A Big Project Announcement

We are where we are, of course. But we’re also everywhere we’ve ever been. As far as that goes, we’re everywhere we’d like to go. In fact, we’re everywhere we can imagine going.

In UtataScapes, we want you to explore and document… well, that. All of that. Where you are, where you’ve been, where you’d like to go, where you can imagine going.

Unlike our standard multi-category projects, we’re only dividing UtataScapes into two categories: PlaceScapes and MindScapes.

PlaceScapes—that’s where we are and where we’ve been. These places are real, solid, physical. They’re places you can stand and hear and smell and touch. Cities, towns, villages. Buildings, homes, sheds, campsites. Forests, deserts, rivers, meadows.

You choose the parameters of your own scape. If it exists as a real location, you can PlaceScape it. Neighborhoodscapes, kitchenscapes, deskscapes. You can PlaceScape where your cat spends its time. You can PlaceScape a bicycle ride. You can create a MarketScape of a grocery run.

MindScapes? There are no boundaries here. Maybe take a real place and change it. Or see it from a new perspective. Or recreate it out of Lego. Or cheese. Maybe create an entirely new place, an imaginary place, a fantasy place, a heaven (or a hell, why not?), a place of adventure or comfort or music. Take a lyric from a poem or a song and photograph it (“I didn't know I was lost at the time/Eyes in the sun where the road wasn't wide/So I went looking for an exit sign…”). Cobble together your own Hotel California or invent a stately pleasure dome like Kubla Khan (“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.”).

These two Scape concepts are elastic enough to allow you to explore/create what might be called liminalscapes—the places between places, transitional zones or areas—not quite here, not quite there, but still here and still there.

Some liminal scapes are actual PlaceScapes. Truckstops on highways, for example. A physical place that’s not where you started and isn’t where you stop; a place where you pause between here and there. Other liminal scapes are MindScapes, such as that hypnogagic period when you’re transitioning between being awake and being asleep (or its mirror state, hypnopompia—the transitional state between sleep and waking).

That’s the concept. There are, of course, rules. They can be found in the FAQ. It may be worth remembering that the Utata notion of rules are similar to a pirate’s notion of personal property. So have fun.