Domus 908 November 2007
My personal interest in drawing and mark-making has always made me intrigued by the making of maps; so when I was reading a recent edition of Domus that focused some of its attention towards to this very topic, I was motivated to make a note of its relevance to studio six work. In the foreword to November’s edition of Domus, the editor Flavio Albanese starts his foreword by quoting Bateson: “the map is not the territory” (Gregory Bateson, in “Form, Substance and Difference,” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)) This short but succinct observation has many connotations in the realm of ‘mapping’.
Albanese expands by describing the map as: “…not a real place… [but as] …an image of the world” A simple observation, but one that would appear to have been blinded by the expansion and increased use of satalite navigation and google earth. These ‘new’ ways of seeing our planet are throwing up certain attitudes towards maps, ones that in my opinion make for passive spectatorship rather than more reciprocal relationships, that could throw up questions rather than ‘answers’.
This point demonstrated most clearly in a local news article that revealed Sheffield’s recently opened inner ring road will not feature on any in-car sat nav system for at least 2 years. Due to the company who program the digital maps not being able to update the system anytime soon. (i.e. too many other new roads to update). The company will have to send a special mapping van to drive the new road in question and record/trace the new highway.
Road to nowhere?….
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1 response so far ↓
jaylloyd // December 31, 2007 at 7:29 pm
“Western cartography purports to be factual, conveying a true two dimensional picture of our four/five dimensional world. But, any lover of maps will tell you of the peculiarities and richnesses of charts of different Western cultures, different conventions, endearing or infuriating mistakes, the challenges of updating, and of necessary inaccuracies of representation (if motorways were really as wide as the map portrays…). And increasingly maps are made from satellite recording, ground knowledge is regarded as less precise, less useful, more costly. While we gather ever more facts about the planet, and share incredible amounts of research around the globe, at each exten-sion of scale, detailed place-based knowledge gained over generations is lost, and wisdom mislaid. With each level of abstraction, we feel less able to argue what we know, and less sure in our valuing of the unquantifiable smallnesses which can make everyday life a delight and help nature and culture to interact benignly.” - Sue Clifford, Common Ground http://www.commonground.org.uk/parishmaps/m-ppp.html
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