Tactical Cartography: Diagrams of Power
Visualising for the Public Eye
Artists, media activists and researchers have in recent years developed various tools and methods of cartography, aiming to make visible the informal relations that organise business and politics. These endeavours in critical cartography take advantage of the great increases in the traceability of political and powerful actors, events and issues, provided by info and com technologies. As the point is to bring into view the doing and the dealing among " the powerful of this earth," critical cartography brings into view more or less hidden relations among political and powerful institutions.
While these projects are still very much in their beginnings, they have the potential to capture the dynamics of the political games going on in and among bigger and smaller institutions. But, while this type of work has a very specific aim and potential, it also hooks up with a much broader social and political development : the reconfiguration of the relations between the private (secret) and public, between the hidden and the overt, as a consequence of informationalisation. For this reason, there is a weird catch implicit in critical cartography projects : as finally the tools are available to uncover the secrets of backroom scheming, backroom scheming has become a much less powerful source of scandal. As more and more informal politics are captured in media, their revelation is losing some of its disruptive force. For this reason, these projects could be or should be embraced as an important opportunity to re-consider what it means to do critique.
[Participants]
- Brian Holmes, is an art critic, theorist and activist, particularly involved with the mapping of contemporary capitalism.
- Bureau des Etudes - An artist collective from Strasbourg / Paris, France who have produced a series of remarkable mapping projects, developing a schematic iconic language that maps structures of power.
http://bureaudetudes.free.fr/act.html
- Josh On - They Rule.
An artist from the US, who has created an interactive mapping tool for the web, where visitors can explore the nested interests in the American corprorate ruling class.
http://www.theyrule.net/ (tbc)
- Richard Rogers - Issue Atlas project.
A researcher and theorist at the University of Amsterdam and the Royal College of Art, London, and director of Govcom.org. Has done extensive work on tracking and visualising the proliferation of activist issues on the web.
http://www.govcom.org
- Mike Liebhold has done a lot of work on geospatial web design and how this will affect network use and design. Linking of spatial data to coordinates has implications for wifi hot spots to the way people will experience the world off-screen. (tbc)
- Simon Worthington & Jamie King, editors of Mute Magazine, present the project under development Mapping Contemporary Capitalism (McC)
Moderators: Noortje Marres & Eric Kluitenberg