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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. |
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Back from the 10th edition of ZEMOS98, a festival of audiovisual culture titled this year Regreso al futuro, Back to the Future. I wish all the events i attend were as intelligently curated, carefully organized and stimulating as this one. The audience was great too. And extremely polite: they sat all the way through the talk i gave there in a spanish bastardized with franco-italian words and grammar.
There were workshops, concerts, presentations, screenings and talks. One of the highlights of the week for me was Lisa Parks' talk. Her lecture was part of Critical Powers which invited thinkers and creators to share their views on the possible functions of utopia in an era of advanced Capitalism, the effects of technology changes on cultural process, or on the power of a public sphere. Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context. ZEMOS98 put a tiny extract of the presentation online:
Introduction The lecture was articulated around two themes (Spying and Dreaming) and was a small compendium of the many topics she has been working on over the past few years, most of the material she presented is based on case studies but for lack of time she merely glossed over them. Her first slide showed us a list of satellites that Spain has ownership on. Most are used for remote sensing. The first one (intersat) was launched in 1974, the latest DEIMOS in 2008 which will be used for disaster management. Parks stressed the importance of developing more literacy about satellites. We can name tv channels and websites by wouldn't be able to name satellites. Throughout history, hundreds of satellites have been launched into space. Another of her key interests is the visualization of satellites. We can have an everyday tactile contact with other technologies like mobile phones or television sets but our experience of satellites is very different. Right from the start as satellites are a highly specialized technology. They have to be constructed in clean room, protected from the rest of the world and they are launched in locations which are often closed off for security purpose. Once they are sent into orbit, most of us will never think about them again. Parks then talked about the footprint of satellites. No matter how clearly defined the boundaries of nations can be, their space will always be crisscrossed by footprints from different satellites launched by various countries. Spain uses satellite technology to beam its signal to Latin America for example. That's what she calls "Nation Beaming". Spying 1. The Corona Project The Corona Project was a top secret program run by the CIA with the help of the US Air Force. One of them was hidden in Discoverer Spacecraft which contained biological experiments (to check how plants would withstand being launched into orbit). The project was top secret and involved a huge capital investment that the public financed without ever knowing about it.
Of the 144 Corona satellites launched, 102 returned usable images.
The recovery of the images taken by Corona was quite remarkable. A mechanism would drop the film canister and drop it in the air. The canister would then be recovered in mid-air by a C-119 aircraft. If the recovery mission failed, the canister would deploy a parachute and be recovered on earth or on the ocean. The Corona program was initiated during the Cold War to check if "the other" was developing new weapons. The satellites were thus used to develop an image intelligence which would help the government decide on their own internal and external policy.
The Corona facility are now in decay. 2. Satellite imaging and global conflicts It's also important to discuss the relationship between orbit and earth in the age of image intelligence and see how remote sensing get integrated into news culture, how and when classified images suddenly make their way into our global media culture. More precisely the questions her research is focusing on are: How have satellite images been used to represent global conflicts in the public sphere?
Where does the authority to use and interpret satellite images come from?
What kinds of phenomena and events do satellite images represent?
Have satellite images increased public awareness and knowledge about global conflict?
How have practice and meaning of "intervention" changed in the digital age?
First case study: Rwanda
Refugees International used aerial and sat images in 1996 to try to find and assist 1 million displaced persons. The combination of sat/aerial images was used as a medium that could uniquely visualize a "nationless social body". The organization understood how these images could capture better than any other medium the displacement of a moving mass of people who have nowhere to go. Many satellite images have to be inscribed with caption, without them the images lose their significance, they look like abstract paintings. We need to be directed to read these images. Pressured US to release sat images to draw world attention to a conflict that was being ignored by the international community. Second case study: Bosnia, July 1995
US was boasting to have real time visibility over the war theatre - Information Dominance Case study 3. Colin Powell and Irak, 2003
Powell presented sat images in his address to the UN Security Council to make the case for a US-led war against Irak, alleging they contained "undeniable proof" of Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction. From Lisa Parks vantage point the case raises a real problem as Powell not only plagiarized a PhD thesis but, more crucially, the whole story undermined the credibility of any future use of sat images by US official in a global forum. Satellite images are digital images and have thus no physical reference, they are generated by a series of 0 and 1. Yet they are useful. One shouldn't embrace them as state truth but as a field of investigation. The 3 case studies highlight how much has changed in the US after the Corona programme. Institutional Changes The privatization sector is led by European companies: Today the website of Satellite Imaging Corporation claims that they are the largest because they are the one who possess most satellite assets. They own a fleet of satellite, one of them moves makes a complete turn of the Earth in 90 minutes. The commercialization of sat images has led to some odd uses and requests. In 2001, Dan Bollinger, a fan of the tv program Survivor: Africa, sent a request to Space Imaging to acquire the image data over the Kenya location and share them with other fans of the show. The CBS facilities were discovered but the tv channel didn't want to see their production site exposed. The images nevertheless traveled all over the world showing that satellite images are no longer a matter of security issue but are part of a broader visual culture.
