An Atlas of Radical Cartography, edited by artists Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat (Amazon USA and UK)

The editors say: An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. The map is inherently political-- and the contributions to this book wear their politics on their sleeves.

An Atlas of Radical Cartography provides a critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography, and activism. The maps and essays in this book provoke new understandings of networks and representations of power and its effects on people and places. These new perceptions of the world are the prerequisites of social change.

New York City Garbage Machine, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy

The slipcase contains a set of ten maps and a collection of essays by artists, architects, designers, and writers who illuminate the maps and explore their role as political agent. An Atlas is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking and original publications i've read in a long long time.

First there is a purely aesthetic pleasure of unfolding the maps and discovering the careful, unique and innovative design of each one.

Then the essays are engrossing. They are written by people who have a story to tell you, they are passionate about it, they are angry or worried by the current state of affair but they are also smart enough to know that the best way to solve a problem is to adopt a pro-active attitude.

Right from the cover, showing an "upside-down"map, we are faced with the fact that even the most banal and innocent-looking map has its own agenda, that it is extremely difficult to separate cartography from politics and ideology. Far from being neutral accessories which would merely help you go from point A to point B, maps are often used as instruments for controlling and shaping beliefs. Conversely, maps can also be at the service of protest and social change. That's what the contributors of the Atlas demonstrate. Deliberately, openly and quite convincingly.

Unnayan | Chetla Lock Gate, Marginal Land Settlement in Calcutta, 1984 (detail)

The first map transports you a few decades ago in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Formed in the mid-late 70s, Unnayan was a civil activist groups which campaigned on dwelling, health, labour, schooling and various rights-related issues met by communities in urban and rural areas of eastern India. Unnayan was involved in projects that including preparing maps that identified settlements which existed in Calcutta at the time but were blanked out in officila maps. Elaborated in collaboration with the communities, the maps helped them locate water pumps, roads, but it also made these communities visible on a space which official maps would otherwise define as "vacant land." The vast majority of these maps are destroyed by floods or stolen. Jai Sen, a member of Unnayan, reconstructs fragments of these experiments and puts them on record in Other Worlds, Other Maps: Mapping the Unintended City, his contribution for An Atlas of Radical Cartography.

Institute for Applied Autonomy, iSee

All the other maps are contemporary.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy discusses tactical cartography and how locative media technology can be used by activists as cold and precise weapons to foster critical social engagement. They illustrate the concept by detailing their project iSee, a web-based application developed in collaboration with NYCLU and the Surveillance Camera Players to chart the locations of CCTV cameras in Manhattan. By checking iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras ("paths of least surveillance") allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being "caught on tape" by unregulated security monitors. Their essay explains how stories about the iSee application spread all over the media and generated a series of discussions and debates amongst a -so far- unsuspecting audience. The work also extended to camera-mapping workshops which assumed the double role of rendering the proliferation of surveillance cameras tangible to a general audience and creating an empirical basis for challenging policing and public safety policy.

Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaimen interviews Trevor Paglen about his investigation into extraordinary rendition flights, the tension between art and activism as exemplified by a look at Mark Lombardi's drawings and Ashley Hunt's maps, the reasons why cartography shouldn't be confused with geography, etc.

Olivier Clochard and Philippe Rekacewicz, Death at Europe frontiers

I found An Architektur's contribution to the book illuminating. Because of what i read in the media and because of the intense pleasure i experience when i am treated like a delinquent by the "immigration" officers each time my plane land in the U.S., i often have this vision that the U.S. is the evil one in the quest of security and border control. An Architektur, a collective that applies sociopolitical questions to space and architecture, proves me wrong by exposing the European Union's efforts to tighten its borders against asylum seekers and people looking for a better life. Hence, the need to close hermetically the access to EU and to park inside a migration camp anyone managing to jump above the wired fences. An Architektur points to several maps which illustrate the issue such as Migreurop' s From European Migration and Asylum Policies. to Camps for Foreigners map (PDF), - Hackitectura's map that rethinks the frontier between Morocco and Spain, replacing the concept of border as space of separation with site of connection and reciprocal flow, etc. A striking example is the article and map called Death at Europe frontiers where Olivier Clochard and Philippe Rekacewicz document the death occurred while trying to reach the territory of the European Union. Only documented death are taken into account but their number goes way beyond the 7 000 between 1993 and 2006 (3 000 from December 2003 to 2006). The map shows that danger doesn't stop when the border is crossed. Once inside the EU, migrants have to face racist attacks, unsafe working conditions for the illegals, police repression, internment camps, etc.

