Practices of Representation
- While mapmaking is a tool that can be used to exert power, it is a tool that requires some knowledge and skill to be effective. How does community mapmaking (involving people who are not trained cartographers) disrupt this power? Is it effective in actually empowering indigenous communities beyond their own boundaries?
- The idea of blank spots hiding secrets seems to grow more disturbing as cartographic information, on the whole, becomes more accessible through digital technology and particularly as user-created information becomes more prevalent. How does this greater volume and access to information change our relationship to “secrets” or spaces/places we don’t have access to?
- I was particularly interested in the two-way aspects of augmented spaces, and in the spread of surveillance from located only within government powers to being available to almost anyone, and the conception of surveillance as an economic necessity (asset protection) rather than strictly about power. Augmented reality, especially in examples from science fiction, seems to be driven by economics. Are there examples of digitally augmented space that do not serve a primarily economic function? Spaces that only transmit data to the person in the space seem to count under Manovich’s definition, but what about spaces that only transmit information from the space/person? Would any surveilled space be considered an augmented space?
Augmented space – a delimited area that incorporates the transmission of data into its physical makeup.
Map – A document that indicates the physical location of objects in a space and aids in navigation.