They [maps] are also troubling. Their apparent stability and their aesthetics of closure and finality dissolve with but a little reflection into recognition of their partiality and provisionality, their embodiment of intention, their imaginative and creative capacities, their mythical qualities, their appeal to reverie, their ability to record and stimulate anxiety, their silences and their powers of deception. At the same time their spaces of representation can appear liberating, their dimensionality freeing the reader from both the controlling linearity of narrative description and the confining perspective of photographic or painted images.
"Christian Jacob describes the changing paradigm of cartographic criticism as a shift from the ‘transparent’ view of the map as a neutral, informative transfer of external information into the simplified classificatory frame of the map space, conducted with the intention of achieving ‘an ideal correspondence of the world and its image’, to an ‘opaque’ view of the map which takes account of the selections, omissions, additions and inescapable contextual influences which shape the outcome of such transfers. Mapping is a process which involves both a ‘complex architecture of signs’ (graphic elements with internal forms and logics capable of theoretical disconnection from any geographical reference) and ‘visual architecture’ through which the worlds they construct are selected, translated, organized, and shaped.
"A widely acknowledged ‘spatial turn’ across arts and sciences corresponds to post-structuralist agnosticism about both naturalistic and universal explanation and about single voiced historical narratives, and to the concomitant recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge. ‘Cognitive mapping’ means much more today than was conceived by its 1960s investigators, who took for granted the existence of an objectively mappable and mapped space against which the ‘mental maps’ could be compared.
"In the opinion of many observers, it is the spatialities of connectivity, networked linkage, marginality and liminality, and the transgression of linear boundaries and hermetic categories–spatial ‘flow’–which mark experience in the late twentieth-century world. Such spatialities render obsolete conventional geographic and topographic mapping practices while stimulating new forms of cartographic representation, not only to express the liberating qualities of new spatial structures but also the altered divisions and hierarchies they generate. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s reference to rhizome as a metaphor for half-submerged, non-hierarchical, open and unplanned spatial connection is a signal example.
"…creative, even playful, process of discovering and engendering though mapping new connections and relationships among disparate elements. Where network enthusiasts and regional surveyors mapped to disclose and impose order, Corner maps to create fields for projects…’drift’, where mapping acknowledges open-ended even goal-less, movement across space; ‘layering’, which superimposes spatial elements and experiences, less exposing than intervening imaginatively in their interconnections; ‘gameboard’, which recognizes and enables the actions of contesting agents across a design space; and ‘rhizome’, realizing graphically the metaphor of non-centric, organic spatiality.
"Ptolemy’s distinction between geographical mapping–fundamentally a mathematical exercise which privileged theoretical knowledge over sensory experience–and choreographic mapping which places emphasis on the recognizable qualities of visual image, including colours, symbols and codes.
"Another form of mapping is the creative probing, the tactical reworking, the imaginative projection of a surface. Here, the mapping becomes the two-dimensional ‘staging’ of actuality or desire, and it has a long genealogy, ‘Perspective’ has a temporal as well as spatial meaning–looking forward, the sense of prospect. Thus the map excites imagination and graphs desire, its projection is the foundation for and stimulus to projects.
"The possibilities for coding survey information through various sings and symbols placed within the representational spaces of the map, are theoretically unlimited, constrained only by the imagination of the map-maker and the practicalities of legibility and comprehension.
"Mapping experienced, as opposed to imagined, space requires a semiotics which connects represented space to an idea of the real.
"Selection in mapping generated its own anxieties, many of them circulating around questions of status of the knowledge presented on the map.
"a priori features of mapping are scale, framing, selection, and coding.
"Enlarging or reducing the space generated and occupied by phenomena alters their form, their significance, their relations of meaning with other phenomena. Scale selection and manipulation is thus a powerfully imaginative and generative act which at once records and sets in train chains of meaning and association in an active process of knowing.
"Framing is a territorializing, even imperializing, process, the map inescapably a classificatory device.
"Failure to frame a land mass, or a mapped territory fully to occupy the map’s bounding lines, as in seventeenth-century maps of Van Dieman’s Land, speak of failures of vision and knowledge, of the uncertainty implied by the peripeteia–the meandering, linear progress whose trace may disappear into the trackless space.
"‘Blank’ spaces within the frame also generate and reflect aesthetic and epistemological anxiety; they are thus the favoured space of cartouches, scales, keys and other technical, textual or decorative devices which thereby become active elements within the mapping process.
"Scale and framing of course come together in projection, the necessity within geographic and topographic mapping to translate the globe’s three-dimensional, curving surface onto a two-dimensional plane through the agency of graticule. The abstract lines of graticule and grid, whether left visible on the map or erased in its final appearance, act both to secure a consistent semiotic connection between sign and signified (map and territory), and to contain, distribute and coordinate the internal signs and spaces of representation.
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