Going Off the Grid in the Midwest

Initially, The Line was much shorter. In 2017, urban researchers Luis Hilti and Matilde Igual Capdevila drew a line from their Liechtenstein home to a gallery in Venice as a part of the 2018 Venice Biennale. A year later, they extended that line around the globe, connecting the two points “the long way.” Through this, they established The Institute for Linear Research (ILR). Now, the ILR invites anyone to traverse The Line (accessible by Google Maps) by foot (or boat, bicycle or other human-powered method) and document the landscape. The documentation—called “linear research”—is collected in the Atlas of Remoteness, an ongoing research project that is archived on the Atlas of Remoteness website and in books that explore The Line globally.

This is how The Line met Mary Dahlman Begley, a self-described “architectural worker” at the Chicago architecture firm WJW. In 2020, she began walking The Line through Midwestern states, selecting particular segments that were closest to Minneapolis, where she was then living. She invited collaborators—architects, researchers and academics—to make their own journeys along The Line through rural Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota as part of a cross-disciplinary collaboration. In 2024, Begley and her collaborators released the first study of The Line in the US: Atlas of Remoteness: Midwest USA.

The book presents a thoughtful visualization of The Line, which is, after all, an invisible, arbitrary line drawn across a map of the Earth. After two years as a correspondent with the ILR, Begley says the possibilities for linear research are vast. It’s not merely walking and documenting, but an opportunity to reimagine the possibilities for place.

In Atlas of Remoteness, Begley and her co-authors chronicle their multi-season explorations with descriptions that evoke the rural landscapes they traverse: walking across grassy hillsides in the summer heat, negotiating frozen wilderness during hunting seasons; photographs document small towns covered in snow and empty parking lots. It all seems very pastoral, until the authors reach The Line’s precise GPS coordinates and discover conditions that restrict access to it.

In one of their first walks, Begley and coauthor Drew Smith attempted to reach The Line in Pine Bend Bluffs Scientific and Natural Area, in Dakota County just south of St. Paul, Minnesota. While walking toward The Line, they found an unnamed pathway that provided a “narrow clearing through an otherwise dense deciduous forest.” It brought them not to The Line but to a maintenance facility for an oil pipeline that was directly beneath them. Their path was a pipeline.

“It was an area that had been mown down so that planes could fly over and inspect the pipeline underneath us,” Begley says. Several pipelines carrying cut through the Pine Bend Bluffs area on the way to a nearby refinery. Later, they learned that the site’s many pipelines carry petroleum from origination points in Northern Canada and the Dakotas to refineries that make products like jet fuel and asphalts.

Oil pipelines carrying tar sands from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico pass frequently through the Midwest and are common occurrences throughout the anthology. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration reports that more than 2.6 million miles of pipelines deliver natural gas and petroleum products across the United States. But according to the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog on pipeline industries and their regulators, public information about underground pipelines hasn’t always been easy to find. The sheer number and types of pipelines—production pipelines, transmission pipelines, gathering lines or distribution mains, to name a few—combined with the many management companies that have varying levels of communication with the public, creates opacity.

The National Pipeline Mapping System does provide some gas transmission and hazardous liquid transmission lines, but lacks precise geospatial information. “You can find transmission lines for natural gas or hazardous liquids to see where they are in your communities, but [for] gas gathering lines or gas distribution lines, there’s no requirements for them to be put into this mapping system,” says Kenneth Clarkson of the Pipelines Safety Trust. It’s no surprise, then, that ILR researchers would come across these mown pathways haphazardly. Due to the secrecy of their precise locations Begley calls pipelines “space obliterators.”

“Pipelines remove the distance from where oil is found—the Alberta tar sands, for example—and then where it’s refined and exported,” she says. “You don’t know that they’re there unless there’s a problem.”

