a digital archive of time
The project takes its name from the double meaning of atlas: a bound collection of maps, and also the Titan condemned to carry the weight of the sky. Both are true here. Like an atlas of maps, the project is organized as a set of entrances rather than a single image -- one symbol in the painting leading to a different territory of how time is experienced. But atlas also means weight: to move repeatedly across oceans is to carry more than one place, timeline, and self at once. A flight record can tell you that UA862 left Hong Kong at 12:30 p.m. and landed in San Francisco at 9:56 a.m.; it cannot tell you whether you were leaving or returning, or what it costs to carry both. The project lives in that gap.
ATLAS' foundation is a painting that I did on a similar theme, turned into an interactive reception point rather than an object observed from a distance. Viewers move through the image and enter three galleries through embedded symbols: a cartography of significant flights, a France gallery built from journal entries, sketches, and conversations from a summer abroad, and an audio-reactive gallery exploring how music, unlike a flight record or photograph, can only be known through duration.
The design is associative rather than chronological, following how memory moves: one image, sound, or place leading unexpectedly to another. This owes a debt to Michelle Caswell's work on the silences embedded in records, Valeria Luiselli's account of migrant stories resisting official form, Maria Eugenia Cotera's case for archives as sites of encounter rather than stable evidence, and Elijah Gaddis's treatment of fragments as meaningful in themselves.
This project has a deliberate stopping point. By the end of the semester, the flight cartography and audio-reactive piano galleries will either be finished to a working version or left dim on purpose, as fragments the project doesn't resolve, consistent with its own argument about incompleteness. After that point, the site costs nothing to keep live and needs no further maintenance to stay online.
The one point of failure is the France gallery's dependence on my Omeka account: if that lapses, the node graph survives, but the canonical, catalogued record it links out to does not. Before the project closes, I'll pull a full Dublin Core export of the Omeka collection into this repository as a static backup, so the documentary layer outlives the live account. Any future expansion becomes its own project.
Scroll down to the main page of ATLAS. Look for three separate grey hotspot. Hint: they are located at the piano, the blue cliff, and the scarlet plane wing. Click on the hotspots to enter their respective gallery. At this point, only hotspot on the cliff is active.
a range of media is used to capture the intimate and fleeting moments and feelings that cannot be described in words alone.
Digital exhibition — homepage
A painting as atlas. Each symbol — the plane wing, the Campanile, the piano — is an entrance into a different way that time gets distorted, measured, remembered, or heard. Drag to pan, press 0 to reset the view.
Symbols shown dim are visible but not yet active. Hover a node to see it light up.