About Moogle Gaps...

Moogle Gaps is a collection of digital ephemera, like the emptying of a desk drawer: stories and drawing, histories, natural histories, adventures and of course maps. What I'm calling "Moogle Gaps" is a play on the new standard for mapping, Google Maps. Unlike Google Maps, Moogle Gaps will animate the gray and green "gaps" in the landsacpe, turning these spaces into places.

Place is a vague word and to narrow the concept I would define "place" as the connection between physical space and people. Place is created and ever changing, malleable both in physical landscape (think bulldozers) and meaning (think the Lorraine Motel). Unfolding these layers of meaning involves the making and reading of maps, the walking of boundaries, observing the cycles of birds and insects, and the questioning of history and culture. Place is at once unyielding like granite peaks and skyscrapers yet wonderfully temporal, contingent on ethereal things like the smell of hay, humidity, a creole accent or the sound of moving water. Spaces can be pinned to the wall on a map and photographed a million times yet these same spaces are somehow unique to each person, each time - this is place. I hope you enjoy and as always please contact me for questions, thoughts, or to share something about your places.


Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Bad Spin Art?

The 2012 elections are over and we finally can put away the state cutouts and red and blue paint for another four years. I don't think Americans have spent so much time starring at an outline of Ohio since its statehood in 1803. For one night the country was transfixed by tiny geographical outlines and the oscillations between blue and red. Geography lesson aside the hyper, flickering, buffering, updating  % reporting election coverage did give us a chance to brush up on U.S. geography it did little to show the true geography or political belief. A series of maps created by Mark Newman from the Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan helps unfold these problems. View the series of maps here. 


A reminder that the wavy edges of Ohio are created by the Ohio River to the South and Lake Eerie to the North. The pencil straight western edge was created by... well a pencil. 

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