Cartography: Ben Pease; Artwork: Mona Caron, Courtesy of UC-Press

Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces

Thanks to Google Earth and MapQuest and GPS and all the other digital mapping products, an image of where we are, or where we are headed, is always just a click away. These geographical services are so omnipresent, in fact, it would be easy to assume that there's nothing left to map. But the blanket of digital geographic information doesn't contain the whole story about the physical world we live in, nor does it necessarily offer an objective, value-neutral view. Bay Area map aficionados are pushing the boundaries of mainstream mapping conventions, and their work is both beautiful to behold and fascinating in the questions they raise about how knowledge is defined.

Rebecca Solnit, author of a new atlas of San Francisco called "Infinite City," sees Google Maps and services like it, with their emphasis on retail outlets and driving data, as painting "a middle-class, consumer version" of a place.

"Google will always show you freeway exits, but bird migration routes are harder to find," she said.

The 22 maps in "Infinite City" cover unusual territory. Inspired by the artistry of 18th- and 19th-century cartography, the maps have a lush, classic look while offering somewhat obscure information about dockworkers, the original shoreline of Mission Bay, military installations, centenarians, and cypress trees, among many other topics.

Most of the maps and accompanying essays, which were created by Solnit and a team of cartographers, writers and researchers who called themselves "the Atlas Family," juxtapose data sets in a poetic way that makes you think about the city in a new light.

Trevor Paglen

Large Hangars and Fuel Storage, 2005, from the Limit Telephotography series, a project to photograph classified military installations, mostly in the southwestern United States.

"Monarchs and Butterflies," for example, maps native butterfly habitats and gay and lesbian public spaces. Another map looks at cinematic history, plotting sites where "Vertigo" was filmed alongside landmarks related to photography innovator Eadweard Muybridge.

"Infinite City" is also a manifesto of sorts for a peoples' cartography. As with the open source mapping movement, which supports the free dissemination of geospatial data and mapping applications, a central message of this atlas is that mapping should be an accessible, popular medium.

Trevor Paglen, a artist and author based in New York and Oakland who will be presenting his new book "Invisible" at City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, pushes the idea of geography in different directions.

A self-described "experimental geographer," Paglen documents what he calls the "classified landscapes" of military sites and operations.

Using photographic equipment intended for use in astronomy, he has photographed top-secret United States military installations in Nevada and across the Southwest from vantage points, some over 40 miles away, yielding blurry images of geographies not easily available on any map.

Working with amateur astronomers who track classified spacecraft in the Earth's orbit, Paglen has also used sophisticated equipment to take long-exposure photographs that capture the craft as they fly across the night sky.

Although Paglen's theme is "covert operations and classified landscapes," the idea behind his work -- making the invisible visible -- is widely applicable in a world where information is power.

From the location of PG&E's pressurized gas lines to the provenance of political campaign contributions, society is always negotiating what kind of information belongs in the public sphere. Paglen's work makes us think about what is -- and is not -- on the map.

There is no doubt that we will increasingly rely on digital mapping systems in our daily lives. They do assure, after all, that "you are never lost, you are never lonely," as Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, put it recently at a conference in Berlin.

But for all their magical utility, there's a risk, too, in becoming passive consumers of maps and geographic information.

"Maps are never completely neutral, and in many ways their points of view are somewhat arbitrary," David Rumsey, the San Francisco-based collector of historical maps, has written, "even if fixed in conventions we take for granted."

Plus, sometimes wonderful things happen when you get lost.