On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Today sees the public release of Mapumental, a ground-breaking map-generator tool that helps you to work out the optimal place to live or work in order to have an easy commute and an affordable home.

Through a highly intuitive interface, you can highlight parts of a map that match your ideal criteria of averaged commuting time, house prices and ’scenicness’ (whatever that might mean!).

After I generated my own little map and customised it, I came to three conclusions:

• Public transport in London is a nightmare
• You can’t be too demanding about where you want to live, according to that ’scenicness’ index…
• You have to be bloody rich!

Mapumental is a project by Channel 4 and mySociety.

http://mapumental.channel4.com/

Sans commentaire…

While we may think of geographic maps as amongst the more objective graphics, Stephen Boyd David reminds us of the subjective nature of mapping in this essay published in Emotional Cartography (Ed. Christian Nold). There is always some degree of subjectivity in an image. The way we see the world is channelled by language (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and linguistics have taught us that maps, like pictures and words, do not represent things, but shared ideas of things.

In contrast with the perspective, which needs a viewpoint, the map doesn’t need an onlooker – it is the first panopticon.
However maps do distort and select – because they are made for a purpose: they carry place-names, or indicate a hierarchy of importance. Whereas aerial photography shows the “raw stuff”, a well-made and usable map must be clear and legible, serving its purpose precisely through its selectivity. But some profound distortions go unnoticed because they are embedded in a shared cultural perspective: as the terrestrial globe is unwrapped on a flat surface, Europe is conveniently located in the middle of most Mercator projections. Yet even a globe, considered to be the most direct model of the Earth, has its northern hemisphere “up”, still dominating the under-developed world.
The first level of subjectivity arises from who we are and what we are trying to represent; on top of this is always overlaid our belonging to a wider cultural group: “dominant groups often assume that the shape of their world is the shape of the world.”

Oskar Karlin, Elephant & Castle-centred tube map.

Where you start a journey is sometimes as important as where you are: Time and space has already been compressed by ever faster mechanised travel, and increased ease of access makes the territory a different shape and size, experienced differently in different places. This is evidenced by Oskar Karlin’s time travel map, showing travel times from Elephant & Castle station, distorting Beck’s original underground map which is itself a heavily deformed representation of the topography giving much greater importance to the central area at the expense of the periphery. The emphasis on connections (or absence of them), the relative proximity of places is reminiscent of space syntax diagrams showing the connections between adjacent rooms in a building, rather than their relative layout as shown in a plan view.

Perspective is another way of prioritising and organising importance: The introduction of perspective in the BBC broadcast weather maps attracted much criticism, not least because it was thought to breach the corporation’s duty of impartiality. The same effect was exaggeratingly used by Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker’s view of the world to a humorous end.

Tom Carden’s Travel Time Tube Map expands on Karlin’s work by allowing any user to dynamically reorganise the map in order to represent travel times from any station:

Tom Carden, Travel Time Tube Map

A new generation of web-enabled interactive devices has enabled dynamic and on-demand maps to be produced, customised by users to fit their interests, altering the role of map-maker and opening up a map to new expressions, re-introducing objectivity into an object that has become more universal. Portable GPS technologies have further changed the stakes by adding the here and now, making maps inherently personal and embedded in the present.

Download the book (Ed. Christian Nold) from Emotional Cartography.

Un: Place – A curation by Beatrice Jarvis, exhibition opens 3 June – 20 July at the Jerwood café

Alys Williams / Benjamin Bailey / Seecum Cheung / Ilona Sagar / Dana Macpherson / Inzajeano Latif

An exhibition of personal cartographies and urban responses

Six artists have each created a piece of work that responds directly to the landscape of Jerwood Space, an iconic building situated in the heart of bustling Bankside. This reclaimed area between London Bridge and Waterloo is steeped in fragmented traces of lingering history, where passages of time are lost in hidden corners and marked histories are glimpsed on decaying facades.

The city has and will always remain a myriad of inspiration, This exhibition explores the creative relationship between the city and the individual to develop unique personal cartographies ; relearning mapping as an intricate interaction of the imagination in a diversity of forms and media.

Jerwood Space
171 Union Street
London
SE1 OLN

www.jerwoodspace.co.uk or www.jerwoodvisualarts.org

A new book exploring the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.

