Springer
From CopyCult
| Table of contents |
provisional title
Soft spots and blindware
abstract
This article is shaped as a visual essay. Through discussing a series of (photo) graphic images, drawings, charts and maps it is argued that the practice of visualising urban and relational networks, is a collective activity of a intuitive, speculative and suggestive nature. First we discuss aspects that are traditionally associated with the art of mapmaking. We discuss different types of geographical cartography and ask how maps function as tools of control and knowledge gathering. How are perspective of the geo-projection related to the power position of the map's user? We move on to discuss the changed nature of tools that come with the rise of new media and networked environment. Digital media has popularised a uniform scaleable worldview in which viewpoints can be changed from birdseye to streetlevel with a click of themouse. Through a scrutinisation of the techniques and motives that drive popular online mapping systems, the article reviews motives and purpose of these services. Why is insight in corporate and political policies concerning data access and privacy important to us? How can the potential of networked dataprocessing be re-appropriated for the benefit of individuals and groups operating outside a neo-liberal paradigms?
The article pleas to perceiving tools not as neutral utensils, not as black boxes. It is the responsibility of the cultural producer to continuously critically review tools, methodologies, workflows as content generating instruments. Through a series of examples of works by others and by the authors themselves, the article zooms in on several aspects of a diverse, multi-layered, fragmented, collaborative work approach that ranges from cartographic representation and artistic urban interventions, to data visualisations of networks of relationships. It will also narrate different experiments in collaboratively imagining and creating tools to support these works and emphasize the importance of free geodata and free and open source software at the practical level as well as at the methodological level.
The writers of the article come from a background of visual arts and computer programming and are both members of Constant, a Brussels based association for Arts and Media, active in the fields of (cyber) feminism, copyleft and open source. Collaboration, crossing borders, cross-breeding social sectors, disciplines, genders and genres is at the heart of the work of Constant.
preambule
* 1 maps and control / surveillance /
Maps are related to a long history of war, control and surveillance. They are also based on/establishing/ an important number of norms, conventions and protocols that make possible to exchange informations about space.
Experiencing space, specifying location and travelling distancs are physical, bodily processes that consume time and energy. Time-space contraptions (transportation, maps, media, tele networks) deliver power, equals hierarchy. In a context of digital networks, poweris related to control over code, access to- and legibilty of data. Mapping tools shift from pen, human calculation and paper to data mining, automatised analyses and database linking.
* 2 revealing the fabric of the map: google seams , joints , imperfections
A careful reading of Google maps reveal the artificiality of the whole process of large scale map-making. A global assemblage of techniques, finances and concepts is necessary to create a seamless fabric of geodata. It is in the holes, the joints and the imperfections that we can have a sense of the whole machinery at work behind the friendly interface.
* 3 DIY alternatives,
making task specific maps:
Conventions, norms, protocols define the language of sharing geodata, informations about space and places. But they somehow enframe/predefine these informations. How can we share data when this frame is too much of a constraint? How can we share information about space when they presuppose different systems of approaching/describing places? How can we share subjective informations about space that resist the norms and conventions or borrow from many different sources? How can we repurpose data for different and sometimes opposite needs?
Examples subjective maps, open street map
making places executable
Intentional blurring of hierarchy between the map, the mapped, the reader. Enthusiastic about the principle of distributed production because it shifts positions of power connected to production of representations, as discussed before, and wonder if decentralised practices can be applied to the practice of mapmaking.
Human laws / coded conditionals -- code = law (if some condition holds, action follows) 'inhabitants of cyberspace should pay attention for programmed polity by asking questions: is this software just and humane?' (Mitchell, architectural design)
When owning code is power, programming is a potentially controversial activity. Whose side are you on? A question too rarely asked to a mapmaker.
examples: time based maps:
Peter I think we could extend this preambule to the city as hardware and talk about the legal documents, rules (told and untold) that govern/or not the use of public space.
Introduction to constant
talk about a mixed practice that leads to varied approach of mapmaking / view on urbanity -- examples of projects, that we can go into in detail, maybe each of the could be discussed from a different angle: Tool / method / participants etc. -- Together they can cover a broad range of perspectives
Stitch and Split: sharing classifications
Stitch And Split is interested in selves and territories in science fiction. What interests us in this research is how the beings, objects, concepts and spaces that appear in science fiction create «displacement», deconstruct the usual categories from which we perceive the world, move the boundaries again, cut up the territories again.
