Here Be Dragons

His most famous map was for another cause. He posted an interactive map of the parade route for President Bush's second inauguration. Designed to help people "coordinate your plans," with a nod and a wink to protesters, it presented everything from access points to webcams showing live pictures of downtown Washington. The Drudge Report caught wind and posted a link. Schiller got 42,155 unique visitors in 28 days -- some of whom posted comments accusing the anonymous creator of "treason."

He had made a separate, anonymous Web site to host the inaugural map. Yet he could tell who his visitors were, or at least where they came from, by studying site statistics compiled from the Internet Protocol addresses of computers that called up the map, a trail that is automatically logged by most Web servers. He got nearly 200 hits from computers with .mil addresses -- the military; about 120 from Treas.gov, where the Secret Service resides; 27 from The Washington Post and 23 from the New York Times. In other words, he found himself watching the watchers. So began a new cartographic exploration, a study of the virtual landscape of the Internet. He posted maps and blog entries on his main Web site, yet he blocked access by the search engines and leaked his address only to friends on MySpace and people he met along the way. He had 1,000 business cards printed 1,000 days ago, and handed them out with his e-mail address to see who would follow the electronic trail back to him.

Neat, but -- why?

"It's about how information flows from A to B," Schiller says. "You can float out balloons and see if someone pops them or picks them up."

By selectively granting access and watching the results, Schiller created a virtual country within the borderless Internet, populated by friends, fans, activists and map freaks. He averages about 140 unique visits a month.

Every so often he makes discreet forays into the public -- posts a link on a local blog or e-mail list; enters an art contest. Then he will track the subsequent increased traffic to his site, watching what pages and what maps people open, observing the routes they take to find him.

One recent morning, he sits at his computer to check the previous day's traffic. The first visitor arrived via his MySpace page at 12:21 a.m. At 9:46 a.m., someone from a Pfizer Pharmaceutical address reached his site through the Statehood Green Party Web page. At 5:59 p.m., someone from Istanbul checked in.

On a recent evening, venturing from his third-floor lair to visit the corner of 14th and T streets, he mulls his next move.

Fourteenth and T is one of the few places outside the GWU Geography Department where you can see Schiller's work without a computer. Here, fixed to a broken signpost, is a rectangular scrap of wood. On the wood is a faded map. It's an aerial view of the neighborhood. An arrow calls your attention to an intersection. There's a caption:

"You are here."

He's thinking about removing the "robots exclusion protocol" that blocks Google and the others. Going public would add a new phase to the experiment, he says. He'd see how the geography of his controlled community is changed by the chaos of publicity. Or maybe not. Imagine coming out of hiding and no one notices. "The null hypothesis is the Web site remains obscure," he says, in the streetlight gloom of 14th and T.

More hopefully, he says, "Most likely, I will change and the nature of this Web site will change." The usually understated Schiller can't conceal his pride when he speaks of his "body of work," the 500 maps created in obscurity. He'd like people to see them. He'd also like to sell some maps.

"I'm interested in seeing other people's opinions," he says. "Will people blog about it? Will I be made fun of?"

For a minute, in the dark on the way back to the rowhouse, it's as if he's the one on the verge of being found by explorers with maps. Mr. Schiller, we presume?

He is there.

Then he returns to his computer.