Here Be Dragons

Then it gets complicated. On his computer he will take a swatch of a neighborhood, then he will tessellate it by creating mirrored repetitions, then he may impose radial geometry on the repetitions. The result is elaborate abstraction assembled from realistic detail, ready for framing at 5 by 3 1/2 feet.

"It's just a cool idea," says Dave Roberts, a USGS cartographer. "I've never seen anything like that before."

USGS employs contractors flying airplanes to get the pictures. Some cities were shot in 2005, but the D.C. imagery is circa 2002. Schiller will have to wait for the next flyover in a few years to make a map revealing his rooftop declaration of "No war."

"He's at the cutting edge between cartography, art, visualization . . . helping people look at the Earth in new ways," says Joseph Kerski, a former USGS cartographer.

"If you come into the geography department, we all have some of his posters hanging in offices," says Lisa Benton-Short, an associate professor at George Washington University, where Schiller was a student. Benton-Short commissioned Schiller's "Central Park Quilt -- North" map for the cover of a forthcoming book she is co-authoring, "Nature and the City."

"I think it's kind of an eight-sided snowflake," she says. "If you look carefully, you can see streets and buildings, but you can see a big swath of green. . . . You get people just staring at his posters, saying, 'Look at that building, I know that building!' " There's a lot of latitude and longitude in the identity of this modern geographer. He is thin and wiry, with long black sideburns. He has a T-shirt that says, "The world is you," in French. On a shelf in his bedroom is a tricorn hat. He wears it as part of his "colonist" costume when he demonstrates for D.C. statehood. He has waited tables and organized seminars for a geographers' association; now he's a Web developer and public-relations consultant. He hopes to publish an atlas. His chief means of transportation, a battered Jamis bicycle, was recently stolen.

To find this mapmaker, you have to know his name, and you have to know where you're going. You can't stumble across his work with a generic keyword search because he coded his Web site, www.nikolasschiller.com, so that Google and other search engines wouldn't automatically index it. Google would turn up his site only if you already knew of his existence and typed in his name.

You can also type into Google "Redacted Name." Click "I'm Feeling Lucky." That will take you to his Web site. Nikolas Schiller is Redacted Name. Statehood, secrecy, online stunts, counter-surveillance: coordinates to explore in the mapmaker's biographical geography. Let's start with the maps. He's made 119 different renderings of D.C. alone.

"Ball of Destruction" shows the Mall and Capitol Hill in the figure of a woman. For security reasons, the feds have obscured photos of the roofs of the White House complex. On Schiller's map, the White House appears to be dangling from the woman's nose like something in need of a tissue. The woman holds a sphere made from satellite imagery of Hurricane Katrina. On the ground before her is a fractured map of the Superdome on the second day of flooding.

Some are meditations on themes such as religion, as in "Cathedral Quilt -- Signed," which shows the Washington National Cathedral neighborhood, upon which Schiller has signed his name repeatedly in Arabic. Many exploit the spacey, soothing rhythm of repeated forms, and imply a dialogue between the real and the imagined, with titles like "DC Lenz #2," "Jefferson Mandala" and "RFK Quilt.""The world is severely out of balance," Schiller says. "These maps I make are an implied reflection of a world more or less at balance."

His maps resist the idea of geography as destiny, but geography was his destiny. His formative map experiences came as a boy from outside St. Louis navigating family vacations with TripTiks. Each summer his mother would rent a car and take Schiller and his two older sisters to a different national park, where the boy would study topographical hiking maps. Growing up in a three-bedroom apartment near neighborhoods of big houses, his family relying on welfare for a period, he tuned into the paradoxes of geographic proximity and social inequity. GWU offered him the most scholarship money.

Like so many transplants, he became outraged by D.C.'s disenfranchisement. "Nikolas looks better in a Colonial outfit and a tricorner hat than practically anyone I know," says Timothy Cooper, a statehood activist. Schiller is also the movement's cartographer, sitting in Freedom Plaza with a laptop displaying aerial maps to plot protest locations.