Flying above Mono Lake, California. Photo by Geoff Manaugh.

Mapping North America with Media

Mapping 21st century landscapes, Stiltsville, scientists, novelists, mayors, atmospheric events.

Venue, a portable media studio and traveling landscape research base, rolled through D.C. in mid-January, marking the eight-month halfway point in its ambitious North American road trip.

Fronted by BLDG blog writer Geoff Manaugh and Edible Geography author Nicola Twilley, Venue seeks to document the 21st century landscape of the continent, interviewing everyone from scientists to novelists, mayors to landfill crews.

They have traveled to Stiltsville, a handful of 1930s candy-colored houses a mile from the Cape Florida lighthouse, Cinder Lake, a simulated lunar desert-scape outside Flagstaff, Ariz., and the Luray Caves, with four acres of stalactites beneath the mountains of Virginia.

Jim Irwin and Dave Scott training at Cinder Lake. Paul Switzer Collection, Northern Arizona University.

Manaugh, who joined pilot and aerial photographer Michael Light in a car-sized airplane over California’s Mono Lake, was hooked:

“If it’s possible to be bitten by a kind of aerial bug, a compulsion to be up in the air, to experience the landscape not as ground but as a relatively unpredictable series of atmospheric events, then I think that’s what just happened to me.”

Follow Venue’s media-rich travels—or submit ideas of intriguing people, locales or natural phenomena for them to map next— by visiting them here.

– Erica Berry