The remote locale, barren landscape and harsh weather of Devon Island, coupled with the presence of the Haughton impact crater, give it a number of correspondence points with the landscape of Mars--so many that the scientists of the Haughton-Mars Project have, for years now, been using it as a Mars-analogue in a series of experiments.

 

Research topics include Mars greenhouses, Mars ice drilling, and Mars surgery (as conducted by medically untrained team members, remotely guided by Earth surgeons, with a twenty-minute communications delay).  The human factors experiments are the ones that intrigue me the most--they remind me of the kind of hypothetical play I enjoyed as a child, in which my brothers and I would create routes around the house without using the floor.  Although I have not yet found myself without a floor, it is entirely possible that the explorers currently working on Devon may find themselves on Mars one day, and it's heartening to know they'll have experienced analogues for what they might find there.

The idea of tree bridges--trees encouraged to grow in such a way that their living roots span a chasm or river--charms me to no end.  Tree bridges imply patience and generational planning; they're aesthetically lovely; and perhaps best of all, they're a reminder that humans and our environment aren't separate and hostile entities: we live in the world, we shape the world, the world lives in us.

Does anyone else remember the many, many stories about our future vacations on the moon? We'd make our way there, of course, via the mythical space elevator. Sadly, this great invention has yet to come to be.

NASA scientist Jerome Pearson first proposed the elevator in 1969 and continued his work on it through the 70s, additionally providing research to Sir Arthur Clarke for his novel The Fountains of Paradise. While there was some earlier work by a Russian scientist, Yuri N. Artsutanov, it was Pearson's article published in the journal Acta Astronautica that made the elevator famous.

And what a journey it would be! The average distance to the moon is 238,857 miles, or nearly ten trips around the Earth at the equator. There has been much work on this as a concept but as of now, there's no actual work on the structure. The comparable size and reach of the structure requires the device to be both extremely light and supportive of a great weight.

And therein lies the problem. As of now, there's no such material. Most recently, in 2007 there was a Space Elevator contest, which offered a five million dollar prize to a group which managed the development of such a technology. While no team took home the prize, a group from MIT placed first with a nanotube entry that seemed very promising.

In fiction, it's easier. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise certainly made the concept famous, but there's been more than just his work. Artists and illustrators too, have been inspired by the idea.

And where can we go from here? Only up, of course.

A photographer friend in university somehow talked me into participating in a project in which we placed a stuffed weasel in a number of odd settings: toilet bowl, bookshelf, cafeteria, and (crowning glory) in between two slices of bread with a bit of lettuce and tomato.  As gag-inducing as that was, for me it was an introduction to a type of taxidermy I hadn't seen before.  In addition to strictly memorializing prized specimens, taxidermists have historically set up anthropomorphic tableaus, such as this one by Edward Hart:

 

Or consider the contemporary taxidermy art found at Paxton Gate, a quirky shop in San Francisco:

 

My favourite marries form and function.  It's the world's most expensive beer, produced by BrewDog and named "The End of History":

 

A friend sent me a link to Texas author, cartoonist, and web designer Austin Kleon's website with the comment, "I want a print of this to hang on my wall. Hello, subconscious."



Couldn't agree more.

I'm not usually big on found poetry, so I don’t know why the idea of finding it in the newspaper with a black marker to redact all the bits you don't need is so very compelling. Maybe it's because we're used to seeing those thick black lines over the important information, hiding things from us rather than revealing them; maybe it's the way the placement of the remaining words has this almost tactile visual flow and structure. Maybe it's the quasi-manifesto attached and how much that intrigues me, when thought through: "As humans living in the modern age, we spend our lives sifting through the mountain of information piled on us, looking for a few golden nuggets that we can use, discarding the rest. And so, our creativity isn’t about what we choose to leave in, it’s about what we choose to leave out."

One of the things that constantly amazes me (and one of the things that this Atlas of Imagination is all about!) is the ways in which we transcribe our world. Through art--with words, with visual pieces, with dance--and, sometimes, by stepping out of the way and letting it talk for itself. With a little help from us, of course.

Tim Knowles, a British artist, does this with his tree drawings. He sets up paper on an easel, attaches pens or pencils to branches, and steps back. The motion of the branches, from wind or squirrels--or, well, whatever--creates a pattern on the page.

Though the tree (and the weather, and the local animal populations) do get a say in how the art looks, and maybe it seems more 'natural' than taking a photograph... in the end, even this level of 'non-interference' implies a lot about what our society is, and who we are as people.

Writers can't avoid thinking about gender.  Our characters sometimes have gender identities different from our own, and we have the responsibility of giving them believable voices.  Some writers do this very poorly--the voice doesn't match the character, and the reader finds it jarring.  This very dissonance, though, points to a common understanding of gendered speech.  We have a sense of how men speak versus how women speak; often, we even have a more nuanced sense that includes people with complex gendered identities.

 

In 2003 a research team led by Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, analyzed the correlation between gender and word usage.  Their findings were used to create the Gender Genie, which will tell you where your writing lines up statistically.  Gimmick?  Sure... but I found it very fascinating to discover that samples of my writing as a first-person heterosexual female character do in fact read as female; my first-person heterosexual male character reads as male; and my first-person lesbian character reads as male, but just barely.  Whatever choices I've made to differentiate these characters' voices, I have not made very consciously--but they do seem to be lining up with the statistically measurable usages from the study.

Street artists have been doing reverse graffiti for quite a while now. The theory is simple: instead of adding a layer of spraypaint to buildings, sidewalks, or tunnels to make an artistic statement, selectively clean portions of your 'canvas' to create an image.

The legality was somewhat questionable for a while, but though I don't believe there have been any official rulings, it's largely accepted as within the bounds of law. And, as with any new artistic technique, people are finding ways to use it to make money: it's become a 'green' advertising technique, a new form of marketing for products or companies. Even Paul Curtis, one of the pioneers of the field, has taken paid gigs.

Either way, though, the mental flip that this kind of art requires--instead of adding something, why not take something away--is reminiscent of the scratch-away paper I used as a kid, a layer of black to be filed off to let the gold or rainbow colors underneath shine through. And, of course, the cleanup process after this form of art is deliciously simple, and amusingly subversive in these grimy cities: just wash the rest of the surface, and it's gone.

Victorian artist Louis Wain had a long and successful commercial career, illustrating anthropomorphized cats for calendars, children's books, and postcards.  He wasn't the kind of artist we usually imagine when we think about artists tormented by madness:

And yet, those cheery cat families were the creation of a man who had great difficulty supporting his own family due to his tenuous connection to reality.  In his later years, Wain grew so paranoid and delusional that his sisters had him committed to a pauper ward in a mental hospital.

One of Wain's most prominent fans was H.G. Wells, who, upon hearing of Wain's plight, appealed to the public and assisted in having Wain transferred to a more comfortable hospital, which included a pleasant garden and a colony of cats.  Wain remained troubled, though; and while he continued to work with his favourite subject, some of his later cats look unhappy, fearful, or deranged.

Wain's work is a reminder, if we need one, that every kind of art can expose the soul.

This pretty much needs not an introduction.

Warning: will suck HOURS of your life.