From the Cartographic View to the VirtualChristine Buci-Glucksmannhttp://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/mapping_and_text/carthographic-view/

«To think is to travel.» (Deleuze)Any map could be a voyage in thought connecting a passage and a territory, the readable and

the visible, by capturing the infinite within the smallest detail. This could describe the starting pointand the risk inherent in all the «appeals» to cartography, from the 16th-century pictorial to thecontemporary virtual. Indeed, it was Pieter Bruegel's «Landscape with the Fall of Icarus» (1558)that gave birth to a new outloook that would result in more and more scientific atlases and maps.From up high, Icarus contemplates the scenes being played out on the earth, he plunges infinitelyinto a maritime horizon of light; up close we can glimpse his tiny leg. Such a plural view ofdistance and of nearness will gradually bring together «the Icarian eye» and the cartographic eye,into a space with no center, and will introduce a dialectic between «the site» and «the non-site,» touseRobert Smithson's terms. In this way, the map is a veritable alternative to the Albertian modelof the window opened onto the world, and it gives rise to a descriptive andconstructed visualarrangement, a space that is open to multiple entrances, a «plateau» where the gaze becomesnomadic. This relationship between site and non-site has revealed a constituitive geo-philosophicalparadox. On one hand, the map is the territory, as Jorge Luis Borges’ emperor desired, with hispolitical madness for making a map on the very same scale as the territory. But in another sense,the map is not the territory. Even more so, it is its substitute, and that is why Lewis Carroll createdanother, more playful utopia, the blank map. Between being and non-being, territory and plane,the map is the model of an «in-between» that deterritorializes the gaze through a generalizedpanopticon, that can mark out passages, borders and power plays as in all the military strategies ofthe present day. So, we need to examine the genealogy of this view, its modalities and itsstrategies, in order to understand how this regard-passage has today become a model of the virtual.As if the culture of flux and instabilities required a new kind of image – fluid, ultra-thin and light,that I called the image-flux, [1] and that takes over from the modernist image, this crystal-imageproper to the architectural and artistic culture of glass, with all its literal and complextransparencies.1. New VisibilitiesContrary to Foucault’s position concerning the radical distinction between the visible and thereadable, the map is immediately both readable and visible. It functions like a non-mimetic image,an image-index (Pierce), that lies at the origin of a pragmatic of expression. A toponym, such asParis or Berlin, is localized, and corresponds to a referential and contextual territory, a country, afragment of a country or a planisphere. This art of describing the world «in the absence of,» thatVermeer treated in his famous «Allegory of Painting,» in which the immense map of theNetherlands doubles et redoubles the painting within a critical and selfreflective arrangement; infact, this conveyed a contemporary machine of vision that included the discovery of the «newworld» and of a universe that henceforth would have no center and would be infinite. That is whythe map of the world of the 16th and 17th centuries desymbolizes the world previously centeredaroundJerusalem and dominated by the Christ of medieval maps. From then on, the map became amere artefact, and it is easy to understand the fascination it inspired in the first artist cartographers,

Leonardo da Vinci or Dürer. The map seizes the real, masters it, and allows a glimpse of anunconscious quality of vision with its foldings and unfoldings, within a weightless plane. A maptakes possession of the limits and the borders of the unlimited.

This is why these new visibilities that are distinct from the perspectivist schema with its point ofview, combine several heterogenous elements. It is a «descriptio» connecting images and signs, anew kind of abstraction, that views the diagram as abstract, and that allows for the pluralism of thedirections and the displacements characteristic to a worldregard, projected onto a continuous orfragmented plane, with all its variations of scale. An abstraction such as the virtual developspresupposes a mentalization of the world and an abstract machine made of lines and of possibilitiesenabling one to «read a map,» as we say. This involves a complex reading, because one needs toproject oneself outside of oneself, to forget one’s own position, in order to explore this cartographyin rhizomes. The diagram is already in itself a map or an overlay of maps, that allows one toexplore movements, such as in Etienne Jules Marey’s «Diagrammes chronophotographiques,» andvirtual volumes. Le Corbusier's «Diagramme d’un nuage de fumée à Alger» even anticipatedfractal mathematics. The cartographic Cogito is thus that of a voyage in space-time and of a pluralsubject: being here and elsewhere, being near and far, being multiple, up to immersing oneself intoall the possible utopias of a Space Art. The diagram explores continuous space, the constructed,within an abstract figurative which initiates an experience of thought, through its allusive andschematic structure. That is why the diagrammatic reasoning that inspires so many artists—including Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin — is a kind of Leibnizian reasoning, that one rediscovers inthe new connections made between the numeric continuousness and the morphogenesis that are socharacteristic of architectures of the virtual. Seeing is to (construct, build) and to know, to linktopology and tropologies within systems, arrangements made of lines, of forces and of vectoralpoints, as in Paul Klee’sschemas, where the arrows are forces. In that, the map combines the twospace-times distinguished by Boulez and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in «Mille Plateaux.»1The striated space that is metric and pulsed, and the space that is smooth and infinite like the oceanor the desert, with its affects of a universe, its curves and its interstitial graphs.

