The galleries re-opened after their summer hibernation! Yippee! So, a few weeks ago, I saw a bunch of art — and, as usual, patterns emerged: maps, graphs, notations, diagrams, flows, waves.
First, Mishka Henner’s “Semi-Automatic” @ Bruce Silverstein: Henner aggregates data sets, images from mass media, and the stuff of the Internet. His best pieces mine Google Maps for examples of how the aerial view often reveals the accidentally sublime geometries of our man-made landscapes, and how those âobjectiveâ views are often convoluted by various commercial or security concerns.
Mishka Henner, Nato Storage Annex, Coevorden Drenthe, 2011 (photo via Silverstein)Mishka Henner (photo via Silverstein)Mishka Henner, 18 ways of looking at an oil derrick (my title — and my photo)
Second, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures: In keeping with his ongoing investigation of covert military and intelligence operations, Paglen examines the “geography and aesthetics of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) global surveillance programs.” We see maps of NSA cable-tapping “choke points,” photos of  undersea cables (see also Nicole Starosielski’s book and map on transoceanic cables), a two-channel video highlighting communications infrastructures and sites of covert intelligence operations, text crawlers of cryptographic codes, and other cool stuff.
Trevor Paglen (photo via Metro Pictures)Trevor Paglen Cable Landing; Choke Point Map (photo by me)
Third, Sarah Sze at Tanya Bonakdar: Sze examines the materials, instruments, and conceptual techniques we employ to construct our senses of space — how we frame the fragments of an image (as we frequently do with composite satellite images) in order to grasp the “big picture,” how we rely on a limited set of visual tropes to understand our place within the cosmos, and how our desire for orientation translates across different scales.
Sarah Sze, framing fragments of sky (photo by me)Sarah Sze, windows and shards and screens (photo by me)Sarah Sze, world on a string (photo by me)Sarah Sze, lines + spheres (photo by me)
While Sze played with the conceptual and material frames of imagery, Dan Flavin’s “Corners, Barriers and Corridors” at David Zwirner explored (as it always does) light as a means of delineating spatial and perceptual boundaries:
Dan Flavin, untitled (to Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein on not seeing anyone in the room), 1968 (photo via Zwirner)
Gordon Matta-Clark, Energy Tree (photo via Zwirner)Gordon Matta-Clark, Tree FormsGordon Matta-Clark, Energy Tree (2)Gordon Matta-Clark, Arrows
Gordon Matta-Clark, Energy RoomsGordon Matta-Clark, Calligraphy
And speaking of notation: Paula Cooper featured Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Weiner (all dudes!) in “The Xerox Book” — a show based on its namesake 1968 publication by Seth Siegelaub and Jack Wendler. Siegelaub, whose work partly inspired my 2011 article on experimental design publications, worked with the exhibition-as-book (or book-as-exhibition); for this particular project, each artist was invited to contribute 25 pages to the 8.5 x 11″ Xeroxed publication. As Siegelaub told Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1999,
The Xerox Book ⊠was the first [projec]
where I proposed a series of ârequirementsâ for the project, concerning the use of a standard size paper and the amount of pages the âcontainerâ within which the artist was asked to work. What I was trying to do was standardize the conditions of exhibition with the idea that the resulting differences in each artistâs project or work, would be precisely what the artistâs work was about.
Xerox Book (photo via Cooper)Carl Andre’s typewriter drawings (my photo)
Seventh, annotation and textual alteration — particularly process-driven, rule-based transformations — reappeared as themes and practices in “Marginalias” @ Field Projects.
Where to Find It! Brad Thiele’s re-visions projectGore Vidal’s Point-to-Point Navigation (get it?!)
Eighth, textual alteration was again central to McArthur Binion’s “Re:Mine” at Galerie Lelong. While Henner mines the Internet for source material, Binion mines the forms of Minimalism and representations — personal, bureaucratic, etc. — of personal identity. In “Re:Mine,” part of his DNA series, Binion uses his birth certificate and address book, with their regimented, linear forms, to create a gridded “under-surface.” He then applies horizontal and vertical strokes of paint, which serve both to “weave” the documents together into a tapestry, and to partly obscure their data. Thus, by “mining” his own textual DNA, Binion is “both hiding and excavating biographical information in his paintings, claiming and reclaiming personal and cultural history.”
McArthur Binion (photo by me)
Ninth, Christian Marclay’s “Surround Sounds”@ Paula Cooper employs text to dramatically different effect. Sharing Marginalia’s preference for puns, Marclay’s flatly onomatopoetic Pop-esque paintings and video installation constitute a mute cacophony.
Christian Marclay, Surround Sounds (photo via Cooper)
Tenth, Paul Sharits takes the opposite approach — pairing semantically-empty imagery with disjunctive sound — in “Dream Displacement” at Greene Naftali. Sharits’s work emphasizes the physical properties of celluloid and its mechanical apparatae. As he explained in a 1976 interview about this particular work,
I want the films to have a physical presence and there is also a kind of physical adjustment I want to get between the sound and the image. Itâs not any rational measure or anything — Iâve just got to figure out how to get it to be the right balance so that one is constantly threatening the other. One element threatens with violence, the other with beauty.
I set out this summer to write a column for Places on mapping, informed by all the background work I did to develop my new “Maps as Media” grad studio. Today, my editors mercifully informed me that what I’ve written is not an article, but a pedagogical prospectus. Doh! I sort-of suspected that. Re-reading the piece again, after about a month’s distance, it’s now painfully clear: this thing is of a generic species for which there is no market. Another annoying quirk: I use the Royal We waaaaay too presumptuously, way too often.
Maybe I can salvage some of this crap for a more focused piece in the near or distant future? For now, however, I celebrate my glorious failure by posting it here, in the hope that some of it might be of use to some hypothetical reader — and with the expectation that the act of posting will be at least mildly cathartic for me.
Gaps in the Map: The Topologies of Cartography
Representing the uncharted or classified: hic sunt dracones, via Carta Marina; Google blur, via The AtlanticÂ
Are you excited by the idea of using bits to move atoms? Are you excited to directly impact logistics and transportation in hundreds of cities? Are you excited to help move people and things more efficiently around the world? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are probably a great fit for Uber!
Back in July, Uber was seeking a GIS Engineer to contribute to the development of ârobust mapping and logistics infrastructureâ that could manage the ârouting, navigation, dynamic pricing, supply positioning, local search, and real-time traffic patternsâ of its international fleets of vehicles, drivers, and passengers. Meanwhile, Sanborn, the company born in the 1860s to create fire insurance maps, had openings for an aerial mapping pilot and a Natural Resources GIS Analyst Programmer; and ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) listed 256 jobs on its website â everything from Apps Product Engineers to Multimedia Specialists to a Technical Advisor for the oil and gas industries.
