T15:06:00.005-05:00

We just received word of this event from our friends at the Backstory Cafe in Chicago. It's a free walking tour of sites related to the infamous 1924 murder of Bobby Franks. See more information below:
WHAT: "Crime of the Century: Leopold and Loeb and the Murder of Bobby Franks"
(A walking history tour of relevant sites!! and screening of Hitchcock's "Rope").
WHEN: Sunday, November 2 and Sunday, November 9 at 2:00 PM
WHERE: Starting at the corner of 49th and Ellis in Kenwood ending @ Backstory Cafe for screening.
WHO: "Pocket Guide to Hell" tours with tour guide Paul Durica
HOW LONG: Approximately ninety minutes for tour, and an eighty minute screening.
COST: Free!!! (Bring $ for cider, coffee, and pumpkin treats @ Backstory during screening)

On May 21, 1924, in the city of Chicago, a young boy went missing. He was walking in the late afternoon between the Harvard School, where he was a popular student, and his house, one of Kenwood's many mansions. Later that night his father, Jacob Franks, received a phone call informing him that his son, Bobby, had been kidnapped but could be ransomed for ten thousand dollars. The next morning, south of the city, near Wolf Lake, a pump man for the American Maize CO saw a human foot sticking out from the edge of a culvert. Bobby had been beaten to death with a blunt object. Suspicion fell on the boy's teachers but then the chance discovery of a pair of glasses with a unique tortoiseshell frame led police to question the nineteen year old son of a shipping magnate. The young man, an amateur ornithologist, claimed he'd been at the Lake the week prior, looking for cranes. He had an alibi for the night of the kidnapping, a friend, also a resident of Kenwood, the son of the vice president of Sears-Roebuck. But suddenly there were all these things - the glasses, an Underwood typewriter, a green touring car, a length of rope, a chisel with a taped handle, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, another of chloroform, a checkered stocking - that traced a series of encounters disproving the story told by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. Had these young men of wealth and education killed Franks, as they claimed, for the "thrill of it"? Could famed death penalty opponent Clarence Darrow save them from the gallows? What is the enduring legacy of what the press dubbed the Crime of the Century?

Pocket Guide to Hell invites you to return to the scene of the crime. Join us for a tour of the Kenwood neighborhood that will visit, among other places, the site of the kidnapping, the Harvard school, the Franks house, and, of course, the houses of Leopold and Loeb, in order to restore a sense of contingency and chance to a long ago event and to reflect upon its continued effect on a neighborhood and an issue of national importance. The tour concludes with a special
screening of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" and refreshments for sale at Backstory Cafe (6100 S Blackstone).

There are fifteen slots for each date. Please email Paul Durica your preferred date and the number of people in your party. Slots will be filled on a first come, first served basis.
image above: "Two police officers dredging the water near the scene where Bobby Franks was murdered," 1924. From Jazz Age Chicago

Oct. 12 - Upcoming Parking Public Tour (Hollywood, again)

2008-10-07T16:07:00.003-05:00

We're not sure how we keep getting pulled back into the parking universe of Hollywood, but we're grateful that we have the opportunity to visit with some great folks there and revisit the ever changing (especially at the moment) Hollywood place-scape.
This time, we're offering our tour as part of a series of De/tours organized for the LA Freewaves "Hollywould" festival, and will have a special guest. Hollywood urban planner Sarah MacPherson will expand our itinerary to the equally interesting and overlooked spaces of alley ways.
The De/tours will take place on Sunday, October 12, and the look extremely promising. Below is an overview of the schedule.
4:00 — Ryan Griffis, artist – Parking Public: a Tour of Parking Lots and Utopias: Hollywood
4:15 — Elizabeth Lovins – Excavating the Lost Hollywood Art Colony, a walking pod tour; BYO mobile video player
4:30 — Greg Goldin, architecture critic – Stepping on the Cracks: Skeptical Promenade thru Hollywood Redevelopment
4:45 — Matthew Reynolds, visual culture scholar – The Glamour of Surveillance: A User's Guide to Looking in Hollywood
5:00 — Sara Wookey, choreographer and Deborah Murphy, urban designer – Actions of Time and Space on the Walk of Fame Workshop at LA Forum/Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions
5:00 – James Rojas, urban planner – playful brainstorming workshop with props and 3D model about Hollywood's future
See the LA Freewaves site for more info on the tours and festival.

