Obstruction Theory

I must say that despite the feelings of the man using a monome to play the html data of websites as sound etc… on my last posting here, i do think the NYTimes have a severely impressive web presence. One need look no further than their interactive map of Baghdad:

[Assessing the 'Surge': an interactive map of Baghdad from nytimes.com]

The map itself is a result of a project ‘to study the ground-level effects of the American troop buildup’. As one’s mouse hovers over the neighbourhoods lying either side of the undulating Tigris, connections are made between the map and surrounding text and image. As my cursor wavers over Saydia in the south, i see the region connect to an image of a smiling girl’s face and Saydia: Thousands Flee Active Battle Zone. Not only can I click on a particular neighbourhood to venture into on-the-ground journalism, video and photojournalism but i can also view the map in terms of who inhabits which areas, displaced neighbourhoods, Sunni majority and strong Mahdi army presence. Geographically aware and able. Now we are actively participating in the journalism we view, no longer passive recipients.

How far could one take this? Next of course, please, vantage point mobility, the ability to zoom in and see the street level, to tilt and angle oneself to catch a particular glimpse of the four golden minarets at Kadhmayn;  then palimpsestic maps of infrastructures begin to appear: electricity grids and aqueducts and their lines of communication. Movements of people across the city over a day, a year, a decade, ever since Werner Herzog filmed from above the Iraqi oil fields being sent aflame in Lessons of Darkness. A map of the city shifting over time, rising out of the sands before your very eyes; and the subsequent destructions, captured for posterity.

[from Herzog's Lessons of Darkness]

The only aspect now missing is the ability to alter the map, the possibility of effecting change. Consider the following: a man, lets call him X, is a voyeur, he places himself at train stations and on trams, above balconies and under bridges, watching keenly all the varied passers-by. Inconspicuous, he seems to himself. Every step he takes, however, leaves an imprint. As do his no-longer-furtive glances. What if interactive maps were malleable in this sense, each place you visit somehow your mark is left upon, a barely visible stamp of your past presence there. Then we could see and hear of viewers movements across the map, paths taken and returned upon. More extreme still and we have a landscape entirely alterable, viewers able to construct small compounds and tap into the electricity grid, shape hillocks and breathe life into the space. I do not, of course, recommend this for Baghdad.

Nor have I said much of the substance of this particular interactive map, which you really should check out yourself since I have no ability to relate to you the complexities of all the information that can be gathered from this particular well. Do, however, permit me end with the words of a small girl, seemingly proud to have been displaced due to her family receiving a letter with a bullet in it:

No matter what, Iraq is so beautiful… Iraq will remain beautiful, no matter what. (Sung) Baghdad of poets and pictures. The gold of time… and its perfume scent.

[genography: the paths of our ancestors across the globe. image courtesy of wired dot com]

The Genographic Project, a $45 million initiative backed by National Geographic, aims at producing detailed, readable and functional maps (visual and otherwise) of the ways in which DNA has spread around the global over the past sixty thousand years. With a quarter million and growing fast volunteers hailing from the four corners from the earth, the project has already managed to map out some seriously impressive paths across the globe, the primary source of DNA being cheek swabs. You yourself can purchase a starter kit from National Geographic (follow the first link above…), send in a swab and not only discover the many paths your DNA has swept across the globe but participate in and aid this project.

Here we find corroboration that such research is necessarily and intricately intertwined with our histories. To quote,

One study by project scientists Pierre Zalloua and Chris Tyler-Smith has discovered a genetic marker typical of Europeans in modern Lebanese men. The inference is clear they say: this distinctive Y-chromosome was left behind by 11th-century Crusaders when they invaded Lebanon and then settled in the country. A similar sort of genetic legacy has been detected in regions where Gengis Khan ruled and which has been linked to the many male descendants he produced.

These conjectural highways, appropriately (or not?) designated such nomenclature as M343, M174 etc…, paths trodden out and lands rode upon time and time again, necessarily span all the continents bar the southernmost and the Genographic Project’s website has some very interesting interactive visualisations of the interplay between the genography of our multifarious landscapes and the history which is now burnt upon the land: the appropriately named (yes) Globe of Human History and Atlas of the Human Journey.

I would like to see this coupled with Ben Fry’s Genome Valence, which visualises genes themselves, in the sense that it maps out the different sequences of nucleic acids which can occur in various organisms:

[image courtesy of ben fry]

Since 99.9% of the three billion nucleotides which make up the human gemone are the same, what i suggest is an evolving interactive globe showing the paths traced out by all our ancestors, along with imagery capturing data sets which encapsulate those slight variations, that 0.1% which make us all so very different, these superimposed perhaps when your mouse hovers above a particular location at a particular point in time, varying as earth revolves and as the timeline oscillates between then and now. Palimpsests of genetic data fading in and out, meaningful, retrievable.