UberSanborn Fire Insurance MapsAerial Photography, via KLM
GIS, or geographic information systems, specialists have reason to be excited, whether their skills are put to use increasing the worldâs efficiency at Uber or not. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment opportunities for geoscientists are expected to grow 16% between 2012 and 2022; for surveying and mapping technicians, 14%; for cartographers and protogrammetrists (those who make maps from aerial and satellite imagery), 20%; and for geographers, an impressive 29%, growth driven primarily by the demand for geographic data and maps. Todayâs and tomorrowâs map-makers and GIS analysts will, enthusiasts proclaim, help our scientists better understand the dynamics of climate change; help our law enforcement officials predict and prevent urban crime; help our policymakers develop global policies that respond to patterns of refugee migration; help to dispatch Uber drivers to waiting passengers; and help us find the best dry cleaners and donuts in town. Soon, if Silicon Valley has its way, weâll have a map app for every conceivable localizable good and service or geographic flow. Our landscapes, rationalized via a universal calculus and rendered into normalized indexical domains, offer themselves up to be searched, tracked, coded, zoned, exploited.
The map, it seems, travels widely. It pops up regularly, as both material artifact and metaphor, in everyday conversations. Mapping presents itself as a valuable tool or method for everyone from journalists and epidemiologists to police departments and digital marketers. The widespread availability of constantly-updated GIS data, and the prevalence of constantly-refreshing screens, means that more maps are produced, and more of them enter our lives, every day. And those maps-on-small-screens are doubly pervasive: both actively and passively, overtly and covertly present and active. We actively seek out the map, typically by tapping the Google Maps icon on our phones, to orient ourselves and find our way.[1] Yet those maps are also covertly foundational, always âon,â even if only in the background, on our location-aware devices. The passive and continual monitoring of our whereabouts means that weâre always lounging, driving, or shopping (or engaging in less consumption-oriented, or perhaps even nefarious, activities) on somebodyâs map â somebody whoâs eager to route an Uber our way, or feed us advertisements for restaurants or movies that might be of interest along the next block, or track our movement across borders and point surveillance apparatae in our direction.
Anthropologist Clyde Kluchhohn (1949), media sage Marshall McLuhan (1967), and his promoter, adman Howard Luck Gossage, have all been credited with acknowledging that whoever discovered water probably wasnât a fish. The implication, of course, is that the fish isnât aware of its aquatic environment, its medium, because itâs immersed in it. It knows nothing else; or, if it does, itâs probably not long for this terrestrial world. We, however, live both inside and outside the proverbial and conceptual fishbowl: we live on the surface of the earth, but weâve developed means of representing that territory to ourselves â and even seeing precisely where we lie within that territory: âYou are here.â Maps are, of course, one such representational, orientational, and navigational tool. At the same time, the ubiquity of maps â their seemingly obligatory integration into our apps, websites, new forms of âdata journalism,â and performance dashboards â has, to some degree, naturalized them, made them banal. Weâre often unconscious of their existence both because weâve dissolved them into our everyday landscape, and because theyâve rendered themselves imperceptible, passively operational, within that landscape. Theyâve become, in a sense, our aquatic medium.
Maps in Data Journalism
All the more reason why maps are not simply a concern for geographers and cartographers and GIS engineers; or for the programmers and designers whoâve found themselves working in the robust GIS industry; or for the countless artists whoâve taken up maps as their subject. Maps are a foundational part of the wired worldâs social, cultural, and political terrain; and theyâre of tremendous political-economic importance to the non-wired portions of the world that cartographers often depict (often for âdevelopmentâ purposes). Maps always have been, but are now more than ever, media.
Regarding maps as media encourages us to recognize their prevalence and value as a fundamental cultural form â but it also prompts us to supplement geographyâs methodologies and critical frameworks with those from media studies. Weâre invited to consider mapsâ material forms, graphic language, and the protocols that direct their operation. Weâre invited to consider the processes by which theyâre created, circulated, and used â and by whom. Weâre invited to examine the massive complex of industries now dedicated to their creation. Weâre invited to consider the deep history of techniques, technologies, and sensibilities that informed the development of cartography â and to wonder how those fundamentals might still be present, in some form or another, in our maps today. Weâre also invited to think about the âdiscourse networkâ of cartography itself, as itâs practiced in geography departments and labs and the satellite-inhabited exosphere, and to consider the politics underlying the practical and critical work through which map-making gets done.
In such company, it is obligatory to cite Foucault â so, voilĂ !: âThe great obsession of the nineteenth century,â he argues, âwas history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.â
The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at the moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.[3]
Vermeer, The Art of Painting, 1665-8Nervous Net: Jay Forrester’s World Dynamics, 1971
But thereâs a deep history to this new spatiality. The modern âepoch of spaceâ â and the compulsion to diagram and map it â saw many foreshadowings in previous ages. Polymathic scholar Tom Conley tells of a âcartographic impulseâ in 15th– and 16th-century France, driven by the discovery of the New World; a growing interest in mapmaking, he argues, paralleled the rise of a new sense of self and new forms of cartographic writing that, in both their content and form, explored spatial ideas.[4] The expansion of global seafaring likewise inspired the Dutch to take up mapmaking as both a vocation and a pastime, and to regard maps as both a source of geographic knowledge and a domestic decoration. As art historian Svetlana Alpers explains, 17th-century Dutch artists succumbed to the âmapping impulse,â too, emphasizing landscapes as subject matter and often depicting maps within their paintings, thereby transforming themselves into artist-cartographers (the same could be said of many contemporaneous Italian artists).[5]
Scholars of the late 18th century, preoccupied with âaccuracy, numeracy, and measurement,â also committed themselves to âmapping âanything and everythingââ â and, as Lauren Klein argues, to taxonomic representations of data and other early forms of data visualization.[6] By the following century, widespread âfetishiz[ation] of the mapâ had become part of a larger âfetishizing of vision,â as evidenced by the emergence of panoramas and photographs and plate-glass windows, and the fascination with collection and display.[7] The world itself became an exhibition.[8] Similar impulses, combined with a commitment to the late 19th-/ early 20th-century internationalist peace movement, fed Paul Otlet, Patrick Geddes, and Otto Neurath in their often collaborative experiments and grand proposals to collect, classify, diagram, and exhibit (in the form of âthinking machinesâ or âpictorial statistics,â or, as Lewis Mumford called it, âideological cartography”) all the worldâs knowledge.[9] With the Cold War, and its emerging communication and cognitive sciences and their new calculative and statistical techniques, those data maps increasingly took the form of circuits and nets. As Orit Halpern explains, âCyberneticians and their affiliated disciplines became obsessed with data visualizationâ â particularly, visualizations of processes and patterned flows â as âthe mechanism for consciousness.â[10]
Mapsâ Topoi
That ânetwork that connects points and intersects with its own skein,â an entangled map, would likely defy traditional cartographic representation and instead call for what Halpern calls a more âschizoidâ diagram. Foucaultâs network of vectors and folds is quite different from the map of the Low countries depicted in Vermeerâs The Art of Painting, or the birdsâ-eye city views of the 19th-century panorama, or a Google satellite map showing local bike routes. The vector-network, we might say, represents space as topology; the latter three maps, space as topography.
