Contextualization
Maps are traditionally associated with geography and representation. Mapping is commonly understood as an activity that represents a geographical surface, and that produces knowledge in a fashion entangled with power relations. Maps are thus considered in terms of visual images with rhetorical power. Here, we examine a variety of critiques articulated in discourses on the history of cartography. At the dawn of wide scale technical and cultural transformations made possible by the current development of digital technologies, we propose a number of visual strategies to creatively and critically engage with these critiques.
Digital technologies are currently expanding and propelling the possibilities for producing maps. Digital technologies hold the potential to thwart the normative models of maps production such as staticity, referenciality, scientificity. These normative models are mainly engrained in map's representational form. In fact, the traditional stasis associated with visual representation seems to restrain the possibilities for the integration of dynamic processes. However, the digital realm reveals itself as an extremely powerful way for making maps in continuous transformation: metastable and moving maps. That is to say, generative rather than representational maps. Following Korzybski who claimed that the map is not the territory, and Baudrillard who said that the territory does not precede the map, we wish to interrogate the possibility for creating maps in continuous becoming, e.g. the possibility of mapping relations and movement through the production of moving maps. One of our key question is to ask whether it is possible to map movement instead of mapping territories. To put it in other words, we wish to find strategies for mapping moving territories: connexions and relationalities. Drawing from different resources on the history of cartography we wish to resist to some traditional and problematic ways of creating maps. Although resistance is not understood here as a reaction against representation, or even worse as a renunciation. It is rather understood in terms of a creation activated within the act of representing itself. Creation thus becomes a a line of flight. However, as notices it Agamben, a line of flight does not mean detour, non-confrontation, but rather resistance. He adds that it is a question of thinking “a flight that does not involve an evasion, but a movement in the situation where it is happening.”1 Our strategy is therefore not to hijack the critiques we are presenting here. Rather we aim at integrating them as creative endeavours, as motors of creation.