Locating the State

2008-09-05T12:10:00.002-05:00

A brief, but interesting discussion about locative media was launched by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) on Nettime recently. Basically, it started with a reposting of a story from the NY Times about the use of vehicle GPS systems to prosecute criminals in the US. The discussion then moved through the problematics of location information as a personal data set, not unlike biometric data. How does satellite-generated information linking identity and geography become another form of biometric data - another institutional representation of personhood in the archives of biopower?
On a lighter note, Miller also pointed to a mobile walking project hosted by Yellow Arrow, one of the most widely known locative media projects. Surprisingly, we hadn't seen this specific project - Capitol of Punk, a mobile documentary video work that looks at the geography and history of the Washington DC punk and hardcare scene. Some great, brief edited interviews with folks like Ian MacKaye, Ian Svenonius and Allison Wolfe.

People's Atlas of Chicago

2008-07-30T15:07:00.003-05:00

Our compatriots over at AREA Chicago are plugging away at their People's Atlas of Chicago project. They have taken another step towards improving community feedback and input, incorporating drop-sites where maps can be picked up and dropped off for incorporation into the Atlas.
If you're in Chicago, these locations are:
Backstory Cafe: 6100 S. Blackstone Ave
Women and Children First Books: 5233 N. Clark St
Southwest Youth Collaborative: 6400 S. Kedzie Avenue
Quimby's Books: 1854 W. North Avenue
The Map Room Tavern: 1949 N. Hoyne

Mail maps to AREA Chicago PO Box 476971 Chicago IL 60647

Countdown to Beijing

2008-07-28T23:08:00.003-05:00

So, it's no surprise that with the 2008 Olympics opening next month there would be a dramatic increase in journalism focused on Beijing. From the apparently policy-resistant smog to that human rights dilemma that just won't go away, and of course, the endless lists of who is or isn't going to be at the games, there's more than enough to chew on.
As the New York Times often does, they found an interesting cultural angle from which to approach some of the vast changes unfolding across the city and China at large. A recent story focuses on a struggle over the preservation of the historic hutong neighborhoods. While the writer does point to the class inequities that usually accompany architectural preservationist movements, at least in the U.S., the piece tends to find sympathy with the connection between architectural preservation and the preservation of disappearing social traditions and conventions. Interestingly, this is also applied to the socialist-modernist housing projects built during the heyday of China's socialist regime in the 1950-60s. The similarities, and differences, among this architectural narrative in China and the U.S. is striking... modernist, government housing projects in China are still, according to the NYT article, a desirable place to live:

So ingrained is the bias against hutong living among middle-class people that Yan Weng, a forward-looking architect who once lived in the Qianmen neighborhood, told me that he had recently moved into a high-rise. "For those of us who grew up in Mao's China, the government complexes were always the ideal," he said. "And that has not changed much."

Certainly not the case with state-sponsored housing in the U.S. But then again, our housing projects were built with completely different objectives in mind, and our tag-team racialized and capitalist state has produced such a ghastly image of government housing, that it's hard to imagine it being rehabbed.
The article continues, getting to the fact that the hutong neighborhoods are being reoccupied by wealthy foreigners and Chinese alike. Sounds very similar to the process of gentrification that has been happening in cities across the U.S. for several decades - upwardly mobile small families and couples renovating previously working-class bungalows in close-in urban areas. We're sure there are differences, however, given the extreme divergences in history between the two countries.
One place we're looking to for information on how the games and Beijing's development is effecting housing there in more politicized terms is the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions, who just released a new report entitled "One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games." We havn't finished reading it yet, but the findings seem in line with the overall trend of displacement in the wake of urban redevelopment schemes designed around the Olympics.
Image above from COHRE website, apparently it reads "Demolish quickly, Welcome the Olympics, Switch to a New Look"

