[Sebastian Campion / Urban Cursor / 2009]

A few weeks ago the Cyprus-based NeMe art/theory platform published a compelling essay entitled Writing Within the Map produced by the scholar and artist Jeremy Hight. The text is engaging for a number of reasons – it sharply delineates how maps are temporal artifacts, interrogates the legacy of publishing and it provides a subtle examination of the narrative qualities of space. Contemporary media and technology writing would be in a much better state if all the tech journalists sipping on the augmented reality (AR) Kool-Aid—undoubtedly spiked with hallucinogens by the marketing team—read Hight's text and spent some time considering his nuanced perspective. The essay touches on a number of topics and I'd like to unpack a handful of these and discuss some related developments.

Perhaps the most noteworthy quality of Writing Within the Map is how closely it hugs the literary tradition. Hight points to a number of works of fiction that prefigure the present-day relationship between technology and the city – which we might broadly describe as read/write urbanism (see Shepard & Greenfield's conversation about that terminology). Both Mildorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) and George Perec's Life: A User's Manual (1978) are leveraged as examples of how fiction can be constructed as a experimental frame rather than rely on the conventions of "the novel" to tell stories. Specifically, these texts are examined as encyclopedic puzzles that require the reader to engage the non-standard parameters of the narrative in order to navigate. Hight springboards from these examples of non-linear fiction into the "spatialized narratives, multi-sensory mapping and the possibility of tagging" in AR and locative media and in making this connection explicit he keeps us firmly grounded in the 20th century. An excerpt:

To "read" a place is no longer about placing a singular narrative upon it, triggered from a map, nor is this notion of "reading" only to have a singular, unalterable experience or interpretation. To "publish" has long been a general association of taking a work and finding a print or web space for it to be presented as more than just a work in progress. This has also long been problematic as well as a gross oversimplification. To "publish" is also self publication and distribution in communities or like minded groups without the hard read of publication or rejection. Well, aren’t cities the same? Aren't all places to be interpreted as such?

Hight transitions from scrutinizing notions of reading and publishing into a vital discussion of how point of view (POV) plays out in literature and space. Conversations about first and third-person narrative highlight how both these strategies for storytelling engender the delineation of experience and cave paintings, trail markings, written prose and AR overlays are all equalized as related techniques of graphic communication. Hight's central question: what is the significance of the fact that the map can now function as "the archive" and act as the receptacle in which we store everything – fact and fiction, qualitative and quantitative information, both subjective and objective perspectives. One one hand High is proposing an unruly mess—information overload—but one can't help but imagine how fascinating it would be to navigate a map of a city like Rome, where the layers of historical annotations would reflect the patinaed palimpsest of the urban fabric.

[Holden Caulfield's Manhattan in The Catcher in the Rye]

Given the traditional uses of maps for navigation and record-keeping, methodically geolocating fictional events may seem indulgent or even irrelevant. However, the application of this kind of rigor may be just what the humanities need – this kind of approach could definitely inform cultural geography and literary studies. The above still is from an interactive map produced by The New York Times Graphic Department (in January) that depicts the site of numerous passages from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In browsing these quotes the linear narrative of the source novel disintegrates – a carefully orchestrated procession of scenes are scattered across the city like seeds thrown into the wind. This recontextualization of narrative raises two questions:

• How might narrative and the walking tour intersect? (see Conor McGarrigle's 2008 project Joyce Walks)
• Reverse engineering the cartography that underlies a novel is simple enough, but what fiction and new media work might we look to as examples of spatial narratives? (that is not a rhetorical question - please leave links and suggestions as comments)

These questions are obviously not limited to literature as location scouting within the pre-production stages of a commercial film project explicitly spatializes narrative. The irony here is that places are (generally) used as "extras" – to sub in for inaccessible locations in favour of cheap approximations. A great example of a project that capitalizes on the tension between artifice and reality is Thom Andersen's 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, an exhaustive excavation of the mythologized (and genericized) L.A. of 20th century American cinema.

[Layar AR Browser / comprehensive overview]

A particularly evocative moment in Writing Within the Map occurs in schematizing third-person POV in narrative as "…the distant 'he' or 'she' that allows text to be a camera that can zoom along a surface, into space, race down to atoms…" One can't help but wonder if this is the description of kaleidoscopic prose or a seamless 3D interface. While Hight is discussing perspective shifts in locative narrative, I've heard this desire for infinitesimal detail elsewhere over the last several months. Last fall, when I was guest editing the ScienceBlogs Revolutionary Minds Think Tank blog, one of the most provocative contributors was Nick Matzke. When asked what fields he would combine to capitalize on the possibilities of cross-disciplinary research, Matzke (an evolutionary biologist) said history, good "old-fashioned, document-based, interpretive history" could greatly benefit from a technological overhaul. Pointing at the digitization of libraries and alluding to exhaustive text analysis and cross-referencing of historical records, biographical information and the corpus of print media, Matzke proposed docuinformatics – a workflow for quantifying and analyzing influence (and the psychological profile) of significant historical figures. The proposal was undoubtedly speculative but very exciting.