2. The Contemporary CartoramaBetween exploration and passage, the cartographic view constantly confronts the abstract with thereal, the place with the delocalization. This was confirmed by the numerous experiences of artistcartographers that I analyzed in «L’œil cartographique de l’art,» [2] where the painting is indeed«a Diagram of the Idea» (Duchamp). Certainly, the map in Vermeer’s work or in El Greco's (suchas in his «View and Plan of Toledo«) was straight away an allegory of painting, a kind of opticalimage that was distinct from the perspectivist image, and that captured the micro-shapes within an«Art of unpainting,» as Svletana Alpers demonstrated. It is an attentive eye that registers minusculethings and inscribes the world onto a surface, to the point of creating a veritable baroque of thesurface. But with 20th century modernism, the map lost its allegorical virtues through its multipleuses. Jasper John's tautological eye («Map,» 1961) transformed the map of the United States into apainting (thanks to its expansiveness, its layering of the surface and its non-formalist inherentflatness. But Robert Smithson’s entropic eye, apparent in his land surveys, or in his «Map ofBroken Clear Glass» also constantly confronts vision with antivision. According to him, the map«is a series of upliftings and of collapsings, a strata of unstable fragments.» Such vertiginous mapsare indeed coverings for the transformations and representations of «sedimentations of the mind,»that plunge into nothingness, like the 1930’s architecture in New York with its forms that stretchthemselves out of shape. The world is curved like all the spirals to infinity that Smithson is fond of(C.f. «Spiral Jetty»). In this way we have a broadening of the cartographic field proper to art.Through a subtle alchemy, it transforms space into time and into «a constellation of time» that arenonchronological. It is the Benjaminian time of remembering, where the past documentsadisplacement of strata and of imprints. The skins of Parmiggiani’s or Pistoletto’s world, Alighieroe Boetti’s embellished maps of Afghanistan, the multiple riverbanks and shapes of all the fictive

pantheons (C.f. Gerhard Richter's «Atlas»). The cartographic view lends itself to all theneutralities, all the transpositions and all the utopias, even all the «heterotopias» à la Foucault.From now on, the cartorama of contemporary art is endless, since the map is the interface of theworld, as in Archizoom’s «No Stop City» (1969). And it is precisely this world-making quality ofthe map that generates all its paradoxes and its multiple logics. Since, however utopic it may be,the map can also become a highly effective machine of power. With the maps kept secret bytotalitarian regimes, targetted bombings of sites, indeed of populations, the map truly is «aportrait,» an image «in meaning and in representation,» as «Logique de Port Royal» alreadydescribed. In this sense, the map anticipated all the networks and a world henceforth in processand in passage: ours.3. An Esthetic and Political Model of the VirtualIn fact, it is the new technologies that endow the regard-passage and the regard–flux with all itshermeneutic and political impact. The passage from a culture of stabilities and of objects, with itsFordism and its industrial standards, to a culture of instabilities and of flux with its cyberspace andits instantaneous communication, gives rise to a new «Folie du Voir» on a global scale. Thepassages arise from what Paul Virilio calls «a great optic,» that crosses all borders in real time.

The cartographic view is therefore inseparable from a new regime of historicity of the masses,which joins with a double temporality. A machinated and machine-like time, and an ephemeraltime, that of an eternal present, with neither future nor plans. Also, this regime tends to destroy thetime of memory that has become more and more commemorative, as well as another time, that ofmirrors and reflections, characteristic of the crystal-image of architectural and artistic modernism. Ifthis crystal, with its sharp edges and its coalescences of the present and the past was the allegory ofthe entire culture of glass of the 20th century (c.f. Bruno Taut, Mies van der Rohe orMarcelDuchamp since the beginning of the century), the image-flux with its new fluidities and itsdiaphanous transparencies would be the allegory of a present marked by a plane of globalimmanence that is screen-like. The image-crystal allows one to seize a little time in its pure state,whereas the image-flux resembles skins and second skins of all the bio-philosophies, that blendhyperrealism and technological neobaroque. From now on, all hybridizations are possible. Thecartographic view is thus at work in the great esthetic and virtual paradigms, which explore moreand more the unbalanced systems and the infinity of the continuum, thanks to the new mathematicsof forms. Within this experimental place, shared by architecture and art, one can extract three greatparadigms which conceptualize and produce virtual space-times that transform the real.1. The Topologies:Exploring what Greg Lynn called the «Animate Forms,» these topologies favor the continuum, thecurves and folds, and all the modes of inflection that already haunted Gaudi and all of art nouveau.Many works were created—«Mobius House» by Stephen Perella, «Embryological House» byLynn2, the «Interactive Map of the Project and of the Performativity»—in order to build a bridgebased on flux; there are also Mark Burry’s «Paramorphism» and «Perplication» [3] of unstabletopologies, «Flux-House» by Paul Minific or «Trans Architecture» that is fluid in cyberspace or inthe real (Marcos Novak, NOX (Maurice Nio and Lars Spuybroek)). Everywhere the curve getsthe better of the straight line and the organic rediscovers its abstract powers that an entire formalistand minimalist culture had denied it.2. From Artifices to ArtefactsAn entire baroque culture had loved artifices and a decorative art that was stylized in order to graspthe multiple, curved or infintessimal perceptions, generated by the clair-obscur characteristic of aworld in motion and open onto the infinite. This curved space, reflected in movement andprojections, was reinvented in a neo-baroque numeric, that addressed only knots, spirals, folds androlled-up or unrolledcombinations, where the object is «objectile» and the subject is «subjectile» asGilles Deleuze analyzed it in «Le pli». In other words, this ultra-fast relational interaction puts an

