An Atlas of Radical Cartography

Editors

Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat. Mogel is an artist working with cartography and public space; Bhagat is a writer and curator.

Publication Details

An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9791377-2-3.

The physical object is part of the argument: the book consists of ten folded maps in a sleeve, paired with ten essays, so that the maps can be removed, unfolded, pinned up and used rather than merely read about. It began as a travelling exhibition.

Description

The collection assembles work by artists, geographers and activists who use mapping as a form of argument. Its premise is that maps are never neutral: every map is the product of decisions about what to include, what to name, what projection to use and what to leave blank, and those decisions carry a politics whether or not anyone intends one. Radical cartography makes the politics explicit and puts the technique to different ends.

Contributors include Trevor Paglen, Ashley Hunt, Pedro Lasch, Damon Rich, Jai Sen, Avery Gordon, Heather Rogers, the Institute for Applied Autonomy and others. The maps address subjects that conventional cartography does not map or maps in ways that conceal: the geography of the US prison system; the routes and infrastructure of migration; the flow of waste; oil and its supply chains; surveillance camera placement and the paths that avoid them; and the spatial distribution of privatised space in cities.

Key Ideas

• Counter-mapping. Using the authority of the map form against the interests it usually serves. Because maps are read as neutral descriptions, a map is unusually persuasive — which is exactly why the technique is worth taking from the institutions that monopolise it.
• What is not mapped is not seen. Absence from a map is a form of non-existence for planning and policy purposes. Much radical cartography is simply the act of putting something on a map for the first time.
• Maps as tools, not representations. The insistence that a map is for doing something — orienting, organising, arguing — rather than for depicting. Hence the folded, removable, usable format.
• The projection problem. The old observation, from Peters onward, that every projection distorts, that there is no neutral choice, and that the standard choices have histories.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Almost everyone now navigates through a small number of commercial mapping services whose inclusion decisions, ranking, labelling and rendering are proprietary and unexamined. The radical cartography tradition supplies the questions worth asking of them: what is shown, what is omitted, what is named and by whose name, what is ranked first, what a "place" has to be in order to appear at all, and who benefits from the answers.

It also connects directly to narrative archaeology and the locative media tradition: both are concerned with attaching information to terrain, and both ran into the same question of who gets to annotate the world.

Related Reading

• Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World
• Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism
• Else/Where: Mapping - New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
• Narrative Archaeology
• Geocloaking