The New Cartography

He is sly, this rebel cartographer. He makes maps that look like quilts, masks, feathers, acid trips. You can find America in these maps -- you can probably find your house in these maps -- if you can find the maps at all, since their creator has posted them to an online underground.
Nikolas Schiller, 26, is the god of this alternative reality. Making maps at a frenzied pace of one every two days for the past 1,000 days, he has done everything he could to keep himself off the map of the World Wide Web.


The mapmaker on his Washington roof with a message that he hopes will someday be reflected in both government aerial photography and the art he creates from that imagery. This is brazen defiance of the Hear Me! ethos of the blogger age, for which he probably will be punished and sentenced to fame. He's a shadow blogger who didn't want you to read his, thank you very much. He pulled the electronic blinds on his Web site: He blocked Google and the other search engines. When one of his creations made it onto the Drudge Report -- 42,000 hits in no time, baby! -- nobody could figure out who was this masked mapmaker.

So here the cyber cipher is now, on the roof of his group rowhouse off U Street NW, conducting another experiment in extreme geography. He recently used discarded chimney bricks to write a message: "No war."