Jerel Johnson
Tax Havens & Networks on the Map
Tax Havens and Networks on the Map project is a work in progress that will ultimately present ten instances of speculative bank assets, maps, and a "tracert" tour through the Google Earth API.
A tax haven must be a public secret. They must be visible and yet offer invisibility. As Sean Hastings (2010), in an interview with Metahaven, has pointed out: “a tax haven — or any other haven for that matter must be publically available to be useful.” My tax havens project explores the logic of the tax haven as an island node on economic and information networks. Tax havens offer a mechanism of obfuscation. Their logic operates through camouflage, stand-ins, layers, and the shell game.
The Tax Havens project was an homage to Metahaven whose research strategies and design tactics were deployed on a subject close to their concerns. The project takes seriously the proposition that graphic design is a means of knowledge production, in doing so the project relied heavily on research. In addition to research, the project negotiated the use of mapping and networking technologies that are implicated in their own discourse of in/visibility.
To do: Optimization of parallax scroll, progressive loading of Google Earth tours, finish responsive. Currently the parallax scroll and loading of the Google Earth tour is too memory intensive causing slow load times and performance problems as you proceed through the site.