Another case which illustrates the previous statement come from a campaign by KFC. The fried chicken company needed to re-design the brand and came up with the "Face from Space" in the Nevada desert, also known as the "UFO Capital of the World." The fast food company purchased an Ikonos image of the site and distributed it through global media circuits. While satellites have historically passed over the earth to observe "naturally unfolding" phenomena, now events are staged precisely so they can be viewed from an orbital perspective. Remote sensing satellites are now being used to pitch products and address global consumers just as other media such as commercial television or the world wide web. More in this article by Lisa Parks: Obscure Objects of Media Studies: Echo, Hotbird and Ikonos. Google Earth Since 2005, Google Earth presents us with a "mosaic'ed" version of the world using satellite images coming from various sources. But while the logo of Google is always clearly visible on the images, no matter how blurry they are themselves, we are kept in the dark regarding the satellites used to compose these images. Google Earth is a great opportunity to educate the public about satellite but instead they do GE tends to almost erase the existence of the satellites. Digital Globe provides date information for satellite images that are part of Google Earth using color-coded squares and "I" icons. By clicking on "preview," you enter a meta-browser featuring the single satellite image captioned with information about how to purchase it or others from Digital Globe. Digital Globe is thus providing date information as part of a marketing strategy. GE becomes a billboard.
Google Earth teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create the Crisis in Darfur mapping initiative which collects and diffuses visual evidence of the destruction in Darfur. On the surface it looks like an admirable project but in several ways it missed the opportunity to represent the conflict in all its complexities. It uses tropes to represent African tragedy (images of suffering children carried by their mother). There is no visible effort of providing a political and economical education about the tragedy. With the slide i pasted below, Lisa Park claims to demonstrate that earlier media news provided more opportunities for education:
Problems of GE Crisis in Darfur layer: What does it mean for a US corporation to reproduce foreign territory as they want and without asking permission (some nations actually complained that GE causes a serious security concern.) In a nutshell: The public remains relatively uninformed about satellites, their uses and their impact on everyday life even though citizens taxes subsidize satellite developments. The second part of Lisa Parks was about The Dreamers, the artists who use and comment on satellite technology. I found this part a bit weaker (less documented and with errors in the orthography of the artists' names, happens to everyone of course but look quite bad on slides.) But here are a few notes: "The Dreamers" encourage us to see and reflect about sat technologies and their potentials. they dare to experiment with satellites (traditionally seen as a heavy and highly specialized technology) and how they are used. Encourage us to think about who owns and control, satellites, orbital space and the spectrum. Develop uses that are not just about state security or corporate profits but about citizens' needs. Artists acknowledged in her presentation about satellite art and activism: Last recommendations from Parks: Investigate satellites, learn their names, who owns them, what they do, how they have been used. There is a need for more satellite literacy.
Imagine how the use of satellite in the public interest might be defined. Image on the homepage showing Laika, a dog launched in orbit together with the satellite Sputnik II in 1957. |
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MediaShed is a "free-media" space open to the public in the east of England. Free media - "as in free speech not free beer"- is a means of doing art, making things or just saying what you want for little or no financial cost by using the public domain, free software and recycled equipment. It is also about saying what you want "freely", using accessible media that can be taken apart and reused without unnecessary restrictions and controls. It's not just a matter of allowing artists, hackers, activists, etc. to use these free tools but also those you would not expect to find in this art context. For example, Mediashed involved a group of kids who usually hang around in the streets to engage in Video sniffin' activities and turn CCTV into a free broadcasting system for their own use. "Why would you want to buy some video equipment when there are already so many cameras around for you to use?" They bought in a high street store some relatively cheap and small devices which can sniff out the street for signals broadcast by wireless CCTV networks. Using the surveillance images captured, the kids then created their own movie.
