An Address

Today’s

Strange Maps shows a map
of ‘the island’ in Lost, and in the
discussion, there is a question about naming, an observation that it is peculiar
that the island is un-named.  In one sense, the LAT-LON coordinates name
the island, locate it, provide it with an address (I would repeat those numbers
here but for the jinx). But the island is not named (Formosa!) in the
conventional sense of toponyms.

The map itself displays layers of plausible locations (colored dots) and
zones (rings) meant to match up with events over the first three seasons of the
program. I find the map interesting because it surfaces at the same time I am
reading and (sketchily) writing about archives, tagging and keywording, what
Derrida in Archive Fever calls the archontic dimension–consignment,
the gathering and piling on of signs.

What does the map archive? And where is the imaginary map between
commencement (sequential) and commandment (jussive)?

I don’t know.  I cannot settle this yet, and I am in no hurry. Lost
is not even airing again for a couple of months, and then, only if the writers’ strike is
resolved. Nevertheless, I am–for these few minutes–taken on a detour through
the map as a museum of Lost, of a topo-nomology embedded almost entirely in television (a
domain, like many others, about which we must continuously ask, What is lost (er,
diminished) in "legitimate hermeneutical authority" (3)?).

United Lakes of Atlantica

Over the weekend Strange Maps
posted an

inverted map of the world
. The imaginary map was designed by Vlad Gerasimov who made it as
desktop wallpaper available at
Vladlabs
.


Aside from the Grand Inversion, the map symbols would suggest
that the climate, landforms, coastlines, flora, and fauna are more or less in
tact. In that case, I suppose I’d be most at home just north and east of Bermuda City. Or somewhere within a canoe ride of the Great Islands.

Web Bearings

The "Map of Online Communities"
posted
to XKCD (one of the few web comics I follow) is
traveling
through the

internets
this morning. Don’t miss it. XKCD MapIt offers an impressive lot: playful
place-names, the loose association of geographic area with online activity, and
a directional orientation based on abstract magnetisms (practical/intellectual
and focuses on real life or the web). Very much the sort of
imaginary map you might expect to find in Harmon’s You Are Here.
Even though the map includes a note discouraging navigational use, I tend
to think of it as appropriate for that purpose, especially for wanderers who sit
in their cozy homes in the Icy North, gazing sullenly at/through Windows
Live and Yahoo and wondering what’s on the other side of the mountain range.

Note the TITLE text available on mouse-over of the map: I’m waiting for the day when, if you tell someone ‘I’m from the internet’, instead of laughing they just ask ‘oh, what part?’