3

It's been a day of collective meetings, trying to negotiate structural and relational issues that invariably seem to pop up when trying to organize or produce anything collectively. It's difficult to do just because we don't have much practice in working collectively in this culture...ideologies of individualism and competition restrict our imaginations. Lately, I've been working with a group of people interested in cartography and in producing alternative mappings of social relations and of built environments. We're starting a project on "danger" - mapping (mis)conceptions of danger in our surroundings, notions of criminality, and sites of insecurity (e.g., sites of police brutality, concentrations of poverty, unemployment, etc.) This group of aspiring (if ersatz) geographers is inspired by an anti-imperialist critique of mapping (maps have participated in a constitutive way in colonial expansion and in the production of knowledge about colonized and dominated peoples), by the desire to make visible certain relations, uses of space, and sedimented histories that normally go unseen or would be productive to visualize.

I've added another link in the sidebar, to "Murmur"/"Murmure" - a really interesting project in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal which tries to engage the pedestrian in the history of the spaces s/he traverses...Take a look, and if you live in one of those cities, you can participate.

And another link: this one to my favourite free-fonts website, MisprintedType.com, belonging to Brazilian designer Eduardo Recife. You can download fonts for free or for cheap as well as admire his art (check out "Invisible", under "Projects"), and navigate his library of links to other design and digital art websites. I've never met Eduardo but I am deeply indebted to him for his beautiful typefaces. I rave about him and his fonts to everyone who cares to listen.