Annotating Space
By Emily Lodish
Marc Tuters: I had always been interested in graffiti as a kind of liberatory spatial practice [2], but you can’t deny that it is often vandalism as well–which is often part of the point, "tattooing the social urban body." The idea was to propose a means by which to allow people then to make graffiti without others having to necessarily be exposed to this. On some level this is the exclusion/inclusion gesture that is perhaps at the centre of mapping. If the project were successful it would create something like perceptual ghettos [3]…you could see what you wanted to see, and it wouldn’t necessarily be what I was seeing. This is kinda how things work anyway, so in an important way the whole project was intended as a metaphor and shouldn’t perhaps be associated too closely with the device–just as a note, I, for example, don’t even have a cell phone. It is more about a way of thinking and seeing.
EL: Thoughts on the relationship between mapping and your work?
MT: What we are doing is more suggesting multiple points of view that collaboratively constitute maps from below. Some might argue that it’s not really a map until some people agree on it, like language, mapping would then be something of a "consensual reality." [4] You can say it’s language, but if no one understands it then it’s just noise. I think that in order for something to be a map it has to have some sort of indexical function like the diagram, or else it’s more like sketching.
EL: The invasive potential of this technology seems dangerous to me, and you mention that GPS was initially a military concept.
MT: I consider it condescending for critics to treat the locative artist [5] as some sort of hapless pawn of industry, unwittingly preparing the field for a military of perception simply because he or she chooses to build her practice directly within their circuits of power. I would contend that the socially-aware locative artist is experimenting with a new field of techno-cognition of potentially utopian dimensions.
EL: What are future applications? And will I experience these "potentially utopian dimensions?"
MT: The doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" laid out in the Pentagon’s Long-Range Plan and Vision for 2020 [6] in fact conflates outer space with virtual space. By 2020, vision itself will connect cyberspace with architectonic space so that the territory and the map become inseparable.
Textual Annotations:
[1] Geographiti is a software application for sharing messages and data encoded with positional information over wireless networks. Thus these virtual messages are fixed in real space, and can only be accessed by being physically present at that location, and using the Geographiti application…unlike those scrawlings on the bathroom wall, this is a polite graffiti, only visible to those looking for it…though accessible by everyone on the system, rather than a hierarchy of content creators and content consumers.
— Karlis Kalnis, White Paper: Geographiti at the Banff New Media Institute
[2] The city is a body without organs, and the graffitists themselves come from the territorial order. They territorialize decoded urban spaces–a particular street, wall or district comes to life through them, becoming a collective territory again.
J.M. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Theory, Culture & Society
[3] Collaborative Mapping Projects:
*Steve Bull, Touch Tone Tours, NYC.
*City Lore, City of Memory
*Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow, PDPal, Minneapolis, New York
*Carbon Defense League, MapHub: Urban Storytelling, Pittsburgh
*Julie Mehretu and Entropy8zuper!, Minneapolis and St. Paul Are East African Cities
*Andrea Moed, Annotate Space, DUMBO, New York
*Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, Gabe Sawhney, [murmur], Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal
*Proboscis, Urban Tapestries, London
*Trebor Scholz, Twenty-Four Dollar Island, Lower Manhattan
*Marc Tuter, Karlis Kalnins, Songlines, Utrecht
*Esther Polak and Jeroen Kee, MILK, various Latvian milk farms
[4] See Marc Tuters, "Theorizing the Radical Potential of Location-Aware Mobiles" @
http://www.gpster.net/potentialmobiles.html
[5] In this plan, the United States pursues unilateral total domination of land, sea, air, cyberspace and outer space through weapons and sensors that would come from proposed sea, land, air and space-based missile defense systems. Once a stealth effort led by a tight band of zealots in the Defense Department, the weapons labs and U.S. Space Command, this strategy is now championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and is becoming embedded in U.S. security policy.
— Jonathan Dean and Jonathan Granoff, from "Missile Defense a Threat," Chicago Sun Times, August 11, 2001
