Practices of Representation: Mapping and Pervasive Computing
Questions for Week 4 – Practices of Representation: Mapping and Pervasive Computing
Does it matter that certain local identities can be both microenvironments and have global span if the individual isn’t aware of their role in either or both systems? Is the very fact that one doesn’t know their sited materially and their global span a function of dominate topographic logics?
Sassen’s analytical borderlands theory argues that the powerless can claim power though “presence in global cities..” Sletto notes how Trinidadian fisherman used narrative performance “to make sense of their own presents” (447). I’m wondering if we can read Sassen’s “presences” as being displayed through the preformative strategies highlighted by Sletto? Does this ‘presence performance’ then get implicated in politics of representation? As in, do images of authenticity and identity made through either map production (Sletto) or new political actors in Global Cities (Sassen) get flattened for certain interests?
Often ‘space’ betrays its interconnections by presenting itself as singular.
The idea that disparate populations have always been connected by various needs is not a new one. Sassen points us to the idea that digitalization becomes an increasingly important part of the spatialization processes that define on what terrain these interconnections occur. Sassen note that the number, intensity, and character of the interconnections have changed, not the interconnections themselves. I wonder how this can come to bear on Slettos piece, which argues that performance in map production reveals something new about space making. But indeed, if making space in the imagined is a valid form of space making then these women have been doing it for while its just Sletto’s presence changes the character of it. I think Sassen teaches us that the where we look for space is just as important has the how of making place into space.
Space: A infinite processes whereby interconnecting systems of global, social, cultural and embodied knowledges inform the value of place.
Place: Fixed in the material and moving freely.
Identity: How you make sense of places’ relationships to the idea of individualism.