Topology is a branch of mathematics concerned with the spatial properties of an object that hold steady even if that object deforms, or stretches; in other words, topology is interested in abstract surfaces, vectors, trajectories, connections, rather than precise spatial locations.[11] Topological structures â âmodels, networks, clouds, fractals,⊠flowsâ and assemblages â are commonly used to describe myriad contemporary cultural forms, from technology to financial markets to geographies transformed by dynamic forces and mobility.[12] The archetypal subway map, which shows relations between lines and stations while âstretching the truthâ in its representation of the above-ground geography, is a topological map â as are many indigenous maps. The recent flood of data visualizations is largely topological, too.
Topography, meanwhile, focuses on graphically representing, or describing, the three-dimensional surface of an area, typically highlighting its local features. The topographic map is one form of cartography; the planimetric map, by contrast, relays the horizontal position of features without also showing relief.
Our current capacious uses of the term âmappingâ â we âmap outâ our workflows and corporate architectures, our weekly schedules and errand itineraries â embrace both topoi: both network diagrams without material reference to physical space, and representations of concrete morphologies; both non-cartographic data visualizations and geographic representations.[13] Particularly when weâre working with GIS, though, itâs important to recognize that those topoi are entwined. The topographical has an underlying topology: the structure of the databases underlying our maps â which configures the relationships between plotted points, lines, and areas â profoundly informs the shapes those maps take. And our representations of geo-locatable data lend themselves to topological network analysis and the modeling of different behaviors and scenarios.[14]
Maps as Media
Through their studies of communication, which involved the creation of new topological diagrams, the cyberneticians were key players in the birth of media studies (McLuhan took inspiration from their work). What constitutes a medium has been endlessly (and often abstrusely) theorized. For our purposes, however, weâll say that maps are media because theyâre material (even the digital is a form of immaterial materiality) technologies and cultural practices of communication and representation.[15] Iâm not the first to make such a claim: some folks in the businesses of making and studying maps have argued that maps are media because theyâre composed of systems of visual language, or theyâre means of propaganda, tools for the âmanipulationâ of meaning and the exercise of power.[16] Christian Jacob, in his The Sovereign Map, presents maps as media by examining both how they function as a means of graphic communication or a system of signs; and how they serve as âtool[s] of powerâ that âimpose a vision of the worldâ and embody particular values and ideologies.[17]
Yes, maps are rhetorical and political â and by looking at the âmedialâ properties of maps, we can better understand how they convey meaning, exert influence, and carry bias. Yet media and cultural studies have long recognized the limitations of reducing artifacts to codes or semiotic systems, or to tools for propaganda. Maps, like the landscapes they represent, arenât simply âtextsâ to be âread.â Whatâs more, geographer John Pickles argues, we âneed an understanding of mapping that does not reduce the work maps do to the repressive exercise of power.â[18] Maps are more then hegemonic forces. Recognizing maps as media potentially opens up a more expansive understanding of how they operate.
First, maps-as-media are material artifacts, or interfaces, that adhere to particular protocols of communication. Jacob traces the mapâs lexical variations â including the French carte, meaning card; the Latin mappa, or tablecloth; the Greek pinax, meaning tablet or plate â and notes that, while there is perhaps no particular concrete manifestation that defines a map, this etymology serves to remind us that the map is given form, instantiated in some way â and, I would argue, the nature of that formalization, even if only fleeting or imaginary, matters. Second, maps-as-media, like all media, are produced by myriad entities â today, by an increasing variety of individuals and industries â for various reasons, under particular conditions, and subject to both cartographic conventions and variable aesthetic or editorial choices. Bill Rankin, through his Radical Cartography project, calls attention to those protocols and conventions by juxtaposing data sets, or rendering the same set of data in varying styles, thus âprovok[ing] slippages, overlaps, and multiple kinds of diversity.â[19] âMy maps are possible only because of the diversity of data and software,â he says, âbut most of my work is about making that data and software do things that they were never meant to do.â[20]
Bill Rankin’s Radical Cartography
Third, maps-as-media are distributed among myriad âusersâ in particular ways; and theyâre accessed, âprocessedâ (do we still âreadâ maps?), and interpreted by those users in different ways. Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson, and Martin Dodge propose a variety of methods â genealogy, ethnography, interviews, participant observation, etc. â that would help geographers better understand how people use maps âwithin particular contexts and cultures as solutions to everyday tasks.â[21] As Matthew Wilson and Monica Stephens note, in advocating for âGIS as media,â the âdistinctly interactiveâ nature of contemporary maps allows for new uses: readers can adjust their scale and scope, reconfigure their data, put those data into motion, and even crowd-source new data (including intelligence from underrepresented groups), thus generating a âplurality of expression(s) and multiple documentations of âtruth.ââ[22]
Whether weâre considering a 14th-century portolan chart or the modern-day Uber app, our maps-as-media arise, circulate, and get used within various âdiscourse networksâ â webs of people, instruments, institutions, specialized knowledges, and power â that constitute their own topologies.[23] One such player in this network is, of course, Google, with its extraordinary cartographic empire that has acquired the authority to âdefine borders and boundariesâ and has, âwithout having any legal, political and democratic mandate,â replaced national agencies and international organizations in becoming âthe referential map of the world.â[24] OpenStreetMap and other open-source initiatives, with vastly different collective values and spatial politics, now present a viable alternative.[25] Meanwhile, satellites, which are critical tools in both the production and distribution of maps, are âindebted toâŠinstitutions committed to seeing the world in military or logistical terms.â[26] It is our âcivic responsibility and political obligation,â Laura Kurgan says, to understand how satellite images are generated; âfor every image, we should be able to inquire about its technology, its location data, its ownership, its legibility, and its source.â[27] Pickles goes even farther, arguing that we need to consider the politics of the Godâs-eye view, of the cartographic gaze, and âread against the grain of representational epistemologies.â[28]
Map-making is also what German media theorists would call a âcultural techniqueâ â a set of operational processes, including means of training the mind and body, the creation of tools and systems of education, etc., that give rise to a cultural practice like cartography.[29] The cultural techniques approach takes a deeply historical view: it acknowledges that people were âmappingâ and making map-like things long before they recognized their work as cartography.[30] Taking the long view helps us understand how âmapping,â through all of its entwined protocols and apparatae, has enabled people to grapple with fundamental human concerns: distinctions between inside and outside, or between nature and culture, for instance. Mapsâ modes of representation, Bernhard Siegert says, signal the dominance of particular âepistemic orders,â or ways of knowing â ways of grasping âterritoryâ at various scales, ways of understanding âproperty,â ways of negotiating the relationships between land and sea, ways of conceptualizing borders and nations, and so forth.[31] Examining our data-driven maps of today through a lineage that extends back through the proto-cartographic, we might wonder about the fundamental epistemological and ontological questions raised by our heat maps and Yelp maps. How might the tides have turned in those âepistemic watersâ?
