About Future Cartographic

Future Cartographic is a home for creative writing, and for experiments in art and collaboration. Erik Moe is the founder and principal writer for the site, though many Future Cartographic projects have been collaborative or have involved writing from collectively generative effort.

As of Fall 2022, Erik is studying Creative Writing at CalArts, The California Institute of the Arts. New collaborations are sure to emerge from these studies, including perhaps further reinvention of Future Cartographic and this website.

Socially Engaged Practice

Future Cartographic emerged from Erik’s lifelong study of art, film, and literature — and in particular from following and participating in artworks that are socially engaged, community-based, participatory or activist in nature.

Time, Urbanism, Landscape, Maps and Exploration

The name Future Cartographic comes from a series of art projects Erik developed beginning in 2015 that imagined hyperlocal neighborhood utopias of the year 2215.

These projects involved walks, conversations, maps, writing and art exploring how history and ideology is handed down to us through the language of architecture, urban planning, and landscape — ideas that we absorb involuntarily by living wherever we live.

Future Cartographic began on the road with conversations in a handful of urban and rural places across North America, but much of this work focused on the neighborhoods of Washington, DC. These are neighborhoods shaped by colonization, war, slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, environmental destruction, cultural erasure, exploitative redevelopment — in short, by the intersection of capitalism and geography. In imagining utopian futures for such a place, we asked what kind of spaces and landscapes would embody a hopeful life for those who will live in our neighborhoods two centuries from now. And what do we need to do today to make that future possible?

These themes of time, urbanism, landscape, maps and exploration are continuing subjects of Future Cartographic’s writing and exploration.

Support

The most direct way to support Future Cartographic is by hiring Erik to collaborate with you on editorial, design, maps and cartography, writing and socially-engaged events and art projects.

Erik / Future Cartographic is grateful for past support and ongoing community through:

  • Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
  • D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities
  • D.C. Writers’ Salon
  • Funk Parade
  • Halcyon Art Lab / S&R Foundation
  • Hamiltonian Artists
  • Little Salon
  • National Arts Strategies

If you’ve enjoyed reading the site, or taking part in one of our projects, a one-time tip or recurring donation is welcome.

Land Acknowledgements

Future Cartographic’s work began and continues on un-ceded land of tribes from Minnesota to D.C. to Southern California. Through walks, maps, writing and dialogue, we aim to honor, learn and build understanding regarding the history and future of the land and the tribes — including the Dakota, Nacotchtank Piscataway, and Tataviam — who have called, and continue to call these areas home.

The neighborhood where Future Cartographic began — the U Street Corridor in Washington, DC — is also known as Black Broadway for the flowering of African American music, culture and Black-owned businesses here that predated the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and continues to this day despite economic pressures hostile to the arts and to people of color.

Our 2022 move to Los Angeles brought a new set of geographic understandings and cultural collisions we are now learning from. These include indigenous intersections with Spanish and American colonization.

We celebrate these histories and are committed to ending all forms of cultural erasure and white supremacy through cultural dialogue.

Contact Us

You may email us through the form below.

We welcome mail including books and media for review consideration.