The preparation and implementation of this project and the encounters arising from it have enabled us to discover a large number of resources. In order to transmit them and give the interested public an opportunity to consult them, annotate them, complete them, transform them, we thought it essential to propose a cartography of those data.
The map model we are proposing today tries to show how the data inhabit the interstices between concepts, qualifiers. Thus a datum is always placed between a couple of concepts. A somewhat abstract example to clarify this proposition:
When we encode a character like Amy Hacker, we choose to situate her between a certain number of concepts. We situate her between «male» and «female», between «dead» and «alive»... In the particular case of Amy Hacker, it is interesting to be able to define this position with nuances. Indeed, in Craig Baldwin’s film Spectres of the Spectrum, she is considered dead except by her granddaughter, a telepath, who tries to understand the message she has left her on the electromagnetic spectrum. We immediately understand that placing Amy Hacker on the datamap is not limited to considering her «dead» or «alive», but allows us to meditate on the interstice where she is situated between two concepts. These pairs of concepts are used to create the spatial coordinates of the map.
According to whether one chooses to see the data on one axis or another, their proximity is modified and the complexity of their relations is revealed. So the Stitch And Split map tries to show a set of dynamic relations, to draw what is situated between the cultural and scientific buoys, to show how the artefacts of science fiction draw their density from this resistance to the criteria for understanding the world.
(illustrations: the same entry under two different axes)
A collaborative cartography
The positioning of a resource between pairs of concepts is of course a highly subjective act. Subjectivity seems to us to be an extremely positive aspect in this kind of venture, if it is considered within the perspective of a dialogue and that one point of view can be answered by another. An item on the datamap is therefore classified by the person who encodes it, but may be the object of comments and transformations by other participants. For that purpose a version system is installed. It enables all participants to propose their own spatialisation of the element on the datamap and to propose their own description of the element.
Tresor / Towards: sharing the experience of the city (Brussels)
At the beginning of the project, nine artists of various fields and generations were invited – each according to their affinities with the choice of the subject and with a personal formalization of their data – to design a subjective cartography of urban interventions in Brussels. Their work was then the subject of an exhibition, and of a first publication that, far from only shedding the light on the particular reading of the territory by those artists, also put together their experimentations in an attempt to achieve a collective mapping out.
Despite the technical and conceptual difficulties, that trial proved very useful as regards what happened next, insofar as it triggered a series of new interrogations. How to represent subjective territorial data? How to classify that data and make the connection between two pieces of data? Which relevance and which form to give to a prospective collective cartography instrument?
Routes + Routines: Exercises, new instructions, the city as hardware
Routes and routines is a series of urban interventions that actively test conditions for moving through urban space. Here we review some of those interventions, their intentions and effects.
In planned infrastructures such as cities, the space of concepts, plans and intentions is the dominant space, the location of power. It dictates how cities should be viewed, routed and used. How node X can be reached from node Y. Typically it withholds users / citizens from stepping out of line, from exploring, let alone producing counter images. When a city enacts and embodies a history, producing counter images specifies the local and its history. (Rosalyn Deutsch) Walking is writing, we say with Barthes when he discusses how to navigate in Tokyo, a city where the streets have no names. You go, you embody the structure, you retrace the route that you have incorporated, you draw a plan, No pro-active go, no collectively embodied map repository.
** R+R Majorca / or APT: temporary techno invasion of a commercial center
In cities we are getting used to the commercial appropriation of shared spaces. Not often do we mistake a shopping mall for public space. Codes of behaviour in these places are set by companies, not by political law or common consencus. Where in cities two types of public meeting places can be distinguished: the market place and the 'fora civilia' (Aristoteles 'politcs') On the web, this distinction is not valid: fora mingle with commerce communication is moneymaking.
** R+R 3: swap script
The art of unmapping implies deregalution. Contesting the clock as a regulating instrument (of both contemporary society and the computer) that synchronises actions of humans. Perceiving time different than seamless coherent chronology, be out of paste with your place, try to obtain 'a certain cohesiveness, without itnecessarily beiing cohessive' (lefebvre spatial practice) The body offers regularities, but they change with mood and action. When listening to bodily information, time is measured by the events that occupy it. (Mumford, the human prospect)
* Gender Art Net: mapmaking instead of categorisations * Bambook: between datamining and storytelling
WE DON'T HAVE TO TALK ABOUT ALL PROJECTS, IF WE THINK WE SHOULD CONCENTRATE ON A FEW WHY NOT?