Pedro Lasch, Guías de Ruta / Route Guides, 2003/2006,

These were just a few lines about 4 of the maps and essays you'll find in An Atlas of Radical Cartography. There's also Pedro Lasch's beautifully symbolic map of the America/Latin America relationships, Lize Mogel's politically heavy re-lecture of the map of the San Francisco Bay Area, Jane Tsong's children science textbook-style drawings which reveal what it takes to be able to turn on the tap in her bathroom, the Center for Urban Pedagogy's well-documented New York City Garbage Machine describes the fight for power over the bins, Brooke Singer's The US Oil Fix demonstrates the impact that the US addiction to fossil fuels has on the rest of the world and Ashley Hunt's A World Map tackles the world capitalist system.

An Atlas takes also the form of a touring exhibition which is making a stop over unitl May 6, 2008 at Dowd Fine Art Gallery, SUNY Cortland, NY.

Related: Resistant Maps (part 1) - Introduction, Resistant Maps (part 2) - GuerrigliaMarketing.

I am quite enthusiastic about this year's edition of Transmediale. The theme was Conspire and as such it attempted to enter the increasingly prevalent yet ambiguous worlds of network induced narratives, cryptic environments and speculative inquiry. As far as i can tell (i missed the three first days of the festival), the festival delivered its promises.

Here are the notes i took during the talk of Eva Horn who was part of Session 4: Techno-Historical Collusions: The Making Of A Trojan Horse. This session investigated the way politics, narrative, technology and belief systems collude.

From left to right: moderator: Florian Cramer. Speakers Eva Horn, Trevor Paglen, Pierre Lagrange and brespondent: Konrad Becker

Eva Horn is a professor of German Literature at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on literature and war in the twentieth century. She has recently finished a manuscript titled The Secret War: Espionage, Treason and Modern Literature (in German). She is the author of "Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence" (Grey Room).

In her talk, Eva Horn analyzed conspiracy theories that have emerged after 9/11 as an example of a political discourse in the internet.

Image

Unlike the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 9/11 tragedy didn't appear at first sight as a conspiracy. Several other explanations were proposed on the first few days which followed 9/11.

She quote President Bush, in a talk to the United Nations, urged people to reject conspiracy theories:

Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.

The main catch phrase in the discourse about the perpetrators of 9/11 is the term "Network(s)". Another quote from the National Security Strategy offices:

Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us.

This text emphasizes the cheapness of this kind of strategy. It also blurs the line between individual and political acts. 9/11 here is about networks. Invisible, latent networks become all of a sudden visible.

Mathias Bröckers's work "The WTC Conspiracy" tries to list facts that do not agree with the official version of the event. It has been translated into english only very recently. Can't find any trace of it

History Commons is an interactive timeline projects everyone can contribute to by adding facts (not opinions) relevant to the 9/11 events. The website provides users with detailed information about and around 9/11. Minute by minute. It also engages with the roads that led to 9/11. The aim is not to try and sell any coherent truth but rather to raise questions and point out incoherences in the official version. The timeline is not complete but provides an open source material that gives readers an idea of how complex the structure of politics is. The time line does not identify a clear and simple cause of the events, it doesn't point to precise alliances with a neat cut between friends and enemies, there is no well-defined causes that lead to conclusions. Instead it demonstrates the hypercomplexity one has to face when trying to understand 9/11.

USA. New York City. September 11th, 2001. As people work around him, a minister stands amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center, seemingly dazed from the events of the day. © Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

Horn then showed an extract of the movie Loose Change which, unlike the timeline, has a narrative and a view on what the "truth" is in this context.

The documentary film, made by film students using recycled footage, claims that 9/11 was a mock terrorist attack and that the events had in fact been orchestrated by the United States government, and bases these claims on perceived anomalies in the historical record of the attacks.

Loose Change 2nd Edition Online Version (Google Video):

For Horn, conspiracy theories are a way to deal with the impenetrable complexity and connectivity of politics and other factors. When dealing with high complexity we have to recognize our loss of control: we can't name the culprit anymore, we loose clear distinctions between friends and enemies, etc. Theories allow you to get back to a sense of control behind what happened. The idea that US secret services couldn't prevent the event looks too much like a loss of control. But with a theory such as the one exposed in Loose Change", we don't lose control over just "10 Arabs in a cave". This sort of political discourse negates global complexity and connectivity.

We have to abandon the claim to absolute truth.

