The representation of territories plays a historical role in the privileges of power. The ownership of the geographical data has always been in the hands of those in power. These days, however, the reappropriation of territorial representation described and shared in the form of a personal perspective is imminent, owing to new collaborative tools and the resulting mutation in the map’s value. It will never again be granted by power structures, but built by individuals.
This also has to do with the strength of global trade and the power to construct, with huge amount of money, a business and aesthetic model that is popular in most countries. These models have to be quickly and highly profitable and »funny« at the same time. But these development models are not only dubious but also culturally dangerous, because they compete side by side with the local economic and social culture.

A valuable tool for resisting this model is the »Delocator«, made by the political collective Finishing School in April. It’s an effective tool for enhancing the local coffee bars in a specific area, with all their peculiar characteristics, and comparing them with the branches of the global coffee bar chain Starbucks in the same area. The coffee bars are still social meeting places, sometimes even inspirational places – partly because of the social variety of their clientele. A raw comparison of data is meant to show how continuous monitoring of the territory contributes to the visualization of a process that takes place as a silent commercial competition with long-term social consequences. The result is intended to increase social awareness by means of the network possibilities, or to build political collaborative artefacts that succeed in creating a mediascape similar to a journalistic inquiry. The software can be downloaded for free and its use for other commercial fields (fast-food, hardware, clothing, etc.) is strongly encouraged.

Mapping practices can be also considered as a visual formalization of knowledge that synthesizes abstract data such as territorial data, but by using different construction processes. Historically, it has been professional designers who were concerned with this practice, but for a few years now such data have been able to be manipulated by anybody who can use vector-graphic software. In the final analysis, geographical data represent the definitive instrument for elaborating and sharing the space abstraction. »Map-o-matix« by Yves Degoyon, Sergio Moreno and Jaume Nualart and other members of the hackitectura Spanish collective is a project that aims to give back to the community the ability to process geographical data in free and collaborative ways. This tool allows people to experiment directly on the Web with the basic functionalities, such as the inclusion of specific nodes and relationships between them, on a map that can be used and extended by many individuals at the same time. Actually, the applications of this instrument could be even more sophisticated and made to include the ability to develop »tactical« maps that could highlight the relationships between power structures or social infrastructures at any level. In this specific field, the typical organigrams of a company’s organizational structures are nothing but a graphic paradigm to describe the levels of power.

The power to manipulate society is also the focus of another project, whose launch was undoubtedly on September 11th. The fake institutional tears that flowed back then commemorated a human disaster with a careful selection of morbid images that sowed the same media terror that has been celebrated in the »special sections« in the printed and TV media after the major terrorist attacks of the last few years. A nodal point of this insane process is the prediction of the next attack, based on much rumour and experts’ analyses. The project »Where-next« turns this mechanism against its advocates. It’s a game born of the strategic partnership between the Guerrigliamarketing.it and Molleindustria groups. It is about betting on the next attack, guessing the time, place and means, using the Google Maps Application Program Interface. The game combines two extreme aspects of contemporary reality: the global legitimation of bets as a technique for guessing and changing our personal future, and the uncertainty caused by terrorist attacks, unbearably amplified by mass media. The authors have constructed this disturbing hybrid so that it is ready to deceive the most incompetent journalists. On the other hand, the game will force everybody else to reflect on how the formalization of the massacre game as practiced by the media on every tragic occasion triggers complex reactions in the users through an online game. In this way, official sources are delegitimized as far as telling us how the future reality will be. Then we can repossess the imaginary of reality by means of this sarcastic and playful form. The end result is that the induced terror is played down to become an exhilarating game, and the latent panic (as a now mandatory component in the West) is broken down into pieces.

The Google Maps’ API has triggered so many visions of territory. One of the most quirky ones is GarbageScout, a tool to highlight garbage heaps on a city map. It is used mostly in American cities (New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia), and people use phonecams to shoot pictures of interesting piles of garbage and send them in along with the exact location. In this case, the metropolitan surplus thrown next to the dustbin is reintroduced into the game of possession by means of a collective eye that selects pieces and re-integrates them into consumer behaviour. There is a good chance that this could effectively disrupt the dynamics of the capital, allowing the reinterpretation of the neighborhood as a living territory and definitively opening up a new, practical reconfiguration of the space by means of virtual tools and real consequences.

http://www.delocator.net/
http://www.garbagescout.com/
http://www.where-next.com/
http://mapomatix.sourceforge.net/

 

 

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