Contents of this tag:

1. 1 2013-07-23T20:42:29-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 Maps 1 Tag plain 2013-07-23T20:42:29-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

This page is referenced by:

• 1 2013-06-13T15:46:56-07:00 Los Angeles Since 13,000 41 Complete Final Draft 2013 plain 2013-10-08T00:27:23-07:00 Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since the earliest human habitation, presented as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print and online formats. It aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. The ghostly presence of the actions of previous generations haunts the global landscapes of this metropolis. The inscribed footprints of every action, good, bad, heroic, tragic, mundane, accumulate as the region ages, so that every subsequent generation owes an enormous debt to the past. Those generations inscribed our landscape. The coral-like structures left us are the skeletons of both the best and worst: the creative, humane, positive, just actions have saved the metropolis, but it is scarred by the unhealed wounds left by cruel, selfish, and bloody acts of injustice that remain all around us, shaping the patterns, quality, and meaning of our lives. Injustices that go have escaped accountability poison the soil for future generations, so a necessary task toward achieving a just and humane global metropolitan community is to exorcise the demons of our past and also pacify the unquiet spirits of those who endured tyranny and exploitation. Simlodon californicus, the saber-toothed cat who welcomed the first humans to settle the Los Angeles Basin, and was in turn destroyed by them, is the appropriate totem of the Avenging Angel in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Ángeles, The town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. Ghost Metropolis seeks to make those ghosts visible, readable, knowable, and therefore actionable. Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, for accountability and for the sheer pleasure of reading stories and seeing through time using the time-machines of cartography, photography, and narrative. This work follows several models:  Livy's history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (53 BCE); Plutarch's Lives (c. 100 CE); (Cervantes's Don Quijote (1601-15); Shakespeare's Richard III (1592), Macbeth (c. 1605); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949).  Equally a visual work, Ghost Metropolis is a 21st-century “Atlas,” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16th and 17th century: rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and cartography.   The lineage of this work is also photographic, and cinematic.  It draws all previous visual traditions together, understandably, because it is also a product of the digital age, a multimedia work of interactive storytelling and argumentation. Pictorial representations of social forms can be thought of as the mapping of the footprints of past actions. Past actors inscribed and left the scene. Their inscribed actions haunt every subsequent inhabitant as ghosts, shaping lives invisibly. The historian who maps the past makes these ghosts visible. If the past is the landscape of what took place, then writing history, as representing, recounting, narrating the paths of our ancestors in that landscape, is inherently cartographic. Ghost Metropolis, as a work of visualization, owes its deepest debt to the Rennaisaance cartographers: Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau.  My own Ghost Maps extensions of this tradition. What does it mean, to be "inspired" by these ancient, centuries-old, and contemporary models?   I seek to emulate Livy in telling the story of an imperial metropolis over many centuries.  Plutarch's systematic biographies are unafraid to judge rulers morally, while telling thrilling stories. From Cervantes I learned that a single, vastly complex phenomenon, like Don Quijote or Los Angeles, requires many stories, many viewpoints, many voices, many genres, and idioms, even to approach it.  It requires Irony, satire, parody, and also grim determination and hope. Melville also wrote in the tradition of Cervantes, but Moby-Dick is a model for Ghost Metropolis also because it is a reflection on power and justice in the United States of America, its component regions, and its global reach.  It is the story of a multicultural nation on the march, with rulers and ruled, owners and workers.  A historian and political scientist with many clear ideas about the theoretical basis of every story, I have composed Ghost Metropolis with a political theory that owes the most to Shakespeare, in part because I also hold that the theory of politics evident in his work lived on in North America, informing its political culture.  Finally, Fernand Braudel's masterwork, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II is a model in many respects.  Braudel's history is that of a region that is the product of processes, actions, and events that must be studied on several scales of time and geography.  It is also a representative work of the Annales school method of mobilizing every available intellectual discipline, from the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, to accomplish the job of telling a comprehensive history of a region on and within the globe. Ghost Metropolis is composed of nodes, networks, and narratives. narrative paths.  Several genres are represented: textual, photographic, cinematic, and cartographic.  A Reader's Guide explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths weblike network intersections. 