They're No Laff-A-Lympics

2008-07-19T13:22:00.004-05:00

We don't know if many people are following the Olympic narratives currently unfolding... it largely seems like they're mostly a non-event for folks outside of journalists, sports enthusiasts, Olympic boosters and those unfortunate enough to live in host cities. And, we guess, those like us with some weird obsession with the intersection of tourism and mega-event found in the modern Olympic Games.
At any rate, some of the stories this past week about Olympics caught our eyes. For example:
The remnants of industrial production coming back to haunt London in its preparation for 2012.
The Australian Press' fears of a sterile Olympics in China.
And reports that over 1600 people have been arrested since June in Hong Kong alone - who knows what the number of arrests are in China at large, but it has included so far some inarguably egregious crackdowns on critics of the state.
We've come across some books that we're looking forward to getting into, in trying to come to a better understanding of the mechanics of the contemporary Olympic Machine and localized resistances to it. A few of the more recent ones that we are particularly excited about are:
Helen Jefferson Lenskyj's Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics and Activism that seems to be written from a scholarly position that is simultaneously invested in resistance to the inequities enacted in Olympic host cities.
Mike Weed's Olympic Tourism
Andrew Billings' Olympic Media
and more generally related to the political economy of sport arena construction, Joanna Cagan and Neil deMause's Field of Schemes.

The Truck Is The Message

2008-07-16T11:41:00.003-05:00

We're getting lots of interesting announcements from our friends this Summer, like this from Ken Ehrlich about the Active Trucking project, with long time collaborator Branden LaBelle:

Tracing the infrastructure of trucking and transport, the project is an examination and meditation on the truck and the trucker as a slippery signifier. Oscillating between the pure functionality of the movement of goods and the poetics of being on the road, trucking generates an array of mythologies that in turn are tied to concrete policies regarding trade. The project attempts to playfully represent this spectrum through videos and drawings installed at FIT, Berlin, a project space housed in an old petrol station.

The project has already taken place in Los Angeles and Tijuana. And as their collective website, Errant Bodies explains the project further:

Based on the networks and infrastructures of trucking and roadways, Active_Trucking maps and notates idiosyncratic aspects of this system. Acquiring information from a variety of sources including trucking companies, notes from excursions on the road and interviews with truckers in the Los Angeles area Active_Trucking seeks to present narratives about the existing system and structure of trucking in the United States and give form to these infrastructural expressions as both economical and alchemical. We are particularly interested in the movements and intersections that occur on the roads of the US both as material embodiments of trade policies, that is, as an example of the constantly negotiated abstract dynamics of transport and markets that have significant local impact, and the mythic fantasies of the open road and the desire for freedom. In the spaces of the highway, we imagine narratives of "Free Trade" intersecting with Easy Rider: multiple narratives that mark the road both as a site for cultural mores and economic activity. The labor of the trucker, the mechanics of trucks, and the workings of dispatchers and related transport companies, feature as efficient systems always on the edge of disruption, distraction, and delay according to the complications of laboring bodies fixated on the roadway.

Interrogating Public Space with Fritz Haeg

2008-07-14T15:02:00.002-05:00

Travel Office friends Nato Thompson and Fritz Haeg recently had a conversation about Fritz's hybrid art-architecture-education practice and how it interfaces with notions of the public and the private. We like this response to questions about public v private space:

Right now I am most interested in private spaces that have the capacity to be public. It’s not that I have given up on public space (though maybe I have!) but I do think that private property, and in particular the home, has become the focus of our society. We are obsessed with our homes as protective bubbles from the realities around us. Today's cities are engineered for isolation, so starting a salon in your living room or growing food in your front yard become ways to subvert this. Perhaps at this moment working from private space out may be more useful than working from public space in.

