Subversive Cartography
Bom texto/projeto sobre mídias locativas e a criação de mapas “subversivos”, forma de anexar informação, criando mapas com “unofficial landmarks”, como formas de “détorunement”, “psicogeografias”, apropriações do espaço urbano. O texto refere-se a projetos que buscam essas experiências. Vejam trechos do texto Subversive Cartography (Via “Space and Culture“):
“Cell phone cameras, video phones, video surveillance cameras, wireless web cams, and the ever-shrinking digital camera capture multiple layers of city spaces-from the banal to the breathtaking. At the same time, the invisible signals of urban geography such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and wireless Internet hot spots are being made visible through location-specific art practices that alter their intended use and create alternate urban narratives. These practices are known as location-based media, and are works whose central focus is a specific location.
The emergence of these new technologies has facilitated a resurgence and expansion of the theory and practice of psychogeography. Psychogeographers have been experimenting with cities for over forty years, but only recently has this theory manifested in ways other than in texts. The new wave of psychogeographic artists and practitioners-following (literally) in the footsteps of psychogeography’s early enthusiasts, the Situationists-are interpreting its ideas in a tangible, inclusive way, and creating projects that are accessible and even fun, bringing psychogeography to a much wider and more popular audience.
This new generation of practice, which includes numerous websites, art collectives and conferences, is committed to the “mental mapping” of physical civic spaces-that is, mapping the versions of places as they exist in our minds and are represented by our emotions. These projects range from those using technological devices that leave geo-markers (precise coordinates of where something is located) to the graffiti tags left behind by unknown artists. Buildings poised for demolition or lonely bus stops-these sorts of things are worthy of attention from the psychogeographic gaze. This is a new kind of cartography, and it rebuilds and alters the way we represent various urban environments, blending new, often personal, elements into these maps that challenge the so-called “objective” institutional representations of cities. (…)
This project looks at some subversions and reiterations of the institutional map. The three main projects examined here, Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC, Townsend Retraced , and One Block Radius, use maps and government archives as portals into the emotional, non-rational terrain of the places they represent. Their use of institutional maps to question the veracity of institutional mapping is a brilliant form of detournement, one of psychogeography’s wiliest tricks. Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC represents a public transportation system in a sprawling Vancouver suburb in the midst of transition; Townsend Retraced represents a failed 1970s planned utopian urban community on the shore of Ontario’s Lake Erie; One Block Radius is an extensive survey of a one-block area of New York’s social geography.”