Czech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

I am admittedly a map geek. I pour over maps searching for the inside nuances of a place, the ways in which landscape, city planning, history and culture have laid their hand on a location. The act of looking becomes as much of an act of transforming myself to another place, one I’ve never seen before. It’s a sneak preview of events to come, a way to prepare myself for the location and experiences that await. Author Lucy Lippard says, “For map-lovers, maps are about visualizing the places you’ve never been and recalling the ones you have been to. A map can be memory or anticipation in graphic code.”1 But for me, maps are also a way of precaution, a way to orient myself to the geography of an unknown place. They are a way to help me from getting lost amid the new and exotic. They are an escape route.

But I have a love/hate relationship with maps. As much as they are a way of understanding a place, an exit plan and a compass, they are also created with an intent. Lippard says, “The “naturalization” of maps--the myth that maps show the world the way it really is--veils the fact that maps are cultural and even individual creations that embody points of view. They map only what the authors or their employers want to show.”2 Information is added or left out of a map, out of a visual depiction of a location, because of what the cartographer wishes to emphasize, and that may actually distance someone from understanding and not getting to understand the place.

My eyes ran through the medieval maze.....

When I was told that I would attend a studio residency in Slavonice, Czech this spring to work with landscape architects and environmental design students I saw my chance to learn as much as possible about how to fabricate and imagine a culture onto a map. Mostly I wanted to travel to Czech, visit Prague, and go to the border of the Iron Curtain. The first thing that I did? I looked on a map. Prague looked amazing, and with the help of Google Maps I was able to zoom into the city structure and move myself through the maze and zig-zag of medieval city planning, looking for clues to the lay of the land and where people would congregate. Where were the churches and cathedrals, the pedestrian bridges and views across the river? What would the city look like when I arrived? Next I turned to Slavonice, which was nestled into an area near what is called the European Greenbelt, the demilitarization zone along the Iron Curtain which created a unique environmental niche because a lack of industrial buildup. I measured the distance to the border and I plotted my escape.

But when we arrived things weren’t as they had appeared on the satellite map. Snow greeted us in Prague, and it was much more prevalent in the villages near the border. Slavonice itself was the vision of quaintness, much more picturesque than the top down maps had shown, but the border was most mysterious. It was nonexistent.

I guess you can't see the white line of the border because of the snow.

I wasn’t expecting a dashed line to be carved into the farmland on the border of the Iron Curtain, but I also wasn’t expecting a line that was so contentious to so many people for so long to have vanished. We crossed the border at a checkpoint a kilometer from Slavonice without fanfare or even a greeting from an Austrian border patrol official which made the entrance into a new country seem much more imaginary and surreal than it really was.


Later that day we took a tour through the surrounding countryside of Czech and visited the Iron Curtain Museum, which is not more than a fence and guard tower along one of the most heavily secured portions of the Czech border.

This spot was where the sand trap was. Now it's a museum to over-preparedness.

At one time there were four parallel electrified fences with a sand trap ten meters wide in the center with guard towers every fifty feet. Now the fence just ends. This erosion of the border conflict wasn’t on the map, but the distinct line of “Austria” and “Czech” that demarcates the difference between here and there was.

The Iron Curtain just ends....

In Prague, the city was overcast and gray. I was expecting the sunny and bright day when the satellite images were taken, but it seems like Google picked the one day in Prague when you can see the sun. Prague bustles with its own haunting vibrations and dark, dank, stone filled streets and monochromatic neighborhoods, seemingly proud of its resistance to change and progress. But the layered and complex nature of the town doesn’t come out in the overhead maps, only the homogeneous nature that satellite imagery draws on the maps. This uniform representation of the world through Google Maps dulls the experience, and takes places that are quite diverse and vibrant and makes them uniform and stale.

Now which place would you rather travel to? Yep, I'd rather be in the gloomy place also.

In the end, what I took from that place, the experiences that I had with it, were not consistent with what I had planned for by observing a place through maps, they were actually much richer and diverse. Lippard states, “A map is a composite of places, and like a place, it hides as much as it reveals.”3 Maybe I was asking too much of a map to impart to me a foreign culture and distant locale, but my experiences didn’t line up with my expectations. The map tricked me into thinking that distant places are alike all the world over, but I can still use them to imagine places that move to their own beat and sing their own song.


1 The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard, 1997, p. 77
2 Lippard, p. 78
3 Lippard, p. 82

Becoming Lake Shakamak

Boat dock at Lake Shakamak, Jasonville Indiana.

When I was a young teen my parents began to rent a cabin on a scenic lake in a state park in Indiana for a week during summertime. Lake Shakamak looked like a spindly hand, it’s four finger tributaries created when the state damned a small river and created the three lake system. Shakamak had about 30 cabins on the outside of the pinkie near the cement tennis courts and boat rental shack, and swimming was relegated to the area between the thumb and index finger. The lake was known for fishing and a huge, 30 foot tall diving tower in the swimming area. We would stay for a week, away from the city and cable television, unable to be found while hiking, fishing, swimming and generally getting away from the world. As much as my family had camped and hiked, from Yellowstone to Yosemite, to me, this became our family camping place.