We're currently working on, with our long time associate Mark Cooley, an upcoming curatorial project based on artistic, collective and otherwise coordinated uses of agricultural methodologies to transform the political and social dimensions of place. Fritz's work will be included. This should happen in Wash D.C. area in the Spring of 2009. More on that later...
pictured above: Edible Estate Regional Prototype Garden #3: Maplewood, New Jersey, established July 8th, 2007 / as viewed from the upstairs bedroom
Photo: Fritz Haeg

Pollution Tourism

2008-07-10T13:05:00.004-05:00

We were just sent a link to Visit Sunny Chernobyl - a blog about "Pollution Tourism". Not sure why we hadn't come across that one before, but we're glad we have it on the radar now. They have a post linking to Good Magazine's piece on man-made disaster tourism spots. The place we're most interested in (not sure why, exactly) is the underground coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania.

Centralia was just another sleepy northeastern Pennsylvania town until the local coal mine was filled with a raging inferno that burned unabated for decades. Even that didn't disrupt the peaceful Centralia life until 1981, when a smoldering sinkhole nearly swallowed a 12-year-old boy. In the wake of the national attention that followed, Centralia became a cult travel destination. To this day, the subterranean fire is still burning. "You can drive through and not even notice," says Chris Perkel, who produced a documentary on the place. "But when the fire's close to the surface, the trees are blackened, and steam and smoke billow from the rocks."
The area's anthracite coal stoked the furnaces of the industrial revolution, but by the mid-19th century, companies left the region - and their messes - behind in favor of cheaper energy sources like petroleum. In 1962, burning garbage in an abandoned strip mine sparked a fire. In the years that followed, the flames grew as debate raged about whose problem it was to fix (the debate remains unresolved). Suddenly appearing sinkholes and carbon monoxide poisoning continued to threaten residents until
the 1980s, when Congress paid to relocate them and bulldozed their houses - though a handful of hard-core Centralians can still be found there.

Land Grab Relay, The New Olympic Sport

2008-07-08T23:27:00.002-05:00

So it seems that Chicago, one of four cities up for the 2016 Olympic games, is already beginning to put some real estate development in play, even before it's anywhere near certain where the city will actually be chosen or not. According to a recent Chicago Tribune piece, the city is planning to pay $85 million for the soon-to-be-closed Michael Hospital property, to be used, potentially, for part of an Olympic village.
According to an earlier and more detailed Tribune article on the property, Chicago's

Olympic bid proposes a $1.1 billion complex that would be privately developed and converted to private housing after the Games. The city intends to pursue this development regardless of whether it beats out Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo to host the Games.

The city is definitely putting some redevelopment in motion regardless of the Olympic outcome, unless you have a conspiracy theory that Daley knows something about the bid selection we don't. Also interesting, the company who currently owns the property, Medline bought the hospital property for $24 million, so they're making a hefty sum off the sale as is.
In These Times has a great summary of what's at stake in Chicago, bid or no bid.
And check this out, another use of activist tours in Chicago.

Pushing Against the Weather

2008-07-07T22:54:00.002-05:00

So, we came across this series of photos while scanning news related to the Olympics, photos by Chinese photographer and television host Ou Zhihang.
In other odd China Olympic news, the Chinese authorities are planning on "dispersing" clouds if needed to maintain good weather. Another instance of state-based attempts to "Own the Weather." Also see this documentary on weather modification history.
Climate modification, once the sole domain of James Bond's enemies, has been getting increasing amounts of attention (though we suspect that most would still consider it aluminum foil hat thinking) as a strategy for climate change. Thankfully, as the ETC reports, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity has agreed to a moratorium on "ocean fertilizing activities" - a process of geo-engineering that would reduce carbon in the atmosphere by manipulating oceanic chemistry. It will be interesting (and disturbing) to see the frenzy of corporate activity to deal with climate change, as it becomes more and more a reality that can't be ignored... naked push ups won't seem so wacky.