end to an entire vision of modernity theorized by Martin Heidegger: a Cartesian Subject, a stableObject, Truth and technique like «Arraisonnement de l’etant.» The modelization characteristic ofthe new numeric tools of programming and of interactivity positions man within things instead ofin front of them. The map of the world is our interactive «envelope,» in a world with neitherprotection nor envelope.3. SurfacesThe map projected the world onto a plane, and this surface-effect has only been generalized,transforming walls into digital skins and depth into an electronic flatbed. The architecture ofhypersurfaces or Stephen Perella [4] ), digital tattoing of numeric images printed on panels (JeanNouvel, Herzog and de Meuron), biotechnical and tactile camouflage (Lynn or NOX)—everywhere the fluid and ultra-thin covering has become the truth of the nude. And here the artistsjoin with the architects, in their landscapes and virtual cities, as can be seen in the works of MiguelChevalier LI3, who draws time and explores post-ephemeral and fragile images. In this way, thespace becomes a floating space and the real becomes more and more transformed by a virtual thatgeneralizes the concept of «-scape.» As Arjun Appadurai has shown in «Modernity at Large» [5]a far-reaching work of intercultural imagination is established in the ethnoscapes, mediascapes,ideoscapes, which are made of the virtual archives and potential narratives of all cultures, betweenhomogenization and heterogenization. The cultures of the ruling powers who dominate with theirwar machines, but also those of the dominated, the diasporas and the «post-colonial» minorities.There is thus a becoming-time of space, and in this situation marked by the technologicalrevolution, it is extremely important to distinguish two qualities that are characteristic of ephemeraltime. A melancholic ephemeral, that of the black bile of the Greeks and the Vanités of the moderns(C.f. «Melencolia» by Dürer, 1514) [6] , and of an entire western mindset thatrefuses to renounceits psychological investment in objects and to undertake a Freudian «task of mourning.» And anephemeral of affirmation that is more Nietzschian, which I found more present during my stays inJapan and China. The impermanence (the «mujô» in Japanese) is the positive capture of time in itsvibrations, its passages, its rhythms and all its variations that unite the technological and thecosmological. As one of humanity’s most ancient texts – the «Yi-Jing» – shows, it involvescombining directions and energies, in order to grasp «the flux that is passing» («peng yun qi») andthe dynamic that corresponds to the opportune moment. That is why the ephemeral is not a passiveacceptance of the present, but rather a way of capturing the modulations of beings and things, theirunity and their differences.

To readdress Hannah Arendt’s distinction, the «potentia» as a potentiality that creates a commonspace interwoven with «the plural-oneness» is radically distinct from the «potestas» as a logic ofpower. Since there can be a politic of the fluxes characteristic of the «potestas», there can also bean esthetic, indeed an ethic, of potency, in which virtuality is a force that transforms the real and isnot merely a universe of semblances. This nomadic science that the cartographic eye reveals to usis always only constituted of passages and becomings, momentary halts and decodable paths ofenergy that enable us to include the parameters of changeability and of displacement into theoverview. Also, the esthetic of the fluxes is a science of multisensorial reactions that constantlyconfronts the human being with his extremes and his risks, the post-human as well as the infra-human. Perhaps, now more than ever, we need to set up a cultural resistance and humanaffirmation of the manifold inbetween worlds in the face of the disorders of existence.

Translated from French by Jane McDonald

[1] Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (1980), english : A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Vol. 2), University of Minnesota 1987; deutsch: Tausend Plateaus.Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie II, Übers. v. Gabriele Ricke/Ronald Vouillié, Berlin 1992.[2] Presented at the Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2000 ; cf. Greg Lynn, Architecture for anEmbryological Housing, Basel 2002

[3] Cf. the RMIT - Homepage[4] Cf. Stephen Perella, »Hypersurface architecture and the question of interface«, in : V2,Interfacing Reality, Rotterdam, 1997[5] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University ofMinnesota, 1996.[6] Cf. detailed information at kunstdirekt.© Media Art Net 2004