Shakamak is the northernmost in a series of 3 lakes that include Lenape and Kickapoo

Some social scientists claim that place is defined not as much by a specific location, but what we as participants do in a place. A particular ice cream shop becomes important because it’s where we went as a child, or this grocery store is where I buy my produce, or Lake Shakamak is where our family went camping. These actions in a space become the deciding factors in what people call a sense of place. Geographer Allan Pred claims that “Places are never ‘finished’ but always ‘becoming’.”1 We embody within places a certain importance because of what we do there, and what we do there is always evolving. Maybe eating habits change and I only shop at the farmers market co-op, or the ice cream store closes and another store takes its location. Those places have changed to me, and become entirely different because of the change.

The idea becomes increasingly problematic when we begin to contemplate the world of live feed video chat rooms. The proliferation of programs like Skype only highlight the place based quandaries that come with advancements in technology. With Skype, a live video feed is taken from the video camera on your computer and traded with the live feed taken from someone who you call, giving a real time, face to face conversation with friends across the world. But where does the action of a Skype conversation actually occur? Geographer Nigel Thrift believes that places are constructed by people doing things, and in a sense are constantly being performed.2 So where does the performance of a live feed or Skype conversation happen when the location is merely a crisscrossing of video and internet?

These are questions that social scientists and geographers will have to tackle in the future, especially with the increase in online role player games and virtual reality worlds. Some believe that these sites will eventually diminish the role that place has in the construction our self perception because they allow for actions and performances to happen in a place outside of a real world location. New definitions of place will have to be created, just as place itself is being constantly redefined as we live in it, to take into account this phantom place, located in a cloud, transmitted and intangible.

Christening the ginormous diving tower... Why do memories sometimes look like old Kodachrome photos?

But the here and now, the world outside of the virtual, is always changing, and sometimes in ways that we can’t control. This seems to be a reason to create an alternate world, one that can be regulated. But I don’t want to be the god of a virtual Lake Shakamak, I have my own memories of that place, that time, and our cabin overlooking a beautiful Indiana forest and lake. However they were molded by my own personal perception, and however they have weathered through time, they exist to me in a much more real way than anything that could be called virtual.

1 Place, A Short Introduction, Tim Cresswell, 2004, p. 35
2 Cresswell, p. 37

Photographs courtesy of the Indiana DNR

The Man in the Mountain

Can you see the man in this mountain? I couldn't either.

They say there’s a Man in Red Mountain north of Phoenix, Arizona. That’s what friends have told me, though I’ve never seen him personally. When the sun hits the mountains just right, if you are in the right location, the shadows create the face of a man in the rocky wall of the mountain. But all the Native American lore, heightened conversation, and leaning out of chairs to gain a glimpse has not been enough for me to see the Man in Red Mountain. I guess I haven’t been standing in the right spot when the sun hits it right. You would think that with all the commotion about something as permanent as stone and you would be able to see it.

Sometimes things are known to be true until they’re looked at from a different perspective or in a different light. Then it’s understood that what was thought to be one way is actually quite different. In order to really see what’s on the mountain, it all depends on where you are and when you’re there. As with many things, there isn’t always a cut and dry answer, even to questions like do you see the man in the mountain. Knowledge and information actually depend on a whole series of factors that may produce a series of different answers, which explains why things that we know to be true become questioned. Elevation is another example of something that is perceived to be objective but is actually quite subjective and averaged.

Elevation is a measurement of the distance that a place, like Red Mountain, is above sea level. It is a place’s height, if you will. It seems easy enough to believe something as measurable as elevation, except elevation has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is entirely unsettled. The ocean ebbs and flows due to tides and gravity on a daily basis, so this fixed distance as a guide isn’t so fixed. The established reference point where the edge of the ocean meets the edge of the beach ebbs and flows with these tides, as much as ten to twenty feet.

Where would you mark sea level? Where the water is, or where it is going to be?

In order to get this average, scientists have to consider the daily changes to the tides over a period of 18.6 years just to get the most accurate average of sea level. This really brings to home the idea of a fluctuation of information. Not to mention, the baseline in which we measure the height of things like mountains changes because of the tides, and this is only really the baseline at two distinct moments in each day.

This concept of using sea level as the basis of elevation is a bit skewed as well, since the earth is an ellipse and not a sphere. Using measurements from sea level, therefore, don’t take this into account because these measurements are constant across the world, but the world bulges at the equator. If measurements for elevation are made from the center of the earth and not from sea level, then Mount Chimborazo is the highest mountain in the world because it’s distance from the center of the earth is greater than that of Mount Everest.

Red Mountain is 1,871 feet, give or take the average tides in Baja, Mexico 182 miles away.

And this is why I say that information is fluid. Things that were considered such a constant, rules and definitions that were taught as infallible, can be so variable. Averaged and debatable. And if the light just hits one bit of information in a different way, casting different shadows, giving different answers, seen again at a different time and in a different light, this shows us to there are often no real cut and dry answers, but a world of nuance, timing, and multiplicity. And if you arrive at the right time, and are in the right place, you can see a mans face in a mountain 1,871 feet tall, give or take ten feet.