The Future of Travel

2008-07-01T16:47:00.004-05:00

As tourism "consultants," we're obviously concerned about the future of travel-based tourism... and what tourism isn't based on travel? According to a story in today's NYT, rising costs of airline operations, such as an 80 percent rise in jet fuel over the last year, the airline industry as a whole will cut back its flights by 10 percent starting this August. The story quotes one analyst's predictions that the cost of air travel may go up 40 percent over the next four years. As we've seen with the rise in oil prices, however, it wouldn't be surprising if it exceeded those expectations - airline tickets have jumped 17 percent in the last year alone.
From the NYT story:

By year's end, roughly 100 American communities will be left without regular commercial air service, and that number may double next year, according to the Air Transport Association, the industry trade group.
"The guy who is used to taking a nonstop flight on a small airplane now has to drive an hour to an hour and a half to an airport to take a trip," said David Castelveter, a vice president with the trade group. "It is a crisis of great magnitude and it is having an impact already."
"I implore American Airlines, as well as the other carriers considering various cost-saving scenarios, to take into account more than profit when they evaluate routes," Gov. David A. Paterson of New York said this week after American announced a series of cuts affecting La Guardia and other state airports.

How about considering energy usage and climate change? Well the EU is building airline travel into its carbon trading scheme, with U.S. resistance, of course. And how easy will that hour and a half drive to a nearby airport be?
Well our friends in Boston, iKatun, just sent us info about how they're thinking about climate change - getting ready with a parade! Their "Parade for the Future" (organized through their collab project Platform2) will inundate the city of Boston with a wave of people wearing blue, demarcating the predicted flood line. It's been postponed to Sat. Sept 13th... ironically for inclement weather!
If you're not in Boston the Fall, but will be in Chicago this July, you could talk about energy policy with the Futurefarmers and a group of energy experts they've organized for their "Energy Plans" series.
[image above from davidszondy.com]

Fueling Tourism

2008-06-25T13:04:00.002-05:00

While Congress is searching for an easy answer for the fuel crisis, many US citizens are heading to Mexico as, what the NY Times has called "gas tourists," due to the still lower pump prices there resulting from government subsidies. Driving further to get cheaper fuel seems like such an "American" tradition. Of course, if you're in New York, you just cross the border to Jersey.
This also reminds us of the different forms of medical tourism (which we have posted about here before), where often wealthy tourists travel for lower cost procedures, or in some cases treatments not available at home.
See our friend Ricardo Miranda Zuniga's investigation of dental tourism along the US-Mexico border.

White World Traveling

2008-06-25T12:56:00.002-05:00

A much better take on whiteness studies than the "What White People Like" cultural fluff... but we're sure Macon D won't get a book offer out of this blog.

Touring Secret Moons

2008-06-23T00:03:00.003-05:00

Our friend, experimental geographer and artist, Trevor Paglen is showing some new work in Berkeley related to his ongoing investigation of all things secret and hidden in the world of the US Military. This time it's a look at the Earth's "secret moons" a.k.a. classified satellites. For the last couple of years, Trevor's been working with amateur astronomers, like these folks, and some artsy computer folks to track and photograph these things, which sounds like no small feat.
Also, see Wired's brief write up of the work.

Neoliberal Geography Souffle

2008-06-22T23:19:00.005-05:00

You take one part psychogeography, one part mass observation, and sprinkle liberally with condensed data mining, stir with latest GPS enabled communication device (Blackberry or iPhone preferred). Combination will become a doughy substance called "reality mining".
Caution, may rise too fast and deflate unexpectedly.
OK, enough with the silly metaphors (sorry food is on our minds). "Reality mining" is described by its founder, Sandy Pentland, of MIT:

The science behind reality mining is that subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them. These biologically based “honest signaling” mechanisms, including a person’s activity level and how the timing of their actions is influenced by others, offer an unmatched window into our social life, intentions, and health. By understanding these subtle patterns we can better understand ourselves, and begin to engineer our society to be a happier, more human place to live...

Locative Media meet genetic determinism. Apparently a "right to the city" isn't as important as a profitable index of it in these people's utopian vision of a "more human place to live."
The real beneficiaries of the US Government's requirement for all mobile phones to carry GPS location awareness are becoming more and more apparent.