Yet itâs not only about the pictures of the world that maps present. The very existence of mapping as a large-scale media-production industry, and the means by which those maps are produced, raises questions about the values embedded in the system. Who has historically owned the means of describing space, and what have been their interests? What kinds of data have merited representation, and how have those data been generated, and what are their âgeographies of knowledgeâ? What do we make of our contemporary interactive mapsâ post-Copernican, egocentric orientation, which places you â not the earth, not the sun, not Jerusalem or Mecca â at the center? What happens when we hold in our hands manipulable maps that render space as something seamlessly traversable, rational, and exploitable?
The Ebstorf mappamundi, ca. 1235Dan Zomack, Lenoir City, via Hand Drawn Map Association
And what kinds of spatial âepistemic ordersâ are eclipsed by this new egocentric framing, or âself-centering,â and real-time navigational assistance? Henry Grabar suggests that, with all this automation, we run the risk of shrinking our capacity for âspatial thinkingâ â for self-orienting and -navigating, for developing our own âcognitive mapsâ to find ourselves in the world.[32] Kurgan also laments contemporary mapsâ âcomfortable sense of orientation, of there being a fixed point,â which âput[s] the project of orientation â visibility, location, use, action, and exploration â into question.â Maps âlet us see too much,â she says, âand hence blind us to what we cannot see, imposing a quiet tyranny of orientation that erases the possibility of disoriented discoveryâ â and, at the same time, “blinds” us (sic) to those âinvisible linesâ of people, places, and networks that are rarely regarded as cartographically significant.[33] (The ableist construction also highlights the dangers of ocularcentrism)
Finally, as someone who has, for many years, studied mapping through the lens of media studies â and who has looked at media through the framework of various institutional politics â Iâd also suggest that the critical study of cartography itself, as practiced in geography and related disciplines, also constitutes its own historical cultural technique, a mode of inquiry and practice that warrants reflection. The politics of that earlier âspatial turnâ â with Foucault and the French admirals at the helm, and the women and Global South below-deck â have shaped the terrain within which we make, use, and study maps today.
Together, these variables constitute the topology of maps-as-media.
Cartography as Media-Making
From 2010 through 2013 my colleague Rory Solomon and I taught a graduate studio at The New School, where our students researched historical media infrastructures (loosely defined) â the rise and disappearance of movie theaters in Greenpoint, the geographies of carrier pigeon networks and independent bookstores and newspaper delivery, the production and distribution of activist zines, the strategic siting of carrier hotels and data centers, the northward spread of Edisonâs electrification â and plotted those infrastructures on a map. We approached map-making as media design: the students used the map as a framework within which they could tell spatial stories and make cartographic arguments, which were illustrated with a variety of media: ârectifiedâ historical maps, archival photos, field recordings, student-produced video, interview footage, and so on.
Rather than use Google Maps or Historypin or one of the myriad existing mapping platforms, though, we worked over the course of several years with programmers and designers in the Parsons School of Design to develop our own map â one based entirely on open-source technologies, including OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap. Why begin tabula rasa? Because while those existing platforms lent themselves readily to geo-locating data â and particularly well to pinning random bits of archival material (âHey, look at this cool old stuff I foundâ!) â they werenât so great at providing context, or explaining relevance or significance, or highlighting provenance and giving credit to the archivists and artists and scholars who generated that âpinnedâ material, or creating a framework that gathered up all those data points into a compelling cartographic argument. And, frankly, we preferred not to rely on corporate platforms built on questionable politics, and which had no obligation to preserve our data.
The mapping platform we made was more-than-a-little clunky, persistently buggy, not-so-pretty, and often a source of tremendous frustration. Plotting material required significantly more effort â and for that reason, more careful thought and parsimoniousness â than wouldâve been required with a slick and seamless tool. Students had to model their own data, then manually link their individual data-points into networks of ârelated records,â which they then tied together via illustrated stories or interactive arguments. They had to do the hard work of building a topological foundation for their topography (and their maps were indeed topographic; they aimed to show the three dimensions of infrastructural activity â the aerial, the street-level, the subterranean â in a city distinguished by both its horizontal spread and its verticality).
Yet all that laborious manual control afforded many benefits. Students saw inside the proverbial black box; they watched software get made⊠and fail, and get (partially) fixed. Those small defeats and victories offered insight into how the system worked â and didnât; the students ultimately learned a lot more from these error-pitted processes, uncomfortable though they were, than from their effortless interactions with Yelp or Google. The students made choices for themselves â about their mapsâ scale of representation, or what base-map would serve as the substrate for all their plotted data â that probably wouldâve been made for them by other platforms; and, consequently, they questioned and âdenaturalizedâ many familiar, default means of representing space. And because the spatial histories they were piecing together required research across multiple domains â official city agencies, national regulatory bodies, various industries and special interest groups, individual stake-holders â the students also had to consider the breath of the âdiscourse networkâ invested in these spatial debates: what diverse entities were involved in the geographies of these stories? Did these various groups think about and represent space in similar or different ways across time â and could we reconcile their distinctive âcultural techniquesâ of mapping?
Several students began their projects searching eagerly for the âopen data motherlodeâ that, they imagined, would reveal clear temporal and spatial patterns and allow them to make big, profound, earth-shattering claims: âI intend to cartographically correlate huge changes in socioeconomic data to movements in these massive infrastructures.â Yet, not surprisingly, those data epiphanies never arose. Epiphanies are hard to engineer (especially when you never studied statistics!). Eventually, most students came to appreciate how their overly-ambitious expectations were conditioned by the prevalence of GIS and the equally ubiquitous, and fetishistic, deification and reification of Big Data.[34] They, like many people, conflated âmappingâ with âdata visualization,â and the âGIS mindsetâ proved stifling to many of them. As historian David Bodenhamer explains, GIS can appear âreductionist in its epistemologyâ; it sometimes âforces data into categories; it defines space in limited and literal ways instead of the metaphorical frames that are equally reflective of human experience.â[35] For many students, those words rang true.
