Reading Response

© 2013 Laura Kurgan z o n e b o o k s

1226 Prospect Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11218

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the Publisher.

Printed in Canada.

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kurgan, Laura. Close up at a distance : mapping, technology, and politics / Laura Kurgan. p. cm. isbn 978-1-935408-28-4 (alk. paper) 1. Satellite image maps. 2. Remote-sensing images— Political aspects. 3. Global positioning system—Social aspects. 4. Aerial photography. I. Title.

g70.4.k87 2013

526—dc23

2012040173

16 clos e up at a di stan ce

of electromagnetic signals, Einstein could finish his description of the electromag- netic theory of moving bodies without spatial or temporal reference to any specially picked-out rest frame, whether in the ether or on earth. No center remained.”13 In fact, GPS and a whole new set of technologies linked to it have introduced, or hyperbolized, a profound decentering or disorientation, and it is that loss of absolute reference points—and the political engagements and commitments that can be enabled by that loss—that are explored in the projects chronicled here.

from theory to practice

We constantly read maps. In print and on computers, mobile phones, PowerPoint presentations, and blogs, maps visualize everything from the movement of hur- ricanes and refugees to the patterns of traffic and shifting electoral landscapes. Maps and the sophisticated technologies that create them are not limited, of course, to the public domain—we can only imagine the complex maps housed in the nose cone of a cruise missile or those that detail the location of every phone call and email intercepted by the Department of Homeland Security. But we tend generally to reduce maps to the diagrams we hold in our hands. They show us where we are and how to get somewhere else, and in doing so, they can contribute to a sense of security and self-possession. The solidity and certainty of the phrase “You are here” would be the motto of that identity-reinforcing—and maybe even identity-constitutive—function of maps. The more they become our everyday means of navigating simple and complex situations alike, the more we take maps for granted. Rather than the interpretations of information that they are, we too often see them simply as representations and descriptions of space. This makes the task of analyzing them even more critical. Maps locate. We can read them because they come laden with conventions, ranging from their legend, scale, and codes of graphic representation to what counts as the information they represent. They depend on a system of notation or of coordinates that places things in relation to one another. This holds for maps that claim to represent physical spaces as well as those that diagram or chart the relative location of nonphysical entities: maps of a family or kinship structure, for instance, or the flows of data through a network. The spaces that maps try to describe can be ideal, psychological, virtual, immaterial, or imagi- nary—and they are never just physical. This drive to locate, to coordinate, however revelatory and even emancipatory it can be, also has its price. It seems as though in the end, maps—the successful ones, the ones that show us where we are and get us from here to there—risk offering only two alternatives. They let us see too much, and hence blind us to

a pro blem of theory a nd pract ice 17

what we cannot see, imposing a quiet tyranny of orientation that erases the pos- sibility of disoriented discovery, or they lose sight of all the other things that we ought to see. They omit, according to their conventions, those invisible lines of people, places, and networks that create the most common spaces we live in today. It is this comfortable sense of orientation, of there being a fixed point, a center from which we can determine with certainty where we are, who we are, or where we are going, that the projects in this book challenge. They put the project of ori- entation—visibility, location, use, action, and exploration—into question, and they do so without dispensing with maps. The maps here are built with GPS, satellite images, databases, and geographic information systems (GIS) software: digital spatial technologies originally designed for military and governmental purposes such as reconnaissance, monitoring, bal- listics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the poli- tics and complexities of their intended uses, these maps attempt to understand them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, they intend to uncover the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information that they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. These projects expose the materials they work with in order to reclaim, repurpose, and discover their inadvertent, sometimes critical, often propositional, uses. They can be used to document, memorialize, preserve, interpret, and politicize, or simply as aesthetic devices, but as with all maps, the ones here—as well as the data sets and the technologies used to chart them—are not neutral.

“what is called reality is constituted in a complex of representations”

Every spot on earth can be located, calculated, and represented in multiple descriptive systems. The digitization of the globe was prefigured by the ancient Greek system of latitudinal and longitudinal lines, translating the surface of the Earth into an abstract and universal grid. Irrespective of politics, place names, borders, or changing environments, places were fixed within the mathematical descriptions of their location. A network of atomic clocks, cameras, and computers has built a virtual globe on which any point of physical space is easily coordinated with digital space. With this change comes the potential to move digital information very quickly from one place to another. We are familiar with the idea that new spaces are today being constructed—spaces different from the ones in which our bodies normally move—but we don’t quite know what to think about them. They are the nether- land spaces of electronic money, information warfare, and dataveillance, but they

18 c lo se u p at a dista nce

are also the spaces of the everyday, such as mobile phone calls, radio stations, navigation systems, and online social networks. To call this the “coordination” of physical space with digital space, as I just did, perhaps understates things. The digital and the physical globes interact in pro- found ways, constituting in effect a question about which globe has the priority. In these days when virtual coordinates direct missiles to their targets and social networks have allowed phone companies and other collectors of our data trails to predict our next move in physical space, the shift has resulted in a radical trans- formation—we can never be sure which coordinate system takes priority in terms of representing our identity or our spatial movements. Some years ago, Rosalyn Deutsche noted that “what is called reality—social meaning, relations, values, identities—is constituted in a complex of representa- tions.” This book experiments with that claim, tests its bearing on our new digital spatial realm, and ends up confirming it in its most radical formulations:

Reality and representation mutually imply each other. This does not mean, as it is

frequently held, that no reality exists or that it is unknowable, but only that no

founding presence, no objective source, or privileged ground of meaning, ensures a

truth lurking behind representations and independent of subjects. Nor is the stress

on representation a desertion of the field of politics; rather, it expands and recasts

our conception of the political to include the forms of discourse. We might even say

that it is thanks to the deconstruction of a privileged ground and the recognized

impossibility of exterior standpoints that politics becomes a necessity. For in the

absence of given or nonrelational meanings, any claim to know directly a truth out-

side representation emerges as an authoritarian form of representation employed

in battles to name reality. There can never be an unproblematic—simply given—

”representation of politics,” but there is always a politics of representation.14