Such was the case in 2017 when the Keystone Pipeline leaked 210,000 gallons of oil in Amherst, South Dakota, and in 2022 when it leaked 588,000 gallons of oil in northeast Kansas, the largest in Keystone’s history. Or, in 2024, when reports of an Enbridge Line 6 spill, which became the largest oil spill in Wisconsin history, arrived more than a month after the spill occurred. These rural spaces are often treated as insignificant, intangible places until they become disaster areas. A mysterious mowed pathway can serve as a trace, a clue for possible points of environmental catastrophe. The Line likely traverses thousands of buried pipelines. Walking along it affords the possibility of making visible the spaces that are made vulnerable by systems of extraction and consumption. Begley documented two lines in rural Minnesota, one “structured from above, through satellites that have measured, demarcated, and labeled the planet,” and the multiple lines of “energy infrastructure which lubricates contemporary American life … constructed entirely beneath the earth.”

The ILR considers The Line to be “non-effective,” in contrast to effective lines, which include territorial borders and property lines—boundaries that carry political and social consequences.

Consider the southernmost corner where The Line enters the United States: It cuts across a portion of Hidalgo County in New Mexico’s “bootheel,” the small protrusion at the state’s southwest corner, creating a triangular piece of land with the US-Mexico border. To follow The Line at this point would necessitate multiple border crossings, rubbing up against societal mechanisms of control and enforcement. As The Line traverses rural areas in the U.S., it crosses state lines, encouraging its explorers to consider the arbitrary nature of these “effective” lines. The Line cares not for variations in income taxes, abortion restrictions or farm subsidies as effective lines do; its presence appropriates the seriousness of effective lines, parodying their political and economic weight.

The New York-based architecture firm AD-WO ponders the effective tools of borders and boundaries. For the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial, they produced “100 Links,” an installation at the Chicago Cultural Center of a Gunter’s chain—a 66-foot, 100-link measuring chain used frequently by 18th-century surveyors in the U.S. to plot land parcels.

After the Revolutionary War, these chains became the measurements for the Public Land Survey System, also known as the Jeffersonian Grid, which divided the land west of the original 13 states, including what we now call the Midwest. It allowed surveyors to systematically define property boundaries within a fixed system mile-square sections of 640 acres, instead of the topographical landmarks and boundaries used in the colonies under the British system of metes and bounds. “[The grid] flattened existing patterns of life, thereby managing the market value of land and creating exceptional conditions for the accumulation of capital,” the AD-WO architects write in their 2023 book Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas.

For the installation, the firm assembled a Gunter’s chain into the shape of a “corner mound”—a heap of dirt dug up from the corners of property lots for sale—that soared high into the gallery ceilings, forming a skeletal tent.

While the installation spoke to the physical tools used to financialize and privatize Indigenous peoples’ land in North America, the chains created an interior that visitors walked through. The links on the Gunter’s chain clinked softly as people brushed against them; the sun, streaming in from large windows, glinted off the metallic pieces. At this scale, the spatial and political context of these objects dissolves, leaving behind opportunities to make new meaning from objects of dispossession.

While mapping their walks Begley and her collaborators agreed on a particular visual “language” to represent The Line on the map. To straighten The Line across the Earth’s curved surface, she had to ignore conventional cardinal directions and reoriented the map by rotating it 30 degrees.

As they followed The Line using Google Maps, they agreed that they would always position The Line parallel to the edge of the phone screen; by doing so, they removed north as the constant. Using this “cartographic language,” each state’s location seemed to twist and pull; contemporary geographic understandings of the Midwest began to collapse. Culturally, the ongoing (and, frankly, irritating) debates about which states constitute the Midwest deflate as “Nebraska” and “Iowa” are thrust into a “northwardly” position, and Wisconsin sinks toward the south.

Therein lies The Line’s power and the potential of linear research: in stepping back from the realities of effective lines, from the macro scale of borders to the hyper-local Jeffersonian grid that still divides property lines today, we can unlink ourselves from the boundaries of the Gunter’s chain to find a deeper connection to the land.

In this sense, “remoteness” takes on multiple meanings. A line is, after all, simply a series of points, and each point contains a plurality of histories and conditions. Linear research provides an opportunity to consider the greater whole of these individual points without the burden of conventional cartographic methods.

Anjulie RaoMore by this author →

Anjulie Rao is a journalist and critic covering the built environment. Based in Chicago, much of her work reckons with the complexities of post-industrial cities; explores connections to place and land; and exposes intersections between architecture, landscapes, and cultural change.