~~~

Maps

There is little to say.

How do places become themselves? They rise from the seafloor, then they fall back into the ocean. It's difficult to reconcile with what we consider important.

I only know how to communicate this as failure.

The only signs that matter are imperceptible: the obfuscated source of a recording, the interior of rocks beneath us, the images passing by on the highway.

Power wants to do away with the materiality of places, to extract and consolidate value from every inch of the earth. The resistance of land becomes apparent. You could be religious or spiritual about this; I am not. Resistance is also a property of media—through constraints and affordances, media exert influence on the communities that use and inhabit them. The media of the atmosphere and hydrosphere afford particular behaviors, and resist others. The earth is a medium for transmissions that both implicate us and will far outlast us.

Tourism

In rarer parts of the world, it seems as though every act is a form of extraction. In tourism, each eye that sees takes a share of the difference sold. To sustain this requires labor to produce difference until everyone is as alienated as the tourist himself, in service to this artificial reproduction of difference.

The tourist is unable to access authentic experience, able only to destroy. There is an alternative, where the outcome reflects the inner life of the observer, transcending extraction and exchange. We hope the future affords this possibility.

This mode of failure is abstraction, which transforms everything that exists and will exist into a resource. We encircle the earth with satellites so that we may flatten it into a perfect sphere, or better, a plane, or a single point where everything collapses.

Waterworld

The movie Ponyo is about breaking the boundary between water and air. Water washes over the earth, leaving it unscathed. Briefly, we witness this potentiality, until the realms are divided again. In reality, water is not so gentle—it seeps into infrastructure, washes away surficial features and signs, and alters minerals deep underground. The water of true life affords no permanence.

In the rock cycle, volatile and water-rich melts rise up through the lithosphere, altering minerals and rupturing the surface to form volcanic arcs. The characteristic greenstone and serpentinite formations of northern California derive from hydrous alteration of the lithosphere during subduction.

"It's very difficult to understand the deep structure of a mountain belt by direct observation."

Perspective

An impression is what captures the character and form of a place. Scanning, near instantaneously, the landscape before you, where do your eyes or your mind linger? What does it stir up in the moment before it ceases to be wild and startling?

As experiences pass, the shape of the world self-organizes into a map of impressions that resembles no empirical mapping. I know vast areas of the United States only through these impressions.

What we find important is not entirely solipsistic; it passes through a form of mediation or cultural filtering. We often share in what is beautiful, sad, joyful, and so on. But categories are not experiences, just as recordings are not experiences; they are derivatives of increasing poverty. The imaginal quality of life runs beneath the level at which we share in each other's experiences, and so we can only attempt to obliquely induce a form of understanding.

~~~

Tracklist

• American drift
• Horsefly (exposure)
• Abalone shell, white wine, and mustard flower
• Accretionary prism
• Charter
• Up around the bend
• Mysteries thereof
• Crescent city parking lot

Acknowledgement

• Heather Mease
• Francis Wilson
• Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
• Zeb Page
• Maia and Jed
• Jeff Taylor
• James Piper
• The house in Portland

Reading

• Yi-Fu Tuan - Space and Place
• Hakim Bey - Overcoming Tourism
• Jean Baudrillard - America
• J.B. Jackson et al. - The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes
• John Durham Peters - The Marvelous Clouds