Going Bananas

2008-06-19T13:13:00.005-05:00

The NY Times has a great Op-Ed on the current problems with the banana industry. While it talks about the coming price jump (estimated to over $1/pound) due to floods in Central America and the rising cost of fuel, the more interesting story is the likely decimation of the variety of banana we in North America and the EU think of as THE BANANA. Apparently, the banana variety we consume is a Cavendish (a Chinese variety) that became the staple for industry in the 1960s, after the previous staple, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by a fungal epidemic. Now, a more virulent form of this fungal disease is attacking the Cavendish variety, which was previously immune.
Why is this significant, well for starters, pretty much the entirety of the banana industry is monopolized by the singular genetic variety Cavendish. Already, the effects of the disease on Asian plantations has been significant, and scientists speculate that it will hit Latin America sometime in the next 5-20 years.
Both traditional forms of cross-breeding and genetic engineering are being employed to create resistance and edible replacement crops, but the problem that cultivated bananas have become a monoculture cash-crop, and one that can't even reproduce on it's own (they don't produce seeds) will most likely just be repeated with whatever is designed to take the Cavendish's place. With the combination of factors facing the well-traveled banana, we'll see if it remains one of the developed world's favorite fruits much longer.
image above: map of world banana production

Spectral Touring

2008-06-17T16:25:00.002-05:00

We would have loved to witness this event, organized and created by our friends in Troy, NY.
Here's what they have to say about Spectres of Liberty:

Spectres of Liberty is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.
The Liberty Street Church is not only significant as a vanished part of Troy's architectural history, but also for its value as a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery. From old photos of the site provided by the Rensselaer Historical Society, we created an inflatable 1:1 scale reproduction of the church and will install it at the former site of the church, which is now a parking lot. We will be animating this ghost church through video projections that call forth the history of the site, as well as through the social context of a cultural event that will bring community members to the site to think more deeply about the space and its history.
Through our research we learned more about Henry Highland Garnet, the pastor of Liberty Street Church from 1843-1848. He was known around the world for his militant orations and publications calling on people to actively participate in the fight to end slavery. When we read Henry Highland Garnet's words from the 1840's: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance," we do not think they are dead words from a forgotten time - but a call, an urging, to participate in transforming our world now.

Can't Map This

2008-06-02T14:26:00.003-05:00

A St. Paul, MN suburb has had itself removed from Google Map's Street View feature, so you won't be taking any virtual tours there...
From the Star Tribune, via Space & Culture.

In the Middle of Nowhere

2008-06-02T14:07:00.001-05:00

For a while, this country’s geographic center bounced around the heartland like the ball on an old movie-screen singalong. When Alaska joined the union nearly 50 years ago, the government determined that the center — the theoretical balance point — had moved from outside Lebanon, Kan., to some inaccessible prairie here in Butte County, 439 miles to the northwest. (Fret not, Lebanon has adapted; it now calls itself the “Historical Geographical Center of the 48 States or the Contiguous United States.”)
Then, when Hawaii became a state soon after, the center moved again — just six miles to this spot, about 21 miles north of Belle Fourche, a small city of ranching and agriculture. The center of the nation was now a few dozen yards from what was then Highway 85; local officials gazed into the open pasture and saw visions of camera-wielding tourists, jammed parking lots, a Belle Fourche boom.

(via NY Times)

Traveling Through the Corridor of Radical Midwest Culture

2008-05-30T23:49:00.002-05:00

A semi-public, mobile seminar we'll be taking part in.
Continental Drift Through the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.

Before there was oil, there was guano...

