On “On the failure (or impossibility) of mapping”
… I saw windows bricked up, apparently against the encroachment of a neighbor building that was no longer in evidence. I saw fronds of razorwire tangled in rusted lengths of now-obsolescent barb, the both moored to a stanchion that had somehow worked or been torn free from anything more solid than the wire itself and which remained hanging stupidly in the void. Above all I saw a thousand ad hoc interventions, each the trace of some occasion on which an electrician or a plumber or a contractor made an off-plan, field-expedient modification in the name of getting things done – the outstanding example of which was a congeries of coiled, small-gauge utility lines staplegunned to the alley’s westerly wall, their distal ends disappearing through holes into the buildings beyond. Some of these were still tagged legibly (feed 193 chrystie roof), but most had long gone mute as to their function or purpose.
I took all of this in, over the course of a quarter-hour. And then I knew, immediately and in my bones, that any project devoted to the Borgesian attempt to map the built environment at even reasonably high resolution is forever doomed to failure, no matter how many self-reporting locational gizmos we tack onto the world. Time and layered improvisation had rendered this one alley-end baroque almost beyond description, calling into question the practicality of any attempt to represent it schematically. And from there, inevitably, the regress beckoned, as it always does for me, and I suddenly understood the world as nothing more than an enormous aggregation of moments like these …
[blogged by Adam Greenfield]
(Via networked_performance.)
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What Adam stumbled upon & into was the decontextualized exposure to a myriad of wholly private conversations, or use-cases. It’s as if one took a wrong turn on the internet and found a mess of online forum log files from hundreds of random sites, mixed together. Many are not in the same language, many are using mysterious jargon for whatever context they are embedded in, but few, if any, are ‘groomed’ for external perusal and many have long since gone obsolete.
My take on things is that a map, a guide, a translator, is not ever present to give you the full spectrum of meaning, historical and otherwise, but rather, to give you a filtered, specific, limited view of the data that matters to your own context and needs. Borges wrote about the ridiculous attempt to create a life size map of the world, and so do we. Maps are contextual windows, not replacements for the world, and Adam’s point about the futility of trying to ‘map it all’ is reverberated here. Colliding the data between particular sources can be, obviously, quite useful, but colliding all of the data, is not.
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