As mentioned in Hyper-Border, a book i reviewed a few days ago, Mexico and the United States live in a state of interdependence: Mexico's economy relies on remittances, while the US need Mexican undocumented super cheap labour force. The United States has had a powerful influence in the Mexican national elections, how about turning that around?

Votemos.us is a Spanish language portal that proposes a vote in the US presidential elections for the millions of (il)legal Mexicans who currently live and work in the United States.

Visitors can register with the site, vote, write an opinion on the elections, read other people’s views and react to it.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga's project is one of the most interesting i've read about recently: for its power to raise the debate on the role that migrants can and/or should have in political life in the US (but also in several European counties), for the lists of facts, figures and articles that provide visitors with more knowledge on the issue and if you read spanish, i can only recommend you to peak inside the page where "registered voters" share their views on the upcoming elections.

More in Structural Patterns.

Related: interview of the artist.

Domesticity at War (Amazon USA and UK), by Princeton professor and theorist Beatriz Colomina.

Editor Actar's blurb: In the postwar, cold war years, there emerges a new type of modern architecture that represents a fundamental transformation from only five decades prior. In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina presents domesticity as a new, and very potent weapon in a changed architectural battlefield. No longer the domain of heroic figures, this post war architecture becomes the property of the middle-class consumer, a truly “modern man� who is constantly bombarded with images of domestic bliss that form a lifestyle campaign, exactingly deployed using recycled military methods and techniques, launched into millions of homes. The resultant mass consumable environment transformed both architect and building, replacing them with newer versions, blindingly happy agents of domestic pleasure, at the same breakneck efficiency that marked the transition of wartime industry to peacetime, from missiles to washing machines. The significance of architects such as Charles and Ray Eames lies in their particular sensitivity to this transformation where buildings and images both come to define occupiable space. A sense of embattled domesticity is the trademark of the immediate postwar years and the focus of this archaeological study.

Turning the hard cover you discover that the book is divided in two units: one book for the text a few photos, and a smaller one containing only illustrations-- including advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, architectural photographs, etc. Charming idea, though it doesn't make the reading very practical.

The European architecture avant-garde in the '20s (in particular Le Corbusier) dreamt of mass-produced houses which would recycle the techniques and materials developed during WWI, but it was in the US that architecture really became was a by-product of the military-industrial complex, during the second half of the 20th Century. On the one hand the industry recycled products and techniques developed and tested at war, on the other hand, architects themselves had been involved in the development of military products.

For instance, Charles and Ray Eames's company designed and produced molded plywood splint for the US military. Devised to replace metal leg splint of wounded soldiers they were a success and by 1945, the company was issuing plywood cabinets, children furniture, chairs, tables, and even Christmas decoration from left-overs.

After 1945, war doesn't simply disappear, not just because it is carried out in the form of the consumption of mass-produced spin-offs of military efficiency and technology but also because domestic life can no longer be taken for granted, it even becomes a form of art therapy for a traumatized nation. Colomina examines in particular the "Lawn at War."

Cleaning The Drapes (from Bringing the War Home) by Martha Rosler, 1969-72

During WWII, maintaining a lawn is a national duty performed for the moral of both those who stayed home and the armed force. However, people are invited to dedicate part of the lawn to the Victory Garden. Gardening was also used as a therapy that helped healing hospital veterans. What is interesting is to see how advertising used war imagery and military rhetoric: the garden becomes a battlefield where, for example, beetles are compared to Japanese soldiers; a BugBlaster device is shaped like a bazooka, lawn mowers are advertised as weapons. In fact, the insecticide industry started as a spin-off of military research on chemical warfare during WWII. The most famous example of military use of insecticide being DDT, the "atomic bomb of the insect world."

Before the dangers of DDT were known, crops & people alike were sprayed with the chemical to protect against bothersome insects

The author goes further when she explains that everything that made America in the '50s was the result of military effort: cars, appliances, medicine, even fast food, etc.

Computers were the stars of the 1964 New York World's Fair. Descendants of the first computers developed to decode enemy messages during WWII, these new computers were concerned with domestic issues, from helping out with the homeworks to helping you select the most suitable colour to decorate your home.

At the New York World’s Fair (image via)

The mere fact of being affluent was regarded as a form of victory during the Cold War. Through the "battle of the appliances" the US wanted to create envy and establish their superiority over Russia. The so-called Kitchen Debate epitomized the notion when Nixon and Khrushchev discussed the respective merits of communism and capitalism while the US President was in Moscow and showing the Soviet Premier a model American home, "a vitrine of all-American perfection."

