“When, for example, I observe an aerial view of the Ile-de-France, I contemplate an unfamiliar agglomeration I’ve never clapped eyes on or set foot on before; and even if the map of Paris is not the same as the urban territory, such cartography is infinitely more precious to me than its view from the air, because it shows me the breaks, the fractures in the symmetry—in a word, the fractalization of a fabric that photography never lets you see.”
— Paul Virilio, City of Panic. Oxford: Berk, 2004
Which better explains the landscape: maps or photographs? There’s no longer any reason to choose. The potential now exists to create visceral, photo-integrated maps that are able to successfully communicate the urban conditions such as “fractalization.” Applications such as Google Maps increasingly change the way we see, understand, and describe our environment. Cameras with geo-tagging capabilities afford us the opportunity to embed photographs into digital maps, resulting in something that’s more than a record of place; it is a record of time. Moments are mapped and universally accessible; a shared global consciousness arises via shared cartography. The personal becomes public while public space becomes personalized.
Mapping is a convergence of technology and the arts: design, photography, language, history, programming, and economics are all relevant to crafting an understanding of your role in the built environment. But the reverse is also true: an understanding of the built environment helps you understand fields like design, language, and economics. Current real-time mapping enables us to map classes of objects from the global to the local: from far-off military movements to locally-available produce.
From the lost art of the hand-drawn map to live GPS tracking, mapping teaches you the skills required to better understand your position—literally and figuratively—in the world. You’ll need to apply critical thinking skills as you extrapolate and configure data to understand the possibility of multiple “views” of a single location. You will learn to process and codify empirical data to re-present your environment at a various scales.
Please note that this will also include full-scale mapping (please refer to the renowned apocryphal anthropologists Lewis Carroll (Sylvie and Bruno) and Jorge Luis Borges (“On Exactitude and Science,” A Universal History of Infamy) for more information).
Please also note that all students will be required to pay for their own subdermal GPS implants for purposes of tracking and documentation.
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