“The Bio Mapping tool is therefore a unique device linking the personal and intimate with the outer space of satellites orbiting around the earth.”

A collection of essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van der Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford brought together and edited by Christian Nold.

Book launch, with talks by the editor Christian Nold as well as Dr Tom Stafford and Sophie Hope, Friday 24th April 2009 6.30 -9pm at SPACE, Hackney.

SPACE, 129-131 Mare St, London E8 3RH

La table de Peutinger, nommée d’après l’humaniste Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547) qui reçu la carte en héritage et la préserva, est la copie d’une carte romaine aujourd’hui disparue, représentant les routes et villes principales de l’empire romain ; elle peut être considérée comme l’ancêtre des cartes routières contemporaines.

Le format horizontal très allongé (6,82 m sur 0,34 m) ne permet pas une représentation réaliste des échelles de distance et de la topographie. La carte doit plutôt être vue comme une représentation schématique d’un réseau de routes, à l’image des plans de métros, permettant de se rendre facilement d’un point à un autre, de se renseigner sur les distances entre étapes. De fait, elle est considérée comme la première représentation cartographique d’un réseau. Elle figure des points remarquables (carrefours, thermes) ainsi quéune représentation simplifiée du relief. Les distances sont inscrites en chiffres romains le long des tracés routiers.

Détail de la carte représentant la région Provence - Bouches-du-Rhône.

Copie intégrale consultable en haute-résolution : B I B L I O T H E C A A U G U S T A N A – Tabula Peutingeriana

Jeremy Wood, The World's biggest 'IF'

Last week-end saw one the busiest day at the Kinetica Artfair in London, featuring over 150 exhibiting artists working at the cross-roads of sound / light art, computer art and interactive sculpture, and an extensive programme of related talks. One of them was given by Jeremy Wood, whose work I saw for the first time last year in the V&A Mapping the imagination exhibition. Wood had been working with GPS technology for over 8 years, and started from a disconcertingly simple idea: he noticed the aesthetic qualities of the paths formed on a map by geo-tagged photographs taken during a flight from Berlin to London. From there he has pushed the practice of flying, driving, cycling, walking (and even dog-walking) with a GPS attached, expecting some meaningful shape or pattern to emerge.
It’s interesting to note that while some of this ‘always-on’ recording process may be totally random (and pretty similar to Dan Belasco Rogers‘ work), Wood has also taken a keen interest in plotting routes to achieve a specific – and often funny – purpose (e.g. writing the world’s biggest ‘IF’, or drawing a ship sailing on the shoreline by cycling around the streets of Brighton – amusingly dropping its anchor where it had the most space to draw it in all details: in a park).

Jeremy Wood, Brighton Boat

I would describe Wood’s practice as negotiating around the possibilities offered by space to enable a drawing to take place, diverting and using wearable GPS technology as a mark-making tool. Initially a method for the military to record spatial activity, the technology has also become in the hands of Wood an ‘alibi’ to find out what’s going on where – a reminder of Situationist strategies for the Dérive (He has applied psychogeographic principles to a few drawings). In a different strand of works, he also explored the assumed precision level of GPS and has interrogated how accurate and reliable the technology actually is.
His work has obvious parallels with art movements of the last century: GPS drawings by animals echo the surrealists’ use of snails to paint. The special relationship to the territory established through walking as a creative act is also found in the work of many land artists, including Richard Long and the Stalker collective.
I was curious to figure out how much importance real-time feedback takes in this kind of work – I guess a lot of the fun is about experiencing it for yourself. Good, because Wood actually happens to run regular GPS drawing workshops with schools, local authorities and art galleries.

http://gpsdrawing.com/

Historiquement, les premières cartes furent nées du besoin de s’orienter le long d’un parcours prédéfini, souvent à l’occasion de pélerinages (voir les précédents articles au sujet du ‘wayfinding’: On Cognitive Mapping, ou l’Itinerary map de Matthew Paris) . Elles alignaient des injonctions performatives le long d’un tracé linéaire ponctué d’étapes à effectuer. En celà, elles sont d’après de Certeau un “memorandum prescrivant des actions, une chaîne d’operations spatialisantes piquetées de références a ce qu’elle produit – des représentations de lieux”. Les cartes d’alors agissaient comme « le récit d’un espace, un tissu narratif ou prédominent des descripteurs d’itinéraires ponctués par des citations d’effets résultants ou autorisants ». Le terme de ‘plan’ se referrerait alors plus a un plan d’action qu’à la projection d’un espace sur une surface.

