Location-Specific Art Practices
Subject
A body of art practice that uses location technology to challenge what a map is and what it can be for — treating cartography as a medium, and considering the normative use of maps as conventions that might be broken in interesting ways.
Nearly everyone now navigates through a small number of commercial mapping services whose selection, ranking, naming and rendering decisions are proprietary. The practices in this Location-Specific Art Practices present a catalog of the questions that might be asked of those services — and a potential demonstration of alternative experiences and possibilities.
Assumptions built into the standard map:
- A view from above and nowhere. The map is drawn from a position no observer occupies, which produces its air of objectivity.
- A single moment. Maps are static; the territory is not.
- Selection presented as completeness. Everything on a map was chosen; nothing indicates what was left out.
- Naming as fact. Place names on a map are the names used by whoever made it.
- Space as container. The map shows where things are, not how the space is produced or by whom — the objection Lefebvre makes to "representations of space." See The Production of Space.
Example Practices
Practices in this tradition include: trace maps recording a single body's actual path rather than an abstract network; emotional and affective mapping, charting fear, comfort or memory across a terrain, in the psychogeographic lineage of Debord; sound and smell maps, substituting a non-visual sense for the visual convention; temporal maps that show a place across time rather than at an instant; counter-maps that add what official cartography omits (see An Atlas of Radical Cartography); participatory maps made by inhabitants rather than surveyors; and deliberately unusable maps — deformed, subjective or partial — that make the fact of construction visible by refusing to function.
Christian Nold's Bio Mapping and Emotion Maps projects, which recorded galvanic skin response alongside GPS position to produce maps of arousal across a walked route, are among the best-documented examples, and are notable for having been made with participants rather than about them.
Work in this area encounters a consistent problem, identified early by locative media literature. A map that successfully refuses the conventions of mapping loses the authority that made mapping worth appropriating. The counter-map borrows credibility from the form it is attacking, and the more thoroughly it breaks the form, the less it borrows. Most durable projects in the tradition therefore keep the map's visual grammar and change only its content — which is effective, and which leaves the deeper assumptions intact.
