Musing On Map Art
In 2008, Belgian net art outfit JODI explored ‘the relations between the world we build through the Internet and the one based on our past mental and physical maps.’
“Services such as GoogleMaps have changed radically our worldview by making the Globe accessible as a commercial multi-user surface.” (Source, with lots of pretty pictures.)
At the heart of this reasoning is the McLuhanesque vision that the form, as much as the content, shapes the way in which we view our surrounding reality. This sentiment is mirrored by Geert Lovink’s comments on setting standards (in Dutch):
Heroic struggle for the dominant discourse is that we prefer to surrender to. The mensch looks for guidance in meaning. It’s about the content, not about the form. We attach no credence to a deeper truth that may be hidden behind the cold, hard infrastructure. The idea that, ultimately, a private company of technocrats provides us with our window on the world is disconcerting to these content-animals, although they won’t lose any sleep over it. The daily festival of public opinion is just so comfortable.
JODI’s work is no one-off. Since technologies like Google Maps and GPS took off, a large number of artists have been occupied with the reflection cast from our digital space onto our physical world. The Google Map remix has become it’s own standard. Most of these online works are light-hearted stabs at the ‘empty-meaning abstract practice’ of ‘multiplication of self-representations’, as exemplified by Les Liens Invisibles’s net art work Google Is Not the Map: The World is my Assumption. It’s reminiscent of JODI’s GEO GOO project.
Some artists are fascinated with bridgeing the online and the offline world, and use geotagging technology like QR-codes to hyperlink physical objects to digital content. Another example is using GPS-registered route information as a pencil.
The Voice of the Street from Leif on Vimeo.
For others, the locating properties of digital cartography are used as an instrument for more conceptual work. For their art-piece Position actuelle de l’idéalisme, Etienne Chambaud and Benoît Maire put an Argos satellite-marker on a raft and sent it out to sea. The marker represents Idealism, providing the ever elusive notion with a pinpoint location, including local weather conditions.
Maps and computers have a long and intimate history. After Wold War II, military strategists quickly realized the potential of mapping real-time geolocations of bombers and nuclear submarines on huge projector screens. These situation rooms replaced the old habit of stooping over dusty map tables and using pewter figurines to represent batallions and brigades. In the past, maps were instrumental in the guns, germs and steel strategy Europeans used to colonize the entire planet. As historical warfare was based on tactical terrain domination, detailed maps of static (terrain) and dynamic (army) features had a decisive influence in many Theatres of War. Throughout history, this succesful symbiosis has been repeatedly transposed to game environments, from Chess to Risk to Call of Duty.
During the Cold War, the military increasingly relied on control systems like SAGE for evaluating nuclear and other potential threats. These systems pushed the development of computer graphics for decades, and displaying maps was at the heart of their succes. However malign their intent, they forebode applications like Google Maps.
This overconfident reliance on automated threat assessment systems, combined with questionnable war room politics, has off course been gloriously satyrized in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Their geotagging properties have also been an inspiration to cybernetics enthousiasts and media-labs who use the situation room setting for activist artwork , like project Situation Room.
Image via We Make Money Not Art, courtesy of LABoral.
Situation Room incorporated a number of prototype installations, including a wifi connection across Gibraltar Strait managed by hackers and activists, a simulated takeover of an abandoned nuclear power plant as a participatory lab, and a data visualization project that served as a backbone for the coordination of social networks. The aim was to research how cartography and distributed control systems could enhance the networking capabilities of different activist groups.
To me, Situation Room also highlights the violent history of map-making. Mimicking the war room aesthetic in a way legitimizes the need for centralized intelligence, which is an old and lame idea.
However, it’s equally dangerous te reduce the World, in the Gaia sense, to a mere canvas, ready to be painted over. What’s left then is a World as nothing more than an empty shell, a wireframe wth no meaning. It’s exactly this sort of thing that Google is Not the Map contemplates on.
Much of it can be seen in some recent cartographic data-visualizations, like the one Aaron Koblin created for the New York Talk Exchange. “On the live globe, data from AT&T long distance and internet services is continuously visualized with a 24 hour delay.”
The images are surely fascinating to look at, but are they relevant outside the cybernetic scope? Do I have to know the dynamics of collaborative editing to appreciate an animation of a year of OpenStreetMap updates?
OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.
Mind you, I’m not saying this work is particularly shallow. But the highly visual nature of these visualizations make it easy to disconnect the image from the underlying meaning.
But let’s finish on a positive note. Some artists are indeed able to see below the surface, and find the hidden connections that bind us all together and to this planet. Marjolijn Dijkman’s work e.g. is sober and meaningful, using mostly plain photography as a medium. Her project Gestures comments on the myriad ways in which we’re all the same, and focusses on our commonality of actions. In References, she “gives insight in the way architecture, design and urban planning is referring to other geographical locations. This archive creates an Atlas of the representation of cultural and geographical elements in a new surrounding. In the navigation the images are to be found on the place they represent instead the place they were originally taken.”
