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.


Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Moon shadow map

A solar eclipse is a rare thing. We know this in practice but do we know why? A solar eclipse is in fact just the shadow of the moon on the earth's surface. Simple, yes? We can hold a ping pong ball in front of a lamp and block out the light of the lamp, no problem. But the moon is just ~230,000 miles from the earth while the sun is over 93,000,000 miles away and the moon, in comparison is minute! So the moon in fact is not blocking out the sun but rather casting a tiny, dark shadow on the face of the earth for just a short time. If we don't happen to live in the this small dark path we will not experience see the shadow and in turn not experience the eclipse. The map above is NASA's shadow map for the first half of the 21st century, showing us when and where the moon's shadow will travel, in turn showing us who will experieince a lunar eclipse in the next 38 years. 

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