But mapping isnât synonymous with GIS (and GIS isnât necessarily about positivism and rigidity). Despite the fact that digital mapping platforms seem to call for the exploitation of data sources â the database behind the map seems to demand quantity and precision â cartography is not necessarily all about Big Data. The personal and the partial, the subjective and the speculative, can also be sketched out on a map â that is, if doing so would be both illuminating to the story or argument one is trying to tell, and ethically sound; making entities visible and locatable can, in some cases, represent a threat or a breach of necessary anonymity.[36] Eventually coming to terms with the ânon-monumentalityâ of their conclusions, accepting that they wouldnât be creating a heat map showing conclusive evidence of quantifiable macro-scale changes, our students recognized the breadth and flexibility and nuance of mapping as a method. While cartography doesnât readily lend itself to the expression of ambiguity â maps donât have âbuts,â âifs,â âhowevers,â or other qualifying statements to convey the âinterpretative nature of the mapping processâ â they still found ways to map the qualitative, the necessarily incomplete and inconclusive, the fuzzy.[37] Sometimes that meant infusing a little poetry into their data models to capture the nuance and nebulousness of their subjects.
Visualizing Uncertainty, via Jibonananda Sanyal, Song Zhang & Gargi Bhattacharya, “A User Study to Compare Four Uncertainty Visualization Methods for 1D and 2D Datasets” IEEE Transactions…Denis Wood, Everything Sings: streetlamp footprints
Yet thereâs a limit to the methodâs flexibility; thereâs only so far we can stretch the topography without shattering its underlying topology. Despite whatever opportunities we might have to detourn, or subvert, the map and its underlying database â to build self-reflexive critiques of the cartographic enterprise right into the map itself â we sometimes run up against the operative or epistemological limitations of these systems. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift note the âdifficulty of mapping something that is only partially locatable in time-space,â and of belaboring our subjects with mappingâs âhistory of subordination to an Enlightenment logic in which everything can be surveyed and pinned down.â[38] Sometimes itâs simply impossible to pin things down as a cartographic point, line, or area.
But the challenges go beyond dealing with a lack of spatial precision. Simply put, not all stories are primarily spatial. Not everything is mappable, and not everything belongs on a map. Framing all research questions, all narratives, all phenomena in terms of space, as the spatial turn inclines us to do, often distorts the content. It forces the territory â the phenomena weâre trying to represent, the histories and stories weâre trying to tell, the arguments weâre trying to make â to conform to the map in order to render itself representable. That translation of physical and human reality into data models and plottable points and lines often results in the loss of something essential and irretrievable. Such critiques have been lodged against âindigenous cartography,â or well-meaning development organizationsâ promotion of cartographic literacy among indigenous populations in order to âempowerâ them to assert their own land rights. âThe process of mapping,â Nancy Lee Peluso argued in an influential 1995 article, âalmost forces the interpretation of customary rights to resources territorially, thereby changing both the claim and the representation of itâŠ.â[39]
Many of my students offered insightful reflections on the values and limitations of mapping as a method and a mode of presentation in their own projects[40]:
I think proximity is a point to be made, but not the whole point, and it might push users to get caught up in spatial observations.
Iâve noticed that all the presentations involved navigation tasks that would seem obscure without the author walking us through them. Why do the maps come so alive when we have a guide walking us through them?
When you see my map from far enough away, it looks like all of Brooklyn is covered in green circles, but zoom in further and there are gaps begging to be filled in. And I think for now at least, thatâs how itâs supposed to look.
They came to accept that some gaps are supposed to be there, that their projects will be defined by holes and incompleteness.[41] In fact, as Peter Turchi writes in Maps of the Imagination, âa fuller understanding of what we donât knowâ â or, I would add, of what we are not meant to know (e.g., what data is classified or otherwise obscured) â âis itself new knowledge, and redefines what we know. Omissions, intended or unintended, provoke the imagination.â[42] In recognizing what maps can and canât do well, these neophyte cartographers were able to look at their maps more critically as media, and at mapping as a method â as only one of myriad media and methods at their disposal, and perhaps not the optimal ones for every job.
Herding Dragons: Mending Cartographyâs Epistemic and Political Gaps
The failings of our mapping platform offered many happy accidents: in particular, they highlighted the limitations of the contemporary âmapping impulse.â By leaving gaps and intentional (and sure, maybe some lazy and unintentional) imperfections in their own maps, our students were able to graphically embed a critique of the cartographic enterprise. And recently, as I designed the next iteration of the course, âMaps as Mediaâ â a critical study of the rhetorics, poetics, politics, and epistemologies of maps from across myriad geographic and cultural contexts â I sought readings and examples that would articulate those critiques, that would contextualize all those tensions we encountered in previous semesters. In the process, I, an outsider to geography, came to recognize that those gaps existed not only in the topography of the map or its underlying topology â the epistemological and political âdragonsâ historically depicted on mapsâ uncharted territories or waters (âhic sunt draconesâ). Those dragons also reside within the critical study of cartography itself â the topology of the discipline â and particularly in the not-terribly-diverse, Western-oriented discourse and its ocularcentric orientation.
The Age of Exploration and its ranks of cartographers were certainly dominated by Western white dudes (as has been most spatial theory). Yet in recent decades â particularly since the rise of âpost-positivistâ cultural geography, âcritical cartography,â and approaches to counter-mapping â the field of geography has attended to issues of gender, race, class, and other forms of diversity. Cartography has embraced diversity both by mapping âdifferenceâ and inequality â that is, taking these issues as its cartographic subject matter â and by incorporating diverse and under-represented perspectives and subjectivities into its cartographic ideas and practices.[43] That said, itâs not uncommon to find recent map-related publications (particularly in the tech-oriented press) that mention nary a woman, collected volumes on cartographic ideas that include a trifling proportion of female or ethnically diverse authors, and conference panels featuring a wall of white men. These shortcomings are of course not unique to geography, but theyâre striking nonetheless.
Wow – look at all those white guys! “The Future of Mapping” panel @ Mutek 2015
What we learn from this mismatch is that many indigenous populations have their own long-standing mapping traditions. And those traditions might have material forms of communication, functions, modes of circulation, and public uses that differ dramatically from those of western maps. Recognizing these alternative traditions, Pickles suggests, would ideally prompt a âreopening of the cartographic canon to the cognitive, performative, semantic and symbolic richness of mappings, as well as the diversity of material products that embody those mappings.â[45] There are myriad ways of staking claim to or making sense of the lands (or seas, in the case of Inuit populations and other sea-faring or ice-dwelling groups) on which one lives, myriad ways of communicating what those lands mean to the population who chooses to represent it, myriad forms that those spatial representations can take, and myriad ways of evaluating their âtruthfulnessâ or validity.[46] Ideally, our âmappingsâ â perhaps a more inclusive term than cartographies â would embrace that diversity.
