Into the Digital Cartographic Void
Multi-media Installation
photos @Leidy Karina Gómez Montoya
4k video essay - 9’16
installation - cardboard, wood
This project, comprising a theoretical research thesis and a multimedia installation, investigates censorship through signs and representations in the digital era.
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.
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The whole project, comprising a theoretical research thesis and a multimedia installation, investigates censorship through signs and representations in the digital era. This video essay specifically focuses on the visual effects of censorship in digital cartography. Censorship can cause a completely missing square (revealing the map’s underlying operational logic based on a highly abstracted, artificial parallel and perpendicular division known as the grid system); alternatively, it can take the form of varying degrees of visibility determined by the digital technology or medium, where the pixel is the basic unit within the visual grid system. This prompts reflection on the extent to which seemingly neutral media, as representative transmitters, are complicit in realizing censorship, and, its inherent nature as being censored. It further triggers questions like, what other forms of absence might exist, extending beyond visuality, embedded within the cartography (or broader modern digital representation system) itself.
Based on the interesting fact that the first jigsaw puzzle was a dissected map back in the 1760s, I see the intricate implications of puzzle rules and cartography-making: the play of form and content, mapping/puzzling as a signifying process, and grids as cultural techniques. Therefore, the film and installation use the metaphor of the puzzle and its completion process to illustrate the intertwining of censorship and digital cartography as a knowledge-production process. By entering into the installation, the audience is “absorbed” into the cartography: a live-streaming camera above the installation, simulating a satellite looking down at the Earth, constantly captures the integration, reverses the subject-object relationship (users looking at digital maps), and completes the loop of gazing.
The extruded jigsaw puzzle pieces landscape that the audience enters represents the complex structures and dynamic factors underlying digital cartography. How they are horizontally interlocked on each stratum suggests that digital cartography is determined not by its visual semiotics, nor by reference to a real landscape, but by broader, invisible dynamic structures beneath its surface.
ESSAY FILM