"A road from Chelsea to St James Park Gate", engraved map found on the pavement of Duke of York Square, Chelsea (London)

Étymologiquement, le mot anglais ‘map’ provient du latin mappamundi, description du monde par une « nappe » de signes – littéralement une toile jetée sur le globe pour le recouvrir de tracés structurants. Une ‘map’ ou carte est donc l’objet plan que l’on en retire. Or, les premières cartes du monde étaient plus le fait de conventions symboliques que d’une observation cartésienne – les cartes « T-O », s’inscrivant dans un disque, sont par exemple le pur produit de contraintes de représentation et de symbolisme religieux. Le format rectangulaire semble s’imposer à mesure que l’on passe d’une vision du monde dominée par la religion à une vision du monde plus cartésienne, au cours de la période qui a vu la naissance du discours scientifique (XVe – XVIIIe siècles). Au cours de la même période, les cartes se sont aussi défaites des itinéraires.

A l’époque de l’exploration du monde, la cartographie a permis de penser l’espace et la place de l’Homme dans le monde, une vision et un équilibre progressivement modifies par la La découverte de nouveaux territoires. se penser soi-même en se projetant dans l’espace.

La cartographie moderne consiste en une juxtaposition d’éléments disparates, dont la plupart ne sont même plus des représentations du monde visible. Ces éléments sont produit par une observation, un recensement et non plus par une spéculation ou une diction, et sont rassemblés pour former le tableau d’un « état » du savoir géographique, formant un système de lieux géographiques isolés dépouillé de logique opératoire, sans « avant ni après », pour reprendre la formule de de Certeau. « Là où la carte découpe, le récit traverse ».

La carte s’incrit dans la logique de Port-Royal au même titre que le tableau : ce sont des images, mais elles fonctionnent sur un mode différent : La carte ne résulte pas d’un système perspectif, ou l’oeil est positionné strictement au point de vue. Elle met en jeu differents dispositifs de vision, differents types de représentation de l’espace. Elle ne fournit pas « une vue à travers » mais « une vue sur ». La carte n’est pas un paysage vu de loin, elle est le fruit d’un panoramique conceptuel. Il n’y a pas mise distance d’un objet visuel, mais carrément rupture de niveau. (Victor Stoichita)

Cartographier, c’est donc porter un regard sans centre ni horizon, prémisse du « regard panoptique » de Foucault.²

^{Michel de Certeau, Récits d’espace, in L’invention du quotidien, Tome 1 : arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990, p.171.}

^{Christine Buci-Glucksmann, L’oeil cartographique de l’Art, Galilée 1998}

Cette carte de France à la toponymie fantaisiste n’est autre que l’illustration du LP de Ich Bin, “Obéis!”, sorti chez Poutre Apparente.

La représentation d’un territoire parsemé de symboles militaires ferait penser à une carte d’état-major, si les noms de sa géographie n’étaient pas humoristiquement travestis en noms imaginaires, tels Mulhouse qui trone en tant que capitale, ou le mont Jacques Chirac qui domine les Ardennes.

Plus d’infos, tracklist et bios sont disponibles sur le site de Poutre Apparente.

What are Germans interested in on the Internet? And how is their interest distributed regionally? Die Zeit’s “Google Karte” shows how 64 keywords score across the country – the map indicates where something was searched the most using Google. For example, ‘Work’ is searched nowhere as much as in Rostock. ‘Wealth’ and ‘progress’ are predominantly East-German. Westeners are searching mostly for ‘career’, ‘greed’ and money.

Related words are often searched in particular cities: Dresden is searching for ‘flirtation’ and ’suspense’. Augsburg for ‘infidelity’ and ‘passion’. Bielefeld for ‘happiness’ and ‘laughter’. ‘Hope’ as well as ‘fear’ are found close together – in Gießen.

Die Zeit’s Google Deutschlandkarte