thursday, october 16, 2008
A map of three summers in the Bay Area
Here’s a book I made recently for my book arts class. I’ll talk about my other classes at some point too.
This is a tetra-tetra flexagon that folds open three times to zoom in from California to the Bay Area to San Francisco to the Mission/Castro area. A flexagon sounds fancy but it’s just one piece of paper cut and folded in a certain way — here are directions for making your own (it’s easy, but it helped me to see them in person first).
This map only covers what I know. I labeled the cities and neighborhoods that I’m familiar with, and I left areas blank if I haven’t spent much time there. (Except I left parts of the Mission/Castro blank because I’d gotten tired of tracing and painting.)
A darker yellow background means I’ve spent more time in that area. A darker orange freeway or street means I’ve traveled along it more often. Green means a park.
So, this book is a way to look at my three summers during college, focused on the past two summers because I couldn’t put the Sunset, the Mission, and the Castro together on one spread. If you fold up the map from its fully open state above, it tells a kind of story:
[4: Mission/Castro] I lived at 18th & Valencia in summer 2007 and 19th & Collingwood in summer 2008 (and 41st & Irving in summer 2006), and I spent a lot of time near those places. [3: San Francisco] I wandered around the city on weekends. [2: Bay Area] On weekday mornings I walked to the Yahoo! shuttle stop at 16th & Mission and rode to Santa Clara, and on weekday evenings I returned the same way. [1: California] At the beginning of each summer, I went from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles for a couple weeks since that’s my home, and then I went up to San Francisco. At the end of the summer, I returned from San Francisco to Los Angeles and then went back to school in Santa Barbara. I work part-time remotely from here.
An animation of reading the book, starting with it closed:
This book also ties in with the Flickr photo map of my summer photos and seeing the Bay Area from above when flying to New Jersey for a few days during the summer, when my grandpa was dying, which is the part of my summer that the map doesn’t reflect.
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saturday, april 21, 2007
I like my name
At a family day at the old Getty museum (pre-1997), a person wrote “Britta” in Persian for me:
This name originated as a nickname for Birgitta, a popular Swedish saint. She is also known as Bridgid and Bridget, which are variations of the name of the Irish triple-goddess Brigid (or Brigit/Brighit), meaning exalted one, who was the goddess of poetry, fire, wisdom, etc., equivalent to Minerva and Athena, and the daughter of an all-powerful harpist god. All of this is nice, but I usually forget to celebrate my name day on October 7th.
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wednesday, february 07, 2007
The art of procrastination
I made my first home page in sixth grade, so it involved an interesting dilemma: how could I balance telling the world all about myself with my concerns about internet stalkers finding me? The result is detailed yet vague, a portrait of my interests in 1999 — complete with animated clip art and stolen images — that does not include my name. Here it is. Note how I mocked the web-counter trend by including an applet that looked like a counter but gave you a random number instead.
Now, what if I was sent back in time to create my home page as a 12-year-old, knowing all my 2007-era web skillz? You might get something that still looks bad.
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sunday, september 17, 2006
Recycling old wiki stuff
When I was nine, I decided that people bothered me too much. I wrote the following (with many scratchings-out) on a piece of notebook paper and posted it on my door.
STAY OUT!!!
For these reasons, stay out!!
- This room is a danger zone!
- There is radioactive material in this room!
- This room is poisonous.
- You are suposed to stay out anyway.
- Guard dog on duty.
- Mad scientists are inside.
- Dangerous experiment going on.
- Explosives are going to blow up once you step inside!
- People over 11 and under 20 are not allowed in.
- Movie being filmed—Do NOT DISTURB!
- Pay 700,000,000,0 dollars every secound you are in here.
- No credit cards.
- You have to PASS MY TEST first.
- All people at the age of 13 can not come in at any time.
- All rules are strictly enforced.
- Angry people inside.
- Do not come in
One exception— people of the ages 5, 6, 8, and 9 and lastly 10 can come in. Rules do not apply to them.
I like people more now, but I still like this.