• 1 2013-07-23T20:21:55-07:00 Reader's Guide 7 plain 2013-08-30T12:43:41-07:00 Ghost Metropolis is a hybrid work composed of genres organized into narratives and networks. Genres -Genres are all stand-alone units of expression in Ghost Metropolis. Each of the nodal genres were created according to their own logics and (in the case of my own creations) in parallel with the creation of the works in the other genres. There are a finite number of instances of each genre, each capable of standing alone.  Each of these is a "node" in the topology of Ghost Metropolis  Multiple Genres, Hybrid Work As a whole, Ghost Metropolis is always simultaneously visual and textual; different genres are never presented in isolation.   a prose essay can be isolated from other genres and still retain 100% of its original information, just as a photograph can be isolated from textual labeling, captioning, and critical commentary because photograph communicates pictorially, not semantically. A work in each genre retains its autonomous integrity when isolated from the others. Cartography is a special case of annotated pictorial form, but it does not need anything outside of its frame. Inventories --Listings of every instance of each Genre. -Narrative Essays -Stand-alone short or long essays in narrative prose form.   Forty-two in number, [expand and replace the paragraph below)/ I have 42 of these. They do not necessarily have any “illustrations.” They were written by me with many images and maps in mind, but I did not plan them to be embedded with specific images in specific places. I have known all along that I would organize them groupings alongside the prose, and printed with layouts that juxtapose images and textual prose. The other types of visual artifacts I have always worked with while writing these essays are presented in the book with equal empirical and representational value as the prose. They are different genres with different cognitive pathways required to “read” them, so it is impossible to value semantic prose as superior or primary. The author uses the power of all together. But it is important to recognize that these prose essays and stories are not, largely speaking, in need of “illustration” in the normal sense. Neither would I prefer that they be stripped of my other, visual forms of expression. The visual material is no less important, but indispensable in a different way. I have tried from the beginning of this project to visualize the past alongside my semantic representations of it. I am a photographer and a writer and a cartographer, but I have never practiced any one of these crafts as a function of my practice in any of the others, nor independence upon that other craft. Photography and Graphics Photographs -Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices. Includes montages and panoramas. Graphics -All static pictorial forms that are neither photographs nor maps, per the definitions in Ghost Metropolis. Maps -Pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, it usually carries semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface. Ghost Maps --See Presner essay for this text Video -All motion pictures. All photographic representations produced with equipment desgned to capture motion in discrete frames and to edit those frames and re-present them at rates too frequent to be detected by the visual perception and cognition of the human mind. Frame still can be isolated from these sequences, but they were never intended to be displayed in a frozen, single-frame format, except for promotional purposes in static formats of magazines and posters. Presentations of frame stills (not to be confused with production stills) beyond their makers’ original intent include critical studies by scholars, and displays by collectors. Audio -All soundtracks lacking moving images. Includes but is not limited to the subgenres of music, radio, recorded voice of any kind, from oral histories to dramatic narratives, and the sound-tracks of movies and videos of any kind. Paths: -Groupings of Nodes with common themes or concerns, presented sequentially in roughly chronological order. -Narrative Pathways -Narrative Essays by common subject in rough chronological order. Pictorial Narratives -Curated sequences of static images (including both photographs and graphics) Cinematic Narratives -Curated sequences of film stills or clips taken directly from cinematic sources. Does not include “production stills” taken by still camera equipment during the making of movies. Cinematic narratives are only taken from motion photography—in whatever format, film to digital. Cartographic Narratives -Curated sequences of maps. Note, this is distinguished from “narrative cartography,” which is any deliberate case of sequential storytelling within a pictorial map. Audio Narratives -Includes voice-overs, curated sequences of discrete musical works (as in the “Soundtrack” of a film), and curated sequences of any form of audio that can be played independently (even if in synchronized conjunction with) any other narrative form. Networks Time and Space

This page references:

• 1 2013-07-27T16:29:27-07:00 Montages 5 Inventory plain 2013-10-20T15:10:29-07:00
• 1 2013-07-27T15:46:57-07:00 Artes Populares, 1922 and 2006. Panoramic Montage by Phil Ethington (2006). 1 plain 2013-07-27T15:46:57-07:00