Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map is a curatorial project materializing in multiple forms: an exhibition, a publication and a series of public programs.

Photography and cartography are entwined in similar processes of subject orientation that structure our experience of social, environmental and virtual landscapes.  A map is not a representation so much as a system of propositions. This project reveals mapping itself as a generative process of knowledge creation, a liberatory method for re-imagining and re-imaging our world, its built and natural environments, and the relationship between space and place.

Maps are tied to a history of authority, scientific rationality and practical application, masking the underlying subjectivity and biases of their creation.  Satellite-based navigation, the disciplines of geography and, more recently, urban planning, have popularized and proliferated map imagery while helping to cement an aura of unassailable cartographic objectivity.  Maps have become ubiquitous tools in our daily lives, and are understandably identified in accordance with a few simple assumptions: they are graphic representations of spatial relations and their creators are technicians bound to graphic systems that reflect a physical reality.  However, the true nature of maps is one of distortion, beginning with their projections of three-dimensional surfaces onto two-dimensional frames, and compounded by territorialization, a habit of identifying, naming and claiming. Maps are image-objects in which different conceptions and configurations of time and space are created, not just charted.
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In the afterglow of a recent opening for the installation at workspace, after total darkness, I received a letter form a friend and collaborator about dark-sky parks and this post on BLDBLOG. Thank you Brian for sending me deeper into the black skies.

2009 is UNESCO’s international year of astronomy and The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) is continuing to promote awareness about light pollution. In Scotland, there is an effort underway to create Europe’s first “dark sky park.” This park would join the only two other such parks recognized by the IDA as having the necessary protections against light pollution and an exceptionally pristine nightscape. The other two parks are both in the United States (in Utah and northern Pennsylvania) and are joined by the sole dark-sky community in Flagstaff AZ.

BLDGBLOG makes an interesting connection, especially in light of the work done for the after total darkness book, between dark skies as cultural and natural property which are directly affected by our landscape and the shape of our community.

The concept of shaping the ground to frame and enhance the sky is not new (for instance, James Turrell’s Skyscapes are an architectural attempt to achieve “light effects and perceptual events” centered on a complex reframing of the sky). Nonetheless, the idea of rebuilding and landscaping an entire community specifically for the purposes of experiencing darkness is an exciting one – as is the idea of UNESCO, official protector of World Heritage Sites, attempting to safeguard dark skies as a “natural and cultural property.

Apparently, James Turrel also worked on the campaign to create the Flagstaff community standards for light pollution. What could be a better activist cause for an artist so dedicated to the profundity of subtle sensory shifts? For better or worse, Turrel’s skyspace in Claremont can be seen from within the light shadow of Los Angeles. The sunsets through this ocular are perhaps more striking than the night skies, but the play between built environment and astral luminance is still pretty provocative. Watch this video.

Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, And the Erotic Life of Property, is working on a new book about America’s cultural commons.

For Hyde, redressing the balance between private (corporate, individual) and common (public) interests depends not just on effective policy but also on recovering the idea of the cultural commons as a deeply American concept. To that end, he excavates a history of the American imagination in which the emphasis is not on the lone genius (Thoreau scribbling hermetically in the Massachusetts woods) but on the anonymous pamphleteer, the inventor eager to share his discoveries.

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Much of Hernandez’s work confronts spaces of holy significance and geometric precision. This reveals a converging aesthetic that will be familiar to anyone who has visited a church or temple, a graveyard or a museum, a barren desert or a civic center. His images/objects feign a cartographic process, but one where the assumptions of authority are tested. Objective realities proposed by both maps and photographs are similarly confusing, although pulling in opposite directions. The traditional operation of a photograph presents the viewer with a singular subjectivity, that of the apparatus, the location of the camera. Conversely, a geographic map suggests that in the terrain represented, “you are here” or “here” or “here.” On one you cannot ever locate yourself in the projected image, and in the other you cannot help but “find yourself” in its representation. It is only human that we desire to have our “perspective” understood, respected and seen by others. To achieve this exchange with greater accuracy has long been the goal of man and machine. Hernandez approaches, with beautiful futility, a universe that has no math, no map, no image and no place from which one can really take it all in.