However, the family fallout shelters popping up in American suburbia were singing a different story. It wasn't a question of domestic bliss anymore, as the shelters were built in a climate of fear and schizophrenia (there are nice anecdotes in the book about proud owner of new shelters who devised ways to protect their new underground "wing" from their own neighbours).

Melvin and Maria Mininson honeymooned in a Miami bomb shelter in June 1959. Chosen from over 100 couples, the newlyweds spent two encapsulated weeks as a publicity stunt sponsored by a shelter manufacturer

The most extraordinary example of nuclear shelter must be the one devised by Jay Swayze in 1962. This full-time underground home boasted windows throughout the house give you a false sense of being above ground. "Dial a view" murals on the concrete shell enabled the owner to change the panoramic landscape at will and to choose the best lighting according to time: daytime, dusk, nighttime, and dawn.

Real plants grow to artificial lights on the porch, and days and nights are always calm, despite what the weather may be doing 13 feet above ground. Images.

Alison and Peter Smithson's House of the Future displayed at the Ideal Home exhibition in 1956

Although i was sometimes annoyed by Colomina's eulogy of everything Eames and the fact that it wasn't always clear what some of the stories she mentioned had to do with the title of the book, Domesticity at War is fantastically enjoyable. It is witty, clear, and choke-full of well-documented anecdotes and facts. You get to learn the story of the lawn and how it was used in advertisements, discover the plastic houses that came with built-in sewing machines, read how glass curtain walls were used to put domestic bliss on display, and why Buckminster Fuller's DDUs (Dymaxion Deployment Units) match all of Duchamp's criteria for the perfect readymade, etc. 3 extra stars for the amazing collection of photos, they make the book worth buying on their own.

Nonspheres IV is the latest iteration of Luis Berríos-Negrón’s ongoing investigation into the contemporary tension between nature and technology. This project takes the built shape of a digitally generated lattice which fills the entire gallery, suggesting a continuous yet remote set of relationships and talking about how the network-logic flattens space while spatializing politics.

This sensation is further induced through works on two geopolitically charged offsite locations - the former NSA listening-post at Teufelsberg, Berlin and a performance in Kabul, Afghanistan.

At program Berlin, through August 18th.

More from my latest visit at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

The space is currently hosting a fascination exhibition called ÉTATS (faites-le vous-même) - Grow Your Own. Set up by the artist Peter Coffin, it brings together an impressive range of micronations, sovereign independent states, concept nation states, and secession movements.

In 2000, Coffin initiated his own independent nation and began collecting information about other such projects around the world. Grow Your Own is an expanded version of a similar exhibition he curated in 2005 at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York in conjunction with Robert Blackson: We Could Have Invited Everyone. All the States featured in the Paris show are presented as a creative response to a global political climate.

Micronations are countries (often without territories) conceived by artists, eccentrics, malcontents or egocentrics. These merge the imaginary, the artistic and the real in their embrace of a parallel world, motivated by artistic and conceptual concerns, a dislike for paying taxes, an immoderate love of royal titles, or even the simple desire to create a new civilization.

Grow Your Own aims to blur the distinction between art, politics, anarchy and fiction. The governments, societies and artists represented in the exhibition have lent some of their symbols for display.

There are projects by recognized artists: like photos and papers that document Yoko Ono and John Lennon's declaration of birth of a conceptual country called Nutopia, IRWIN, Gregory Green's New Free State of Caroline, Groucho Marx's Principality of Freedonia (Groucho played its prime minister in Duck Soup) or Atelier van Lieshout's AVL Ville.

They are presented along with uniforms, the BIZEPS money machine that makes it possible to mint the 5 SoS (State of Sabotage) coin with a hammer blow, maps (Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland which claims all the borders of the world), national anthems (Empire of Aerica), a model of the Principlity of Sealand, documentary films, portraits of kings and queens from a micronations summit, a manual on How to start your own country, flags, all kinds of passports, stamps from countries bearing lovely names like Molossia (!), medals from Ladonia, the royal crown of Talossa (founded in 1979 by "King Robert" in his bedroom in Milwaukee at the age of 13), coins or letters of citizenship from some forty nations including the Empire of Atlantium or the Kingdom of Pinsk. Applications for citizenship and naturalisation can be completed and filed by visitors.

The exhibition closes on May 6. My images on flickr.
Lonely Planet Guide on Micronations.