Census tracts and statistical citizenship.
Please join us for a night of critical demography. Jerry Wong, Information Services Specialist for the Census Bureau’s Los Angeles Regional Office of the US Census will unpack the history of tract #06037195, where Machine Project is located, and how the census knows what it knows. This presentation will be followed by a live skype interview with Matthew Hannah, author of “Dark Territory in the Information Age.” Topics will include: the politics of (statistical) sampling, why filling out the census form might be more important than voting, how thousands of German citizens boycotted the 1983 census, and the radical forms of demography that sprang up around the German anti-census movement.
Boundary Pageant is a collaborative research project organized by Rosten Woo. The public face of Boundary Pageant will be a monthly series of workshops and talks at Machine Project given by a political organizers, artists, and land-use professionals. Each evening will explore a different boundary through anecdote, map, argument, and diagram. Like a Powers of Ten for governance, the project will begin at Machine project’s property line and expand outwards to investigate the stories behind the shapes of census tracts, police precincts, water districts, and county lines.