2008-05-30T23:44:00.002-05:00

Three interestingly linked (if you read between the obvious lines) stories from one day's NY Times.
Peru Guards Its Guano
Food Report Criticizes Biofuel Policies
As Oil Prices Soar, Restaurant Grease Thefts Rise

Recent Tourism Links of Note

2008-05-05T21:38:00.003-05:00

My Heritage Can Beat Up Your History (via Alan Lew)
Neuro-Tourism (via BLDG BLOG)
Design for Despots (ForeignPolicy.com)
Interactive Postcard (Jasper_Sluijs)
Global Food Crisis, an interactive map

Tourism is NOT the World's Largest Industry - So Stop Saying It Is

2008-05-05T21:35:00.001-05:00

via the New Economics of Tourism (blog of the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) at Leeds Metropolitan University).

Carne Asada Con Neumaticos

2008-05-03T13:16:00.004-05:00

The NY Times has an interesting piece on local resistance to a local measure in Los Angeles that would force taco truck to change location every hour. In the Times article, the debate becomes one about authenticity, at least for those who want to get rid of the trucks. As one East LA business owner, who thinks the trucks are a blight on the community, says, "People say this is part of our culture. I don't recall any towns in Mexico having taco trucks."
One thing this makes us wonder about, is the recent upsurge in food prices along with the cost of gas... what is the future of taco trucks, and those that depend on them, in an era of commodity food prices and four-dollar-plus gasoline?

Updates on 1964 Johnnie Mae Chappell Murder

2008-05-03T12:46:00.002-05:00

Although the State of Florida and the City of Jacksonville have decided to continue overlooking the 44 year old murder of Johnnie Mae Chappell (a focus of the Travel Office's Guanabacoa Trail), the FBI has apparently been considering it one of their top 5 unsolved cases from the civil rights era. Reports about a documentary on the murder, by filmaker Keith Beauchamp (maker of the Emmy-nominated “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till”), have been showing up in lots of Jacksonville media and national outlets, and Chappell's murder was featured in Oprah's show on the 40th anniversary of MLK's assassination. Interestingly, Beauchamp recreated the scene and events of the murder on site in Jacksonville, and has been cooperating with the FBI's investigations into the case.
Of course, one has to wonder, if the FBI's investigation does actually deal with the obviously racist and illegal manner in which the original investigation was handled, will it also deal with the obvious continuation of such problems in the current city and state's legal avoidance of that historical legacy?

Touring Collectivism After Modernism in Japan

2008-04-21T23:56:00.002-05:00

We've been reading Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson's book on collective cultural practices, and the chapter on Japanese collectivism by Reiko Tomii was especially interesting due to our lack of knowledge about collective art in Japan. Of special interest is the work of the Sightseeing Art Research Institute and the Play. Of course, Hi-Red-Center's work, slightly more known to us, is also really fascinating, especially the Cleaning Event staged during the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Apparently, the Sightseeing Art Research Institute also performed a doughnut eating performance at the Olympic stadium as well. We're going to look more into this work (starting with Tomii's endnotes) and its relationship to the Travel Office, but if anyone has any immediate information, including other book suggestions, please let us know.

Teaching Starlings, Teaching Ourselves

2008-04-15T12:00:00.002-05:00

Brian Collier, a friend of the Travel Office, recently conducted a tour and Starling "teach-in" in Kansas City. For more information about what Brian is teaching Starlings, check out his website.

Rings of Dissent

2008-04-13T15:11:00.002-05:00

The NY Times has a photo slide show of some activist appropriations of the Olympic rings logo.

Temporary Travel Office Report "Contaminating the Preserve"

2008-04-11T19:56:00.001-05:00

The Temporary Travel Office has just released a 44 page report that summarizes our research and initial recommendations for expanding the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, FL.

The report, titled "Contaminating the Preserve," outlines two proposals: our 2006-7 proposal for an 800 km elevated boardwalk connecting the current Preserve to Guanabacoa, Cuba as well as the more recently proposed extension to the current Preserve that we are currently referring to as the Ash Site Annex, a 43 square mile area of Northwest Jacksonville that contains 7 former incinerator and ash-dump sites.

You can download the report as a 3.4MB PDF file

The Travel Office is also planning the second phase of our consultation, which is being planned as an exhibition and series of discussions at the University of North Florida sometime between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010.