Operational Strategies

Mapping Movement

Stopping is virtually impossible.--Erin Manning(2009)1

Drawing from the critical points we have highlighted, we present here the operational strategies we have developed in order to engage critically and creatively with these critical issues. These strategies will lead the development of our map. The central issue here resides in our objective to map movement: we aim at negating fixed positions in order to foreground movement. Coding maps with digital technologies refers to the act of positioning on a grid. However, our strategies aim at developing means for coding dynamism: to give impulses and virtualities to the grid. Our strategies, we hope, will make operational ways to code an unfixed grid.

Multiple Entries and the Moving Centre

One will enter by any side, none is worth more than another, none of the entries has privileges even if it is almost an impasse (…) One will only seek with which other points the one we enter by is connected to the others, by which crossroads and galleries one passes to connect two points; what is the map of the rhizome, and how it would be immediately modified if one would enter by another point.2

In order to negate hierarchy and produce rhizomatic maps, it appears crucial to us that our maps shall not be generated from a centre from which connexions and relations would derive. To negate the traditional hierarchy imposed by a centre -a centralist and/or hierarchical point of view- the visual presentation points of entry will be distributed and their position on the grid will change over navigation. Consequently, the map viewer/generator will get a different map according to the point of entry he/she will use. In addition, as we don't want to impose a navigation style, the viewer will be invited to navigate in the first page in order to find out the different levels he can engage with.

Multidimensionality and Multireferenciality – The potential for the emergence of transductive operations in the movement of the unfixed grid

To insist on the heterogeneity of the components mapped, the map will be built with different layers that will map different levels of relationality and connectivity. Those will be explained more deeply in the section of our respective projects. The idea here is to add multiple layers so that their accumulation will generate resonances and differences. The fact that the relations and connexions will in a sense be predetermined as they will be encoded will reduce the possibility of generating change. In this regard, we hope that mapping different layers will ensure a productive and creative relation between the digital map (endoding) and the analog process of its reading (decoding or transcoding). In fact, in order to avoid representation and to give impulses and virtualities to our maps -so that they perform a rhizome, a becoming- it is necessary for us to find ways to exceed what Brian Massumi highlights as the limits of the digital. In fact, he argues that the digital only operates on the level of the possible. He says that the digital is not related to the virtual as it only allows a “combinatoric of the possible.”3 Mapping different layers is the strategy we found to facilitate the emergence of new patterns of connexions and relations. We hope that these different layers will operate in a similar way to hypertext. As Massumi argues “the hypertext reader does something that the co-presence of alternative states in code cannot ever do: serially experience effects, accumulate them in an unprogrammed way, in a way that intensifies, creating resonances and interferences patterns moving through the successive, linked appearances.”4 Our idea is to insist on the unfixity of the grid, on its metastability. However it becomes hard as we have to program the map. Programming dynamism sounds simple in the first place but is more difficult than one might think. Programming dynamism and mapping movement has to go further than giving the simple visual impression of movement: both the content and the expression have to perform movement. According to Massumi, himself following Deleuze and Guattari, meaning is situated in between content and expression. In order to generate moving and mutating meaning, it is important to keep in mind that both the content and the expression have to effect movement. Multiplying the layers, we hope will allow both the content and the expression of the map to trigger and generate movement.

The key aspect with the multiplication of layers is the transversality that can be generated through their accumulation/multiplication. Transcoding and transduction is the “manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.”5 In this perspective, multiple meanings could be generated through the transversal operations effected in the overlapping of the various layers. In addition the potential for transductive operations to be effected by our maps foreground our resistance to representation. As Simondon argues, transduction“finds its structures resolving from the tensions of this same field, rather than from external principles.”6 Transduction and transversality foreground the fact that the movement/connexions/relationalities we are mapping are immanent to the map -emerging from within- and not external to it.

Other unexplored possibilities

We thought about integrating sound to the visual as we think sound would increase the potentialities for resonance and interference to occur. Sound might in fact increase the metastable equilibrium of the map and therefore increase the potential for the emergence of multiple readings and meanings.

1 Manning, E. (2009) Relationscapes. MIT Press.

2 Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. (1975) Kafka. Pour une litterature mineure. Les Editions de Minuit. p.7

3 Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press. p.138

4 Ibid.

5 Deleuze. G. et F. Guattari (1980) Milles Plateaux. Les Editions de Minuit. p. 384-385

6 Simondon, G. (1989) Du mode d'existence des objets Techniques. Aubier. p.200