Like Denis Wood’s hand-drawn maps of Boylan Heights in Everything Sings, GIS maps of New York, Berlin, London, or Amsterdam reproduced by Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano in their book HyperCities, Jeremy Wood’s Meridian GPS drawings in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall’s compendium Else/Where, and the forensic maps that are the topic of our next commentary, these are “thick” or “deep” maps, extensible and polyvocal, products of an ongoing practice of collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data.Īs this list of examples shows, the difference between top-down and bottom-up mapping is not technologically determined: many hand-drawn or print maps are as multiple and contingent as the Situationists’ Paris or Wood’s Boylan Heights, while many digital maps appear to be as flat, frozen, and definitive as Szymborska’s “world/not of this world.” What is striking about contemporary developments in mapping, however, is the way in which GIS, GPS, and remote satellite imaging seem to have intensified the divide between top-down and bottom-up mapping, between rational, objective, and scientific representations of fixed space, on the one hand, and experiential, phenomenological, and humanistic representations of lived space, on the other.Īs Jordan Crandall forcefully demonstrates in his essay “Operational Media,” contemporary mapping technologies originated in, proliferate through, and flourish in response to the needs of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Such as Mieko Shiomi, On Kawara, Christian Boltanski, and Bruce Nauman writers such as Iain Sinclair in London Orbital and new media poets such as Wilfried Hou Je Bek in his map piece.

Yoko Ono, 'Map Piece(s),' Grapefruit (Bellport, NY: Wunternaum Press, 1964) Their gist is captured in the spirit of two of Yoko Ono’s Fluxus event scripts, both titled “Map Piece,” published in Grapefruit and pursued in projects by artists Imagined and/or executed by pedestrian-cartographers, walking maps follow Debord’s “ethic of drifting” (quoted O’Rourke 7). The gaps in Situationist maps, the time-signature of maps created through GPS or GIS technologies, and the open-endedness of the projects explored in Karen O’Rourke’s valuable book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers all suggest that bottom-up mapping is never quite completed. The observers that create and are created by this kind of mapping are performative, embodied, in the thick of things, looking for the entrances and exits Szymborska calls “outlets,” and, like Debord and Jorn, willing, even eager, to get lost. Like our always-disturbed world, these maps are often collective, contentious, and unsettled in their search for a form that might capture the mutable, multiple, and contingent view from below.

a world / not of this world,” Surreal, Situationist, and locative new media cartography works from the bottom-up. If a top-down view creates, in Szymborska’s final lines, “. “Mass graves and sudden ruins are,” Szymborska observes, “out of the picture.” The map and its viewer, each occupying half the stanza, co-construct each other as rational, objective, and still. adopts a line of sight on the horizon that freezes and flattens all before her into a calculable, two-dimensional frame” (132). Here, as Rita Raley puts it, “a single, neutral observer. This is the bird’s-eye or top-down view, the perspective Michel de Certeau identifies as abstracted, mental, and totalizing (91-3).

“I like maps,” Szymborska writes, “because they lie,/ Because they give no access to the vicious truth.” The map, she says, is In her final poem, “Map,” Wislawa Szymborska describes a constitutive separation, a distance between map and viewer that suggests some reasons why post-Enlightenment Western mapping might be thought to have lost its body. So why, then, do we identify a cluster of maps that use the affordances of GPS, GIS, and remote satellite imaging as embodied or locative maps? The map, as the saying goes, is not the territory but an abstraction of the territory, not a place but an idea of place that takes material form to support a plan, route a journey, mark ownership, establish zones, and/or underwrite an ideology. Every map, if it is to be readable, makes use of a signifying system to locate or fix the position of something in relation to something else. What does it mean to describe a map as embodied or a mapping practice as locative? With the exception, perhaps, of cognitive maps lodged deep in the brain, most maps are scratched, traced, drawn, stitched, or plotted on rock or sand, parchment, paper, cloth, or a pixelated screen.

Paula Levine, Shadows from Another Place: San Francisco Baghdad

Yoko ono grapefruit map piece