Into the Digital Cartographic Void
Multi-media Installation
photos @Leidy Karina Gómez Montoya
4k video - 10 minutes
installation - cardboard, wood
This project investigates censorship through signs and representations in the digital era, and the design focuses specifically on the void created by censorship in digital cartography.
Censorship is always linked to certain ideologies and power structures, which is true to a great extent. However, how digital technology allows for complexity and obscurity in censorship, does't only have implications for the specific context of digital geographic censorship in China but for all participating in a digitally mediated existence. This project goes beyond the simple dichotomy of authoritarian censorship versus democratic censorlessness. In the design, it posits that, dialectically, some forms of censorship play a role of disclosure rather than just suppressive concealment; meanwhile, intrinsically, digital cartography is always "censored" to some degree, echoing postmodernist critiques of cartographic objectivity and neutrality.
The research starts with a comparative case study that investigates the effects of Chinese censorship on two mapping services. From this case study, the concept of "sign" emerged as significant. It then discusses how different types of visibility are created by employing various signs of censorship (the perspectives of visual semiotics were mainly applied in this part of the analysis). This process operationalizes the representation of reality and constructs certain relationships between the subject and reality, leading to internalized constraints and specific modes of being. Later, the design extracts the visual material from the cartographic research, combines my own experience and perspective and, based on the previous theoretical analysis, forms a cinematographic narrative and ends up as a film. For the installation, I used the metaphor of puzzle to show the broader dynamic structures beneath the surface of digital cartography. The two parts (film and installation) are closely related in content and form.
Based on the fact that the first jigsaw puzzle was a dissected map from the 1760s, and thus combining the intricate implications of puzzle rules, their play of form and content, cartography as a signifying process, and grids as cultural techniques, the design (installation+film) uses the metaphor of the puzzle and its completion process to illustrate the intertwining of censorship and digital cartography in the cartographic knowledge production process in the digital era. By entering into the installation, the audience is "absorbed" into the cartography: a live streaming camera from above the installation, simulating the satellite looking down on the Earth, constantly captures the integration, transcending the simple subject-object relationship (users looking at digital maps) and completing the loop of gazing.
The installation mainly shows the "landscape" beneath the cartography. Vertically, there are five factor strata, representing different factors such as technology, geopolitics, epistemology, etc. Horizontally, each stratum is interlocked by different shapes of extruded forms of jigsaw puzzle. It suggests that digital cartography is determined not by its own semiotics, nor by reference to a real landscape, but by broader dynamic structures beneath its surface.
VIDEO