Supermodernity

A blog about Time, Space and Cyborg Anthropology.

Positioning Cyborg-Cartography as a Solution to Spatial Amnesia

General cartography and satellite imagery work well for everyday activities, but what happens when a geography suddenly fluctuates? In the case of an Earthquake, buildings, people and paths decentralize and change. A cyborg cartography in this case would describe a process or series of processes that take real time data from a number of points and stitch it together so that a changed geograpy can be immediately seen. The idea of a cyborg cartography is a decentralized granular reporting system that communicates with larger reporting systems to create a full functioning pathway map in the time of an emergency, or any other time in which a geography is suddenly upended.

 

"In the case of [a] disaster...nobody knows at first what is going on--what has been destroyed, what has not, what obstructions are in the way of transportation routes, and so on--this capability would be extremely valuable (an understatement). Whether the cyborg-cartographer works from a helicopter or on the ground, he/she would combine reconnaissance with mapping (and disaster relief), as only the human brain could comprehend what is important to observe".

Cyborg Cartography

"We have been experiencing for decades the melding of humans with machines; think of artificial body parts, hearing aids, prosthetics, and so on. What if we could spawn bionic cartographers who have the ability to transfer spatial data that they see, directly (through thought-transmission) and tele-communicate to geo-referenced mapping programs?"

"Even now here on the Mississippi Gulf Coast we are experiencing something of spatial amnesia (spatial dissonance?) almost seven months out from the Storm: we might not know what exists on the landscape only one mile away, in areas that we, personally, formerly traveled. Who has produced a current map of this area, carried out with groundtruthing, of what actually exists? No one, of course". [Written a few months after Hurricane Katrina.]

Original post at: http://embodiedspace.blogspot.com/2008/01/cyborg-cartographer-battles-spatial.html

See also: Piper, Karen. Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

A convincing study of the inhabitant of modern, western society as a “cartographic cyborg,” which is to say as someone so thoroughly intertwined with mapping technologies that it is impossible to say, in terms of knowledge practices, where embodied knowledge ends and technological knowledge begins. Piper goes far beyond the obvious analysis of the modern dependency on maps (and GIS) as spatial instruments to consider the implications of that dependency for the construction of gendered and racial identities within popular culture.