M.W. Pearce and M.J. Hermann, “They Would Not Take Me There; People, Places and Stories from Champlainâs Travels in Canada, 1603-1616”
Contemporary mapping techniques and technologies, despite their âobjectifying,â ârationalizingâ and purported âmasculinistâ tendencies, arenât inherently and exclusively imperialist or patriarchal, or necessarily incapable of dealing with diversity and different worldviews. Itâs possible, Mei-Po Kwan argues, to appropriate and detourn geospatial technologies âto counter their objectifying vision.â Feminist applications of geospatial technologies promise to integrate âbodies, emotions, and subjectivitiesâ into cartography by, for example, drawing inspiration from map artists and map activists, and experimenting with âmore expressive and evocative forms of visual practicesâ â using the GPS to plot and reflect on oneâs personal experiences, for instance, or making movies from 3D GIS imagery.[47] While geographers have, as part of their self-reflexive turn, thought critically about the politics of the cartographic gaze and the epistemologies embedded in their âoptical regimes,â thereâs still one persistent oversight: the focus on visuality. Nearly all definitions of maps distinguish them as a means of visual communication. In the preface to the first volume of the massive and monumental History of Cartography series, J. Brian Harley and David Woodward offer what is widely regarded as one of the most inclusive definitions of maps: âgraphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.â[48] Yet even this expansive, capacious definition limits the means of cartographic expression to the visual.
Yes, graphic, from graphe, implies writing and drawing â but graphe is also at the root of telegraphy, phonography, and cinematography, all forms of inscription that when âplayed back,â or consumed, are experienced through vision, sound, and even texture.[49] Recognizing the sensory diversity of âgraphicâ media might allow us also to explore the potential for more sensorially diverse maps â maps better able to capture the aesthetic richness of our experience of place, and that neednât collapse that multisensoriality into a single-channel representation. This concern with aesthetics isnât simply about creating more ârealisticâ or immersive or creative or beautiful maps. Rather, expanding the sensory repertoire of our mapping techniques and technologies allows us to sanction and codify the critical importance of ânon-ocularcentricâ modes of experience and ways of knowing. The growth of sensory history and sensory studies â fields that recognize historical shifts in our prioritization of the various senses, that acknowledge the importance of non-visual perception in, say, nautical navigation, military operations, and urban planning â attests to the âvalidationâ of our âother senses.â[50] What counts as a map â a term so capacious in its inclusivity of content â should perhaps be similarly inclusive in its material forms and sensory modes. If we think about maps as media, we can recognize the plethora of media at our disposal, all of which could potentially be marshaled to âgraphâ our spatial understandings.
Consider the recent explosion of interest in sound maps, which aim to get at the sonic character of various places. Thereâs a long history for such cultural techniques of mapping: Aboriginal cultures have long used songlines, or âoral mapsâ to navigate across Australia by musically connecting paths in the sky, among the constellations, to paths on the earth.[51] The Aborigines have cultivated a diverse landscape of cartography: the people of Fitzroy Crossing created a 26 x 32-foot painting demonstrating each personâs relation to parts of the Great Sandy Desert, and they presented it in 1997 before the Native Title Tribunal.[52] Australiaâs High Court now permits indigenous populations to submit song, dance, and story as valid evidence in land claims cases.[53] Consider also the creation of tactile and sonic maps for the vision-impaired; users can touch a site on a tactile map and hear information about that location.[54] Finally, think about the possibilities of âdeep mapping,â a multisensory, multi-media, multi-authored, inherently unstable and subjective approach to mapping that has been addressed in several recent publications, including my own.[55]
These maps â like those in my infrastructure mapping studio â encompass media in multiple formats, and methods ranging from GIS analysis to oral history and documentary photography. We might regard mapping as the âumbrellaâ strategy encompassing these other methods and modalities, or as only one component of a âdeepâ spatially-oriented methodology â one that incorporates other modes of inquiry and expression. Regardless, itâs important that we question the role played by each component of our conceptual and methodological mapping toolbox â that we resist the temptation to fetishize the data or the map, that we appreciate what each of our tools can and canât do, and that we devise a strategy by which these various tools can work in a complementary fashion to do justice to the rich spatial and temporal dimensions of our subjects of inquiry.
Maps are media: they make themselves both actively and passively present in our everyday lives. They codify and inscribe those contemporary, historical, and perhaps even future realities and give them direction and meaning. They inform, persuade, and perhaps even manipulate. They validate or marginalize those to whom they do or donât give voice. They embody our ways of knowing and relating to the towns, cities, nations, planets, and galaxies in which we live. They shape the politics by which we govern, shepherd, or exploit our environments, from the micro to the macro scale. And even in their gaps, they give shape to our limitations â to what we donât and perhaps canât know, at least not in the shape of a map. Those lacunae delineate that which canât be pinned down â all the stuff that slips through the grand âgraticule,â the epistemic grid of lats and longs.
* Â * Â * Â * Â *
[1] According to a recent Pew study, 41% of smartphone owners used their phones to access maps during the week-long study period. See Aaron Smith and Dana Page, âU.S. Smartphone Use in 2015â Pew Research Center (April 1, 2015): http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2015/03/PI_Smartphones_0401151.pdf
[2] See Jo Guldi, âWhat Is the Spatial Turnâ Spatial Humanities (n.d.); Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin, Eds., Key Thinkers on Space and Place, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010); Barney Warf and Santa Arias, Eds., The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2009).
[3] Michel Foucault, âOf Other Spacesâ Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22.
[4] Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
[5] Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[6] Anna Marie Claire Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 246. See also Lauren Kleinâs talks and posts on data visualization.
[7] John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London: Routledge, 2004): 134-6.
[8] Timothy Mitchell, âThe World as Exhibitionâ Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:2 (April 1989): 217-36.
[9] Lewis Mumford, âPatrick Geddes, Victor Branford and Applied Sociology in England: The Social Survey, Regionalism and Urban Planningâ In H. E. Barnes, Ed., An Introduction to the History of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press (abridged edition, [1948] 1966); Boyd Rayward, The Universe of Information: The World of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization (Moscow: International Federation of Documentation, 1975); Nader Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011); Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[10] Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 185
[11] See also Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova, âIntroduction: Becoming Topological of Cultureâ Theory, Culture & Society 29:4/5 (2012): 3-35. The authors argue that the âbecoming topologicalâ of culture is reflected in âpractices of sorting, naming, numbering, comparing, listing, and calculatingâ; our predominant cultural forms include âlists, models, networks, clouds, fractals,âŠflowsâ and assemblages (4-5). Geographers and political scientists, they argue, âseek to describe dynamic relations and mobilities that cannot be contained by scaled spatial entities, such as territoryâ (5). âThe effect of those practices is both to introduce new continuities into a discontinuous world by establishing equivalences or similitudes, and to make and mark discontinuities through repeated contrastsâ (4).