Quantitative Cultural Analysis (QCA) is also a terminology associated with the Software Studies Initiative's Cultural Analytics project. In How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analytics for Beginners (2009), Lev Manovich posed the following question to humanity scholars:

If slides made possible art history, and if a movie projector and video recorder enabled film studies, what new cultural disciplines may emerge out of the use of interactive visualization and data analysis of large cultural data sets?

This question is not dissimilar to Hight's – now that the map is moving towards becoming a "wiki-space", what new modes of representation will emerge?

[Sergei Larenkov / Leningrad merges with St. Petersburg / via: Kosmograd]

Another facet of Writing Within the Map focuses on how maps function as historical documents and how archival information might be deployed in the present. Hight presents a scene of "spatial spelunking" where an explorer moving through downtown Detroit is privy to augmentations that detail the past architectural configurations of the fabulous ruins of Motor City landmarks. In this example, AR functions to amplify historical echoes and call into question the fixity of the space we inhabit. This discussion of foregrounding the past is nicely complimented by The Museum of the Phantom City, an iPhone application that allows inhabitants and visitors of New York City to consider the sites of never realized speculative architectural proposals. Geoff Manaugh nailed the uncanny quality of this app when he discussed it last fall: "You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you're being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur…" We've always used maps as historical records but what are the implications of carrying around archives of unrealized futures on our mobile devices? Armed with (or perhaps encumbered by) this wealth of information, urban navigation and exploration could be drastically transformed.

Using the map to destabalize our perception of time dovetails with some of the main points in Bruce Sterling's recent atemporality keynote at Transmediale. Sterling has really been on a roll of late and he seems to have encapsulated his broad awareness of contemporary manufacturing practice, locative media and social software to astutely contextualize a number of mid-progress cultural shifts. Sterling on the current milieu:

Becoming 'multi-temporal', rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we are closer to a potentially objective history than anybody has ever been.

A "potentially objective history" – that brings us back to docuinformatics, Cultural Analytics and Hight's third-person POV in mapping and literature. Beyond topical relevance it is appropriate to cite Sterling here as his talk and Writing Within the Map are probably the most exciting thinking on media and culture that I've encountered so far this year – they work nicely as a 1-2 punch to address perception/social organization and intoxicating opportunities for representing/experiencing space. Thinking about the broad strokes of both of these provocations leaves me feeling a little wary about the tools in my hand right this moment; the user experience of checking in on Foursquare is about as fun as having bloodwork done and I know better than to think that the location-based functionality Facebook is about to roll out is anything more than a contextual advertising engine. If you excuse me, I'll be keeping my eyes trained on the Situated Technologies pamphlet series and blogs like Rhizome and Creative Apps in hopes of catching a glimpse of prototypes that deliver some of the promised functionality that Hight has so alluringly framed.

Many of these ideas will be revisited on Serial Consign soon as I'm presently conducting an interview with Jeremy that will be published in the coming weeks. Also, if you enjoyed the "persistence of memory" theme that underlies this post, consider checking out Joel Johnson's melancholic Raiding Eternity - posted on Gizmodo last week.

The above image was collected from an excellent article by Jeffrey S. Murray on the importance of surveyors to battlefield mapping in World War I. This map was produced by the 2nd Canadian Division in 1916 to delineate no man's land in the Ypres Salient area (Belgium). The idea of of methodically surveying the opposing edges of dug-in/fortified landscape to outline an amorphous contested zone is fascinating. Think about how diligently these maps would need to be maintained as the Allied and German fronts minutely changed from day to day in a battle of feet and inches. The map is literally a model of uncertainty, only somewhat accurate for a fleeting moment in time. As Murray's article points out, WWI was a proving ground for using advances in aerial imaging to produce more accurate maps, which in turn increased the precision of artillery strikes. This curious passage from the piece describes the friction between artillery crewmen (gunners) and surveyors:

Despite the surveyors' best intentions, many of the old-school gunners thought these new techniques were an ungentlemanly way to conduct war. "A lot of the old traditional gunners, when they found … that people were trying to develop accuracy in shooting were appalled," wrote Canada's Lt.-Col. Andrew McNaughton while planning for the 1917 assault on Vimy Ridge. As one artillery officer once put it, "you surveyors with your angles, co-ordinates and logarithms—you take all the fun out of war." They figured artillery units were supposed to fire at the opposing infantry, not at each other.

I'm not sure what is more humorous here – the idea of civilized trench warfare or the notion that lobbing shells at opposing infantrymen was good sport. In Terrence Malick's masterful The Thin Red Line, Sean Penn's character recognizes the paradox of this kind of operationalized thinking when he observes "we're living in a world that's blowing itself to hell as fast as everybody can arrange it." [via: The Map Room]