MAPPING NETWORKS


Counter Cartographies by Brian Holmes

Possible Worldsby Dirk van Weelden

Gazetteer A: Network Maps

The Node Knows by J. J. King

Mapping Social Messes, David Pescovitz talks to Robert Horn

Re-Orientation by Ole Bouman

Gazetteer B: Network Maps

Network Nations by Ben Schouten and Yuri Engelhardt


Counter Cartographies
Can the network society be re-envisioned? How do forces of resistance operate in an era of planetary management? Brian Holmes explores the cardinal points of a dissident cartographic aesthetic, whose network maps and energy diagrams articulate contemporary social structures, from hierarchical power to self-organizing swarms.

We can distinguish between a determinate network map - a geographical representation of structures of networks power, which attempts to identify and measure the forces at play - and an undetermined energy diagram, which opens up a field of possible agency.(22)

Critical and dissident cartographies...appear as counter-behaviors in Michel Foucault's sense: deliberately denormalized refusals of the reason of State, elaborated with the very tools that consolidate the control society.(25)

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Possible Worlds
Attempts to map the Internet range from the strategic to the encyclopedic to the socially utopian. But whatever issues are explored, network mapping inevitably addresses the reciprocity between digital and physical worlds, says Dirk Van Weelden.

Reading about social software, one gets the impression that its makers consider digital communication and digital community superior to community and communication in the physical world.(28)

Network mapping focuses our attention on the reciprocity between digital and physical-social worlds. The more it tells us about connectivity, the more we find we're actually studying versions of metadata - economic, political, cultural, religious -that describe how we intentionally and unintentionally run our physical world. Network mapping reveals that connectivity is not virtual at all. It is real, like religion, beauty or the American dream."(29)

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The Node Knows
The court cartographer has been recalled from defunct surveys of the empire's physical territories to address a more pressing task: structuring the information spaces generated by contemporary capitalism. J.J. King examines the mapping and counter-mapping of the network society.

Today, things that are symbolically related are brought into a network proximity that can mitigate or redeem physical distance. This doesn't mean the end of geography, but reather its re-emergeence in a new form, centered on the instructions, interactions and connections that order global capital across national boundaries - a world reformatted along the lay lines of financial flow...a sort of 'cartography after information'...

Mapping the messy 'Space of Flows' is seen as necessary both by those wishing to critique contempporary capitalism and those seeking improved efficiency in information manipulation.

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Mapping Social Messes
Robert E. Horn is convinced a new language is emerging that blurs the lines between cartoons and prose, diagrams and labels, art and science. A political scientist by training and a knowledge cartographer by profession, he tells David Pescovitz why visual language is crucial in our information-saturated society, and how his “mess maps” can help disentangle complex social situations.

"Aesthetics are important. But in the consulting arena, you can only get as much in terms of aesthetics as the client will pay for."(50)

"Making the map helped them find out what their colleagues know and don't know, what they can rely on each other for, and whether one person's description of the world squares with another's... It's social learning, how we learn together to solve, in this case, community problems."(52)

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Re-Orientation
The world of fixed locations is being superseded by dynamic processes and global information flows. Ole Bouman argues that new modes of mapping are needed to represent modern movements in architecture.

There is a sense in which every design - whether it's called a masterplan, a blueprint or a floor plan - is a map, because it organizes man and matter. Now that the ordering of man and matter has become part of the movement patterns of information, knowledge and captial, architects must change their maps to conform to the new reality... Until now they have done so very cautiously.(57)

Designers who aspire to remain forceful actors in the battle for space (as they once were as master builders) simply cannot ignore the new representations of reality. They need maps in order to understand the big issues and dilemmas.(56)

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Network Nations
Dynamic interfaces for comparing and contrasting global statistics are becoming sophisticated, multi-dimensional and collaborative. Ben Schouten and Yuri Engelhardt identify the emerging principles of information visualization in three recent interactive projects.

Our well-developed visual processing skills--such as the ability to detect patterns, search quickly for specific visual details, or make visual comparisons--are hindered when data is presented in text, tables or databases. Comparison and exploration of abstract data are much easier when the data is mapped into a visual structure.(65)

The field of information visualization stands to benefit from more immersive and pervasive interfaces...By combining methods of interaction with the functionalities of collaborative work, social interactions become possible.(67)
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