Category embodied
Migration of Landscapes
[Map of goose migration routes across North America, from Frank Bellrose’s definitive book on the subject: Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America] Migration is typically used to describe the physical movements of organisms. Accordingly, studies of migratory patterns tend to focus on the movements of birds, fish, butterflies, wolves and other biota. In vernacular […]
Future Baroque
The following piece was published last summer in La Tempestad; given that La Tempestad circulates primarily in Mexico and is published in Spanish, we — Rob Holmes and I, who co-authored the piece — thought that it would be worth re-publishing it on our respective sites for English-language audiences. The article builds on a pair of […]
Foundational Forests IV: All Forests are Experimental
Above is a sample of British Columbia’s Forest service’s Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification (BEC) maps, which delineate Canada’s forest types and their geo-spatial patterns. The incredibly detailed classifications are based on field surveys of assemblies of vegetation, assemblies which are expected to shift in tandem with accelerated climate change. As they do, these maps will shift in […]
How to Unwater
Saturated by images of inundated New York – via the instagram storm and elsewhere – we wonder how the city’s subways and various other low-lying crevices will be drained of Sandy’s remnant flood waters and how long that process might take. As it turns out, there is an emerging design specialty just for that purpose being […]
Drifts in Magnetic Fields
[World Magnetic Model maps notating the magnetic field’s intensity (top) and inclination lines, or angle of the earth’s magnetic field above or below horizontal (bottom)] [Film of a suspension of dissociated cells from trout “olfactory epithelium” (cells extracted from some unfortunate trout’s nose) placed under the laboratory influence of a magnetic field rotating at a […]
Columbia Migrations: Dredge Oregon
[a hand-crafted steel cutterhead of the Dredge Oregon. The specular silver sheen on the backside (click on image for detail) is a nickel plating added to extend the life of the cutter as it rips and churns through the shifting sediments of the Columbia River.] Back in February of this year I had the opportunity […]
N48 05.738 W123 33.287 Elwha Overlook
Near Olympic National Park, just off of highway 112, the National Park Service has set up a public viewing station facing what was formerly the Elwha Dam. The platform is equipped with a high magnification spotting scope which one can use to peer into the various accelerated anthro-geologic events happening there. The series of images […]
Staring at Goats IX: the Para-normal
[Lyn Cassady, former secret U.S. military psychic soldier (…or was he?) tests his interrogative prowess by attempting to stare a goat to death. His successful attempt is authentically recorded by the video camera at his side. We, as viewer, see this as filtered through memories created prior to Cassady’s transformative ‘Jedi’ training, in which his […]
Pearls from Phosphorous
[Map of Aquatic Dead Zones and human population density (altered), courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory] The irony of peak phosphorous is that while there is a perceived shortage, there is an excess amount of phosphorous found throughout the human-influenced environment, exactly where we don’t want it and which we mostly don’t know what to do […]
River was: 34,131,100 points
The U.S. Geological Survey recently posted a LIDAR fly-through of what the Lower Elwha River looked like as of September 2011. The composite of 97 on-the-ground LIDAR scans were made less than a week before the start of dismantling the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams upstream. The 34,131,100 georeferenced points of light will serve as […]
Free Association Design 