[15] See Lisa Gitelman, âMedia as Historical Subjectsâ In Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006): 7.
[16] See, for example, Arthur H. Robinson, The Look of Maps (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); J. B. Harley, âDeconstructing the Mapâ Cartographica 26:2 (Spring 1989): 1-20; A. H. McEachren, How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (New York: Guilford Press, 1995); Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 1992); and the work of Mark Monmonier.
[17] Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches In Cartography Throughout History, Tom Conley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006 [1992]): xv.
[18] John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London: Routledge, 2004): 114.
[19] Bill Rankin, âCartography and the Reality of Boundariesâ Perspecta 42 (Spring 2010: 44.
[21] Rob Kitchin, Justin Gleeson & Martin Dodge, âUnfolding Mapping Practices: A New Epistemology for Cartographyâ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38:3 (July 2013): 480.
[22] Matthew W. Wilson and Monica Stephens, âGIS as Media?â In Susan P. Mains, Julie Cupples and Chris Lukinbeal, Eds., Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media (Springer, forthcoming 2016; draft available here.
[23] Media theorist Friedrich Kittler defines the discourse network as âthe network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant dataâ (Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Trans., Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990: 369).
[29] Bernhard Siegert, âThe Map Is the Territoryâ Radical Philosophy 169 (September/October 2011): 13.
[30] Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, âCultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarksâ Theory, Culture & Society 30:6 (2013): 3-19; Bernhard Siegert, âCacography or Communication?: Cultural Techniques in German Media Studiesâ Grey Room 29 (Winter 2008): 26-47.
[31] For more on cartographyâs self-critique of its own ways of framing knowledge, see Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, âAn Introduction to Critical Cartographyâ ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4:1 (2006): 11-33; and Denis Wood, âCounter-Mapping and the Death of Cartographyâ In Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010): 120-129.
[32] Harvey Grabar, âSmartphones and the Uncertain Future of âSpatial Thinkingââ City Lab (September 9, 2014). See also Fredric Jameson, âCognitive Mappingâ In Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, Eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 347-60; Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960); Jody Rosen (âThe Knowledge, Londonâs Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPSâ New York Times Magazine (November 10, 2014)) on London taxi driversâ extraordinary spatial literacy and capacity for improvised navigation.
[33] Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology & Politics (New York: Zone, 2013): 16-7.
[35] David J. Bodenhamer, âThe Potential of Spatial Humanitiesâ In David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, Eds., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010): 24.
[38] Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift, Introduction to Pile and Thrift, Eds., Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (London: Routledge, 1995): 1.
[39] Nancy Lee Peluso, âWhose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesiaâ Antipode 27:4 (1995): 388. As Denis Wood explains, indigenous people, when encouraged to map their âterritoryâ âmeans taking on board all of professional cartographyâs spatial epistemology, including its commitment to discrete boundaries, especially since these tend ot be bundled into available GPS and GIS technologiesâ (Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010): 141).
[41] For more on the incompleteness and partiality of maps, see Berhard Siegert, âExiting the Projectâ and âThe Permanently Projected Worldâ In Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015): 142-5; and Peter Turchi, âA Wide Landscape of Snowsâ Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2004): 27-71.
[43] See Gillian Roseâs Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) for more on the gender of geographic practice, and feminist approaches to cartography.
[46] Claudio Aporta and Gita Laidler recognized that, in mapping Inuit knowledge, one must represent both land and sea use: âthe large expanses of blue that delineate the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay, among other major water bodies, are left relatively empty in most maps. These âblankâ areas are actually ice-covered white expanses for three quarters of the northern yearâ (âISIP Seeks International Partnersâ IASSA.Net listserv (December 14, 2004); referenced in Woods Rethinking the Power of Maps). And Margaret Pearce and Michael Hermann incorporated Native narratives into their maps of Samuel de Champlainâs travels in Canada in the 17th century (Michael Hermann and Margaret Pearce, ââThey Would Not Take Me Thereâ: People, Places, and Stories from Champlainâs Travels in Canada 1603 â 1616â Cartographic Perspectives 66 (Fall 2010).
[47] Mei-Po Kwan, âAffecting Geospatial Technologies: Toward a Feminist Politics of Emotionâ The Professional Geographer 59:1 (2007): 24, 30. See also the growing body of literature on âaffective geographies.â
[48] J. Brian Harley and David Woodward, Preface to Harley and Woodward, Eds., The History of Cartography, Vol. 1, Book 1(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): xvi.
[49] See James J. Hodge, âMareyâs Graphic Methodâ Transliteracies Project, Research Report (March 5, 2006), and Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Writing Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) for more on the âgraphicâ root of many historical media.
[51] Ray P. Norris & Bill Yidumduma Harney, âSonglines and Navigation in Wardaman and Other Australian Aboriginal Culturesâ Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 17:2 (in press): 1-14.
[52] Geraldine Brooks, âThe Painted Desertâ The New Yorker (July 28, 2003).
[54] âTactile Map Automated Productionâ The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute: http://www.ski.org/project/tactile-map-automated-production-tmap
[55] David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Indiana University Press, 2015); Shannon Mattern, Deep Mapping the Media City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Todd Presner, David Shepard & Yoh Kawano, HyperCites: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / metaLab Projects, 2014).
Later this fall I’ll be a “critic in residence” (of sorts) in the vibrant and acclaimed Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. What this entails is: organizing a speaker series — or, in my case, given my non-local status, a one-night symposium (about which more later!) — and leading a six-part writing workshop for designers. For the workshop, I was invited to use my own practice as a means of encouraging students to articulate their interests and processes as designers. I decided to structure the workshop around the concept of classification — particularly, the myriad ways we can conceptually compartmentalize our bodies of work. Here’s the draftsyllabus [update 10/29: you’ll find the final syllabus here!]:
SORTING THINGS OUT
In this module of Critical Frameworks weâll consider how we might collect, collate, sort, aggregate, intermix, shuffle, juxtapose, isolate, frame, and activate our varying interests, influences, practices, and areas of expertise â and how we can then marshal various experimental writing practices to most effectively and creatively present our multi-faceted selves to the world. Of, if youâd prefer a culinary metaphor, weâll experiment with recipes â scripts, programs, algorithms, maps and timelines â for marinating, chopping, paring, skimming, trussing, torching, and plating up our ideas and inspirations.
Your Contributions:
Participation in on-site and online discussions and workshops: 20%
Shannon Mattern, âBureaucracyâs Playthingsâ Reanimation Libraryâs Word Processor (October 2013).