–I am pleased to announce that Australia, the largest island in the world, has just been dramatically increased in size. Martin Ferguson, Federal Resources Minister

Australia, seemingly overnight or in a split second indeed, has grown 2.5 million square kilometres OR twenty times the size of the United Kingdom, the SMH reported last week. However, as always and of course, not all is exactly as it seems: the land granted by the UN, granted after at least 15 years of Australian persistence, is all UNDERWATER. Yes, all of it, and Australia’s control of the land does not extend to the waterways on the surfaces of the oceans in question. What we have, in fact, is an extension of our continental shelf every which way:

Three dimensional land configurations reappearing in differing guises, most commonly seen clad in the language of airspace, Australia is creeping back down into the shores we once slithered out of, returning to the ocean to look for, among other varied resources, OIL OIL OIL!!! Three letters signifying clout in trade and commerce alike, signifying also a commodity to run out of soon enough. All this having been said, Australia does indeed need oil. Nor should any of us ever forget Brendan Nelson’s (current Australian Opposition leader, then Minister for Defense) admission that troops were kept in Iraq for this blackest of worldly golds, reported here. Lest we forget how consumer petrol prices rose when we invaded Iraq.

Of course, the United Nations granting land is exactly how these things should come about, in contrast to Russia mid last year sticking what may as well have been a Soviet flag in the floor of the Arctic ocean, claiming the land in question to be an extension of its continental shelf. Countries such as Canada were, for obvious reasons, seriously pissed off and compared the action to 15th century land-grabbing.

[2007 TIME magazine person of the year: seriously dangerous land-grabber]

Anyway, returning to the Artic’s southern conterpart, the only continent without native human population, Antarctica, we read that Australia will not be mining in its new sub-Antarctic lands. In a world where our ice shelves are melting at an already alarming rate, where the Northwest passage may actually soon open up (trade shifts resultant may be fascinating, however, seriously, the northwest passage is melting…), it is clear that we should not be mining in such volatile regions. This is why the Antarctic Treaty System is so important. I urge you to read about it at Cool Antarctica, a website very informative for those interested in the land.

[the eco-city Masdar, as projected by Lord Foster. Image from Building Design]

–The world’s first sustainable city is on its way!— Lord Foster, architect/Brit/Lord proclaims. And from what the Guardian here tells us, this may not be far from the truth at all. A city powered in its entirety by the sun.

In short, the plans for ‘Masdar’ (Arabic for ‘the source’), revealed late last month, are as follows: a solar power station is to be built in the heart of the heart of the desert in the United Arab Emirates and this station will power the entire construction of the city, a city to house 50,000 people, a city without cars and yet with 3 different levels of potential transport, one for a light-rail, a 2nd for pedestrians and a 3rd for what the Guardian refers to as “personalised transport pods”, a kind of driverless taxi. The roads will be slender and short, the buildings a maximum of 5 stories high and potentially 80% of the roofspace will be used to generate solar power. This all in what is possibly one of the harshest environments on the face of the earth.

[the future! as projected by fosterandpartners.com]

Now this reminds me of two things. The first can be found here and is a plan developed by the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Corporation to build solar energy plants across North Africa:

More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to European Union member nations…

On top of this, the superheated steam (superheated by the Sun!), after driving turbines to generate the electricity, would be used to boil sea water (in effect, a desalination plant), the fresh water vapour of which could be used to give drinking water to African nations in dire need of it. In the end,

The Desertec project envisages a ring of a thousand of these stations being built along the coast of northern Africa and round into the Mediterranean coast of the Middle East.

The plans for Masdar also remind me of Dubai The World, the man-made islands which themselves form an atlas of this our very globe:

[If you haven't seen this before, yes, people have actually done this.]

Masdar is a phenomenal idea and could well set a precedent for ways in which climate change can and should be battled. But it also strikes me as yet another way way for the United Arab Emirates to try and one-up their counterparts in Dubai, both places striving to have the most amazing cities in the Gulf. It is, however, far more important than Dubai The World which strikes me as an exercise in supreme oil-money-laden idiocy. They, Dubai The World, tell us, tell you, tell me, in hope of increasing tourism in the self-proclaimed ‘desert’s most exciting city’:

300 islands. 386 million tonnes of rock. 232 kilometres of new coastline. 27 km-long breakwater. Like nothing else. Found nowhere else. Epic.