Next their video sniffing adventures were invited to Futuresonic, as part of the festival's Art for Shopping Centers selection. This time the film, called The Duellists, combined free-media with free-running. Inspired by the parkour sport, free-running involves fluid uninterrupted movement adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. Like free-media, free-running makes use of and re-energises the infrastructure of the city. Futuresonic 2007 presents The Duellists by MediaShed ft Methods The performers were professional parkour breakin' crew Methods of Movement and their acrobatic choreography was filmed in the shopping centre over three nights. The film was shot using only the existing in-house CCTV network of 160 cameras operated from the central control room, with a soundtrack created entirely from the found sounds and noises recorded during the performance. Sometimes the quality of the camera is incredibly good, elsewhere it is just b&w and grainy.
The movie was projected on a big plasma screen inside the Manchester Arndale Shopping Centre where an average of 6000 people shop every day. On the second day, they had to take the movie off, some people were not too happy at the idea that performers were messing up with a space meant for shopping activities. The project was the first official UK implementation of GEARBOX the free-media video toolkit developed by MediaShed with the Eyebeam Studios in New York. Comprised of “how to� step by step examples, Gearbox shows people how to record footage using combinations of found resources (such as CCTV Video Sniffin’ or Spy Kiting which allows you to get images that -sort of- look like they were taken from helicoptor but using cheap wireless cctv technology and a kite instead) and low-budget methods of reproducing professional film making techniques (for example, achieving a crane shot using a fishing pole). Related: Michelle Teran's Life: A User's Manual and Manu Luksch's Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers. |
One of the highlights of the 
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Marisa Olson set up and moderated a fantastic panel yesterday afternoon at Conflux about Souveillance Culture. The panel was sponsored by Rhizome and gathered Amy Alexander, Jill Magid and Hasan Elahi, 3 artists whose work engages surveillance and explore the cultural and political implications of sousveillance. The panel assumed that we live in a surveilled society but also in a culture that likes to show and tell. Our society has shifted from one that cherished its right to privacy to a society that promotes the idea "if you see something, say something." Amy Alexander's talk, Software, Surveillance, Scareness & Subjectivity was a presentation of SVEN: Surveillance Video Entertainment Network aka "AI to the People", a software performance or installation for public spaces that she developed together with Wojciech Kosma, Vincent Rabaud with Nikhil Rasiwasia and Jesse Gilbert.
Surveillance is scary and when you're fearful you're not very productive. You do not know when you are surveilled (that's the principle of the Panopticon), nor do we know how (racial profiling, etc.)
She showed as an example these images that document the results of an attempt to use computer vision algorithms to match photographs of individuals with those in a database. Most of the time, the algorithm detected the correct person from the database. However, the few incorrect cases are interesting. The software attempted to detect similarity between photographs and faces but instead of confusing people of the same race, for example, the software will sometimes confuse two people with a smug expression on their face (attitude profiling!) or wearing a bushy moustache. Computer vision algorithms have their own agendas.
If a computer can decide when you are not "desirable", it can also detect when you are desirable, that's called Rock Star Detection which turns boring surveillance videos into exciting music videos. How does the system become suspicious that you might be a rock star? When SVEN system detects any of these characteristics it generates an automatic music video surveillance cinematography. Then Hasan Elahi got us riveted on our seat with the story of how he was arrested by the FBI and submitted to endless interviews and several polygraphs for, basically, having an Arab name (and thus flying with bombs in his pockets), it took him months to (he thought) convince them that he was innocent. Suspecting that he might never be totally cleared he devised a software that tracks him wherever he goes. If you visit the website Tracking Transience, you'll see where he is now, where he was a a few days ago, which airport he went through, what he ate on the plane, how much money he spent where, etc.
Interestingly, when he has a look at who is visiting the website, he discovered that the users who logs in come from the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice (the FBI), the House of Representents, etc. During the discussion that floowed the talks, Elahi explained how his project devalue the FBI file by flooding them with data. And although the work makes his life transparent, he hasn't lost any parcel of intimacy. You never see his face or body on the pictures and while you can see what he had at lunch in a plane that doesn't tell you much about himself.
The idea to engage with surveillance technology came while she was still a student working on the Kissmask piece. At the time she was also looking for a way to connect the two "kissers" together, maybe with video. So she asked around how she could do that and was advised to use a lipstick spy camera.
