ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING: Mapping Out the Future

A shorter version of this review was published in Blueprint magazine's August 2006 issue. Since some of the key points were lost in the edit, we are reprinting the unexpurgated text here, with kind permission of the author and publisher.

By Julian Stallabrass

A striking interview with Eyal Weizman in Else/Where:Mapping highlights the importance of the control of map data. In the 1993 Oslo negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the latter were relying on crude and outdated maps of their settlements. The Israelis had highly detailed maps that showed topography, land use and road networks, and exploited this asymmetry of information to their advantage. Weizman and his collaborators set out to make a public map of Israeli settlements using information gathered from aerial photography, ground visits and satellite data, and made highly conscious political choices about the form of the result, including decisions about how to draw the boundaries around built-up areas and what colour to make the settlements. The result was controversial, and an exhibition in Berlin, A Civilian Occupation, in which it was to be included, was cancelled by the Israel Association of United Architects. The map has been made available on the web as a modifiable PDF, and many have added to it, so that it has become a collective and open practice.

A series of technological innovations have made mapping a more expanded and contested subject, and may make control of data (and subsequent asymmetries of information) more difficult to sustain. These include the provision of satellite data in Google Maps, PDAs and other devices equipped with GPS technology, RFID tags, and the marriage of data from such machines with collectively produced software and creative content. Abrams and Hall’s collection of texts, discussions, images and artists’ projects examines the mapping of digital networks as well as physical space, and the mapping of online discourse, and forms a rich and fascinating resource on this area. Digitisation has had fundamental effects on mapping, claim the editors, freeing data from instantiation in a single visual form in which the two are congealed, and creating a situation in which many visual manifestations of the same dataset may be designed. (This claim has a parallel in Lev Manovich’s argument in The Language of New Media that digital art constructs an interface to a separate database, rather than having the two inseparably melded in a painting or sculpture.) Mapping technology may also be applied to any complex dataset for the purposes of pattern recognition and manipulation—the book includes Ben Fry’s work on the visual mapping of the human genome, used for example to highlight the genetic variation between individuals.

The possibilities such technologies hold out for the marrying of data to an experience of place are remarkable. Marc Tuters and Karlis Kalnins’ work Geograffiti uses GPS waypoints at which users can leave stories, video, audio or other data for others to peruse at that spot. While such systems are in their infancy, and their social use is being pioneered by artists’ projects, it is easy to imagine an urban space saturated by others’ stories, opinions and impressions, the filtration of which could become a problem in a collective version of Borges’ famous story, ‘Funes the Memorious’, who was cursed with the inability to forget.

Some of the artists included here (Julie Mehretu is a prominent example) play on the data sublime, providing the viewer with the impression and spectacle of a fantastically complex and immensely large mapping of data that acts much as mountain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century urban viewers. In both cases, it is the remove from the threatening subject that allows the experience of an enjoyable frisson. Yet the line between the instrumental and the aesthetic display data is a blurred and uncertain one, as digital data synthesises production and reproduction, visualisation and instrumentality. Who can tell whether some impressive vision of the stockmarket as a star chart, for example, will not become an effective device for predictive trading?

In an essay on the mapping of people’s movements around urban spaces, Steve Dietz warns of embedded, distributed computing that it ‘will give rise to nightmarish scenarios of Total Information Awareness by governmental, commercial and illegal powers’ but also holds out the hope that "these capabilities can be used to give expression to personal points of view which, in turn, can be mapped into collaborative, alternative visions." This positive view points two ways: first, to the old alliance of surveillance and individual consumer choice, which has leashed personal data to the production of goods—and there is a danger here that artists, in their creative and ‘critical’ interactions with these possibilities may dramatise and romanticise them for a new group of early adopters; and second, to collective projects, including many the forms of Wiki and free software, to the online gift economy, that may be the only protection against the real threats inherent in the first.

Julian Stallabrass is a reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING

Mapping in the digital age.

Mapping Out the Future

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