24 cartographic perspectives Number 53, Winter 2006 Art-Machines, Body-Ovens and Map-Recipes: Entries for a Psychogeographic Dictionary kanarinka The Institute for Infinitely Small Things [email protected] A map is more than a picture, but what are art- et’s get it all on the table: I’m no cartographer and ists doing about it? “Mapping” has exploded as an this essay can’t tell you what cartography is, or artistic practice. Artists are making geographic maps, where it has been, or where it’s going. psychogeographic maps, sound maps, demographic What I can tell you is that practices near cartogra- maps, data-driven maps, and emotional maps. Artists phy, often involving cartography, have exploded as an are performing maps—enacting and documenting artistic practice. Artists are making geographic maps, location like never before. With the advent of new psychogeographic maps, demographic maps, data- media art, GIS and mobile technologies, the concern driven maps, emotional maps. Artists are performing with data collection and mapping through locative maps—enacting and documenting location like never media is pursued with both romance and critical- before. With the advent of new media art and mobile ity. This article presents a dictionary of terms and technologies, the concern with data collection and projects that demonstrate the variety and complexity mapping through locative media is pursued with both of these map-art practices. These projects utilize the romance and criticality. What I’ve attempted here is a map in a political and social dimension to produce dictionary of terms and projects that demonstrate the new configurations of space, subjectivity and power. variety and complexity of these map-art practices. Their methodology is based on an ethics of experi- As an artist, what I have seen in the past few years mentation; the map is a tool to experiment with a is an exciting convergence of artistic and cartographic particular territory in specific ways in order to reach practices under the term “psychogeography” (see unforeseen destinations. Psychogeography). The interesting thing is that the practices that are emerging might be unrecognizable Keywords: psychogeography, art, technology, politi- to professionals in either field. The projects I describe cal mapping, social mapping, public space, urbanism, might not qualify as cartography and they might also performance, counter-authorship, cooking not be art. Where then are these projects located? Per- haps the are located in a third space (or fourth, fifth, INTRODUCTION or nth space that has yet to be given a name). What is certain is that all of the projects have an interest in the The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual ar- articulation of space, in social and political engage- chive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive ment, and in geographies of various kinds. Whether with the whole social field. It is an abstract ma- the projects qualify as art or as cartography is not chine. It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, necessarily the most interesting question. What’s more even though it makes others see and speak. important is the kind of agency that these projects pro- Deleuze (1988) pose: in other words, what do these projects do? “Cartography” refers to the choice of new worlds, What is a Map? It’s Not a Picture new societies. Here, the practice of the cartographer is immediately political. Like making a painting, making a map is tradition- Rolnik (1998) ally associated with representation and the “totalizing Initial submission, September 9, 2005; final acceptance, November 15, 2005 Number 53, Winter 2006 cartographic perspectives 25 eye”; the desire to see, know, and grasp the world in make pictures. What do we do now? Do we now need its totality. As DeCerteau (1984) acknowledges in his to make pictures that incorporate time? Do we make book, The Practice of Everyday Life: pictures that incorporate time and assert our own The desire to see the city preceded the means of politically fallible, class/race/culture-based subjective satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters rep- perspective? resented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye That sounds way too complicated. had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the me- dieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. It’s Not About Making a Better Picture The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic The question now for artists (and likely for cartog- drive haunts users of architectural productions by raphers) is emphatically not how to make a “better” materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only picture or a more “accurate” map. The world, in fact, painted. […] The panorama-city is a “theoretical” (that needs no representations at all. It needs new relations is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condi- and new uses: in other words, it needs new events, tion of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstand- inventions, actions, activities, experiments, interven- ing of practices (92). tions, infiltrations, ceremonies, situations, episodes Mapping in this traditional sense is associated with and catastrophes. We have departed from a world of spatial, pictographic practices, that is to say, with the forms and objects and entered a world of relations and creation of a representation of the world. A map is a events. But we still desperately need art and maps. picture of reality – a representation of the earth’s sur- Is it possible to think of a map not as a representa- face; a real, neutral, objective representation, just like a tion of reality but as a tool to produce reality? photograph. A picture of an apple describes an apple. Right? Wrong. Beep. Sorry. Maps: Recipes for the Future Any representation of the world that asserts its neutrality and objectivity is immediately suspect. As Deleuze (1988) says, a map is “an abstract machine. Representations, pictures, descriptions must be con- It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, even sidered in the light of their production and the politics though it makes others see and speak” (34). The map of power. Whose apple? Whose map? Whose city? is a machine oriented towards experimentation with Making art, like making maps, is about making a se- the real. It is “abstract” because the map in no way lection from the complexity of the world, choosing to represents what is already actual and determined, but highlight certain things while others go unnoticed. As instead offers a field of potential space, an array of po- Deleuze puts it at one point, “many cities and always tential uses of the actual. It is a “machine” because of another city in the city” (Rajchman, 2000: 74). So many its ability to bring heterogeneous elements of a system perspectives, so many people, so many politics. This into connection with one another. can often leave an artist (and a cartographer, I imag- The map is software in this sense. It is intimately ine) in a perspectival quandary – how does one do associated with the performances that make use of it, anything at all? something like a cooking recipe. A recipe is an abstract Compounding the problem is the accelerated pace set of instructions designed for concrete use. Recipes at which the world now operates. If the information can be more and less specific (a dash of this or that), revolution and the knowledge economies of the past but are never fully determined without being enacted half-century have taught us anything, it is that the and performed. dimension of time is of utmost consideration. Fixed Who or what performs a recipe to make a turkey, representations rapidly decay into unusability and for example? A combination of bodies and machines anachronism. As the rates of information transfer and (the chef/s, the knives, the oven), and you could never physical production accelerate, the picture cannot keep mistake a recipe—usually a set of instructions on pa- up. The workings of this complex world of informa- per—for the turkey that it produces. The recipe doesn’t tional capitalism, a term coined by Castells (2000), depict the turkey, describe the turkey, or say anything have conspired against the inert picture: at all about any turkey it’s ever produced. A recipe What characterizes the current technological revo- is a machine that produces a turkey when combined lution is not the centrality of knowledge and infor- with certain concrete agents, bodies and situations (the mation, but the application of such knowledge and chef, the turkey, the oven, the holiday). Recipes don’t information to knowledge generation and information just produce turkeys – they can produce cookies, good processing/communication devices, in a cumulative cheer, changes in blood sugar, social mishaps, and so feedback loop between innovation and the uses of in- on. novation (16). The recipe includes its baking performances and Cartographers used to make maps. Artists used to social outcomes in a “virtual” space (which is distinct 26 cartographic perspectives Number 53, Winter 2006 from cyberspace’s “virtual”) that stretches out into a So what constitutes a complex system? The thing quasi-infinity of potential uses. There are so many dif- is, everything is complex! When you shift perspective, ferent turkeys that one could bake, so many holidays change your scale of investigation (see Scale), things to have. Like a recipe, a map needs to be activated and that we think of as simple building blocks are revealed used—supplied with particular agents, goals, ingredi- to be parts of large, cooperative systems and contain ents, data and other specifics—in order to do anything within them complex systems of their own. At differ- useful.