What weâll do in our in-person class:
Talk about class logistics and gather everyoneâs web addresses and contact info.
Discuss the epistemologies, politics, and aesthetics of organizational schema.
Consider how various designers and artists (Charles and Ray Eames, David Wojnarowicz, etc.) have organized their own personal files, and how those collections have been catalogued by archivists.
Study the conventions of archival finding aids.[1]
Discuss your cataloguing exercise for the week.
Your exercise for this week:
Itâs 2115. Youâve passed away (my condolences) and bequeathed your physical and digital files â all your file folders, flat files, reference materials, digital storage devices, etc. â to the Getty Research Institute, which has promised to maintain for posterity a record of your life as a renowned renegade designer. An archivist is processing your materials and preparing a finding aid to document not only whatâs in the collection, but also how you structured it: how you organized all your records and notes and clippings into boxes and files and binders, how you sorted your digital materials into folders and programs on your laptop and apps on your mobile device (letâs just pretend weâre still using laptops and iPhones in the 22nd century). The archivist must uphold the archival principal of âoriginal order,â which is based on the recognition that we can learn a lot about you â about your creative and professional practice, about how your brain works, about how you conceive of and âschematizeâ the world, etc. â by examining how you maintained your records. …..Pretend youâre that archivist. Youâll need to step out of your own body, mind, and time to create a (partial) finding aid for your own archival collection. How would your future-archivist draft a one-paragraph (150- to 200-word) âBiographical/Historical Noteâ for you and your collection, and how would he or she describe â in 600 words or fewer â the âScope and Contentâ of your personal analog and digital files, including a list of the âseriesâ of materials in the collection? For guidance and inspiration, seek out the finding aids of your favorite (deceased) artists and designers. In composing your own: no revising or cleaning up, and no self-judgment! Simply list things as they are, in all their glorious (dis)order. …..Please post your finding aids to your Cargo websites. Because we wonât be discussing this work, and I wonât be providing written feedback, until our in-person workshop on November 19 (at which point youâll be sharing all three assignments) youâre welcome to keep returning to and revising your finding aid until then.
Oscar Bluemner, list of works of art, May 18, 1932. Oscar Bluemner papers, 1886â1939, 1960. Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution
Shannon Mattern, Introduction to âNotes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptionsâ The New Everyday (June 2010) [dated â but the general principles are still relevant!].
How many differently-conceptualized and structured lists can you create from the same set of data: your professional projects â all the stuff youâd want to include on your resume and in your professional portfolio (and maybe even some projects youâd rather not include on these more public documents)? Try creating at least five parallel lists: (1) a list of your projects (broadly conceived) in chronological order, or in some other non-chronological-but-still-justifiable(-if-not-completely-sensible) time-order; (2) a list organized according to some geographical or spatial variable; (3) a list of the âseriesâ or âthematicsâ into which you can lump your individual projects; (4) a list of your work organized according to format or medium or genre; and (5) a list organized by some unorthodox, perhaps insane, wildcard criterion. Youâre strongly encouraged to expand on and experiment with the list form: try out different writing styles; incorporate sketches or other forms of illustration (but remember: our primary goal in this workshop is to develop our verbal facility); imagine incorporating some form of interactivity or animation. Donât just scratch out your lists; design them! …..Please post your lists to your Cargo site. Because we wonât be discussing this work, and I wonât be providing written feedback, until our in-person workshop on November 19 (at which point youâll be sharing all three assignments), youâre welcome to keep returning to and revising your lists until then.
NOVEMBER 12: Topological Forms and Logistical Writing[3]
Each student should select one exemplary verbo-graphic (i.e., graphic or interactive, but prominently featuring writing) âtopological formâ â an exploded-view diagram, a fractal map, a timeline or flowchart, an assemblage model, a verbal (perhaps even sonic?) cloud, a network diagram, a recipe or event score, etc. â that both (1) helps us better understand our contemporary culture and (2) informs, inspires, or challenges your own approach to media design. Post your example to your Cargo site, and be prepared to say a few words â like, two minutesâ worth â in class (and, if you want, on your website, too) about how it clarifies/obfuscates, reveals/hides, makes sensible/sense-able some aspect(s) of contemporary âtopologicalâ culture.
What weâll (probably) do in our virtual class:
Discuss âtopological cultureâ and the myriad models â conceptual, linguistic, graphic, pedagogical â weâve developed to help make sense of it.
Consider, by examining the examples each of you has shared, what strategies of verbo-graphic representation we might use to map our own networks of experience and influence.
Your exercise for next week:
I think itâs important for all of us âcultural producersâ â artists, designers, technologists, academics, writers, teachers, etc. â to be able to situate our selves within our fields of thought and practice, not only so we can better understand the traditions in which weâre working and the distinctive contributions weâre making, but also so we can generously acknowledge and express our appreciation for the ideas and people whoâve influenced us. For this final exercise, Iâm asking you to look outward, to your âtopologies of influence and inspiration.â What ideas, people, communities, anomalous places, movements, historical ruptures, etc., have moved and changed you? …..Now, design two topological forms â network diagrams, maps (cartographic or otherwise), timelines, exploded-view diagrams, verbal (even sonic?) clouds, etc. â that represent those forces of influence and your place in relation to them.
NOVEMBER 19: Workshop
Before todayâs class you should have finalized your finding aid, your five lists, and your two topological forms, and posted them to your Cargo site. You should be prepared to share this work with the class in a ten-minute presentation, in which you first speak briefly about your own practice, then walk us through each of your projects, explaining the intention behind them and how those intentions translated into execution. …..Weâll discuss each personâs work, and Iâll then provide written feedback before November 26. Youâre to use this feedback to revise your three projects â and structure their presentation on your Cargo site (see below) â by December 3.
NOVEMBER 19: Evening Lecture (by me) on Remington-Randâs Worlds Fair Filing Systems + âDesignerlyâ Filing
DECEMBER 3: Final âTopological Dossiersâ Due
By 1:00 pm PST you should have posted to your Cargo site final versions of your three (multi-part) projects. And rather than simply âlistingâ them mindlessly, design a system by which they should be introduced, ordered, framed (both graphically and conceptually), and linked.
[3] Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design (Princeton University Press, 2006); Bruno Laour, âCan We Get Back to Materialism, Please?â Isis 98 (2007): 138-42; Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova, âIntroduction: Becoming Topological of Cultureâ Theory, Culture & Society 29:4/5 (2012): 3-35; Shannon Mattern, âIntellectual Furnishingsâ Medium (October 19, 2014); Sharon Oviatt, âCase Study of the Role of Pen and Paper in Serial Innovationâ In The Design of Future Educational Interfaces (New York: Routledge, 2013): 125-6.