She later used the camera to perform Lobby 7 in MIT main lobby. She phoned the manufacturer of the lobby’s informational monitor pretending she had lost the remote control, was sent one and hijacked the monitor, interrupting its daily broadcast with a transmission of her own. This transmission was a real-time exploration of her body and the surrounding architecture as seen through the openings of her clothes, via the lipstick surveillance camera. A camera was recording the 30 min performance and the reaction of passersby. Many of them reached out and patted their body, suspecting that it might be them on the screen.
She explained that she liked the aesthetics of the surveillance camera images, how any given space looks like a stage on a screen and anyone who enters it becomes an actor. Later on she spent 5 years in Amsterdam where the word "repression" doesn't have the same importance as in Boston. She nevertheless noticed the presence of surveillance cameras in the city. There are there as icons of power, sometimes mere decoy that does not necessarily work. She hand-glued rhinestones to security cameras in front of the Rijksakademie and people suddenly noticed the cams, asking them when and why she had installed the camera although they had been there for 7 years.
Next she set herself the task to do the same at the Amsterdam Headquarters of Police. When she phoned to ask whether that would be possible she was told that "we don't work with artists." She thus had to create her own company System Azure Security Ornamentation, took a formal appointment with the police and arrived with her portfolio of glam cams under the arm. The artist was not only authorised to glue rhinestone on the police CCTV cameras using permanent adhesive but she was also hired and paid to do so.
It was decided that the colours used would make the 9 cameras in front of the HQ look like flags. She used colours from the international code: Green is for justice, white for integrity, red is for full of love, etc. Because of a lack of time, Jill Magid had to skip Evidence Locker and go straight to the project Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (L.O.V.E.) Back to New York City after five years abroad, she kept hearing this announcement in the subway "You may be a subject to searches "for security reasons"." She approached a police officer and asked him to search her. He refused because only women officer had the right to search a woman but she managed to convince him to call her and tell her each night where he was on shift and she'd join him to be "trained". She kept record of the meetings and logged them in different forms. More about the project. |
Much of the surveillance is based on softwares. Softwares should not be scary nor mysterious.
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Filmmaker Manu Luksch had a talk about and an installation of her project Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers at ars electronica this year. Her work made vivid and almost tangible the relevance of the symposium´s theme this year: Goodbye Privacy.
The manifesto establishes rules, procedures, and identifies issues useful for filmmakers who want to the costs of creating a movie - by using images captured by CCTV cameras. Her text follows closely the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998 and related privacy legislation that gives the subjects of data records access to copies of the data. The manifesto can be adapted for different jurisdictions. The artist demonstrated the validity of her manifesto with the movie Faceless. Sadly the movie was not shown at ars, only the Making of. Under the DPA, one has the right to retrieve data which is held upon oneself, while the faces of anyone else captured on it have to be blacked out. She therefore claimed the as much CCTV footage of herself as she could and created a story set in the future, in the "faceless world" - with herself as the only woman with a face.
"My requests were more often than not replied to in an inadequate or uninformed way - the controllers had clearly not heard of the Data Protection Act," she told the BBC. She´d either get no reply - despite the law stating requests for images must be responded to in 40 days - or would be told no images could be provided. Others attempted to charge thousands of pounds for "post-production", even though the DPA says that only a standard fee of £10 can be charged. "There are lots of aspects of this legislation which are clearly neglected on a daily basis," she added. Extract of the movie Faceless, 2006 Marie Lechner interviews Manu Luksch (in french). Images. Eutopia has another interview, this time in german. |
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Camera Silens (1994) is an installation for one user at a time a completely sealed-off chamber equipped with a dentist's chair and a closed-circuit surveillance system.
The work refers to a research project at the university clinic in Hamburg Eppendorf, which was suspended in 1973 due to outraged public discussions. Psychiatrist Jan Gross and his colleague Peter Kempe had set up 3 years earlier a "Camera Silens", an anechoic and nearly soundproof chamber, to conduct investigations of the effect of "social isolation and sensory deprivation" on both healthy test persons and patients at the psychiatric hospital under conditions of total separation from natural surroundings (as wikipedia says [citation needed]). Artists Olaf Arndt and Rob Moonen copied this "Camera Silens" to refer to experiments involving the complete control of the human consciousness. The reference to the theme of sensory deprivation allows connections Related: Art Oriente Objet's The Museum of Natural Horror which references Harry Harlow's experiments on the "science of affection"; Timeline: Solitary Confinement in U.S. Prisons. |
