Tropicana Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Transgressions |  Las Vegas, Nevada

36°05'28.80" N, 115°10'18.13" W

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges1946

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing) — then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself. 

 Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard, 1981

The Ogden, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2014

Mandalay Bay, Distant View, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

From Spring Mountain Road, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Henderson, Nevada, 2018

From Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Duck Creek, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Homeless Camp Destroyed by Fire, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

From Interstate 15, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2008

Homeless Camp, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Homes Along Blue Diamond Road, Near Las Vegas, Nevada, 2011

Tropicana Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Santa Claus Used for Target Practice, Near Las Vegas, Nevada 2011

Tropicana Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Tropicana Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Fence Line Southeast of Former Las Vegas Village, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

From Interstate 15, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Overpass and Duck Creek Channel, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Duck Creek, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Homeless Camp Destroyed by Fire, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Fence Surrounding Site of Former Las Vegas Village, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2015

Shooting Range, Near Caliente, Nevada, 2018

Homeless Camp Destroyed by Fire, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Mandalay Bay, Distant View, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Homes Along Duck Creek, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

Homeless Camp Destroyed by Fire, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2018

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