![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
“But what can the geopolitical lens reveal, when it’s a matter of artistic invention?” (Holmes, 2008a)
1. Geopoetics.The figure of map1, historically associated with colonial imperialism, has gradually grown into a privileged trope of contemporary art which articulates it either as personal cartography (singular trace)2, as an ethnographic map of a community or institution3 - thus revealing the![]()
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
complexity of the relationships within these -, or even by evoking its constitutive power, a map of becoming that traces a people to come4.This notion of map as an artistic trope evokes, for example, the work of Lothar Baumgarten, a German artist whose conceptualist work is shaped by a subtle social critique manifested in a particularly poetic and political way of molding ethnographical and historical materials. In this respect we recall specifically the 20015 exhibition that the Fundação de Serralves (Porto) dedicated to this artist, titled “By water brought collected broken buried”, in which the first room displayed a vast map spread out on the floor and partially hidden by a net (Voo Nocturno, 1968-69) next to a small pyramid of blue pigment (Tetraedo, 1968). Cartographies, photographs, names, drawings, sounds, feathers, masks and charms populate the universe of Baumgarten, but always filtered by a reflexive gesture: there is always a mirror, an object of daily use abandoned in the jungle, a name beyond the code, a disorienting index on the map which all betray the presence of the artist, of his gaze, of his system of values. In the words of Hal Foster:
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
Collective/Naeem Mohaimen regarding the map co-authored with John Emerson for project CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006 (2006), and included on the book An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Mogel, L. & Bhagat, A., 2008)6. In fact, this fascinating Atlas, composed of ten maps created by artists and activists, as well as an equal number of essays which query and analyze these irreverent and unsettling cartographies, brings together reflexivity and activist gesture and may be read in agreement with the notion of “tactical media,” just as described by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) on its short essay “Tactical Cartographies,” which examines the map Routes of Least Surveillance (2001-2007) by the IAA and Site-R. As the collective puts it:
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
under the aegis of a desire for a complex social bond of solidarity8. We may recall here the words of Brian Holmes in “The Affectivist Manifesto”, where we witness an enunciation of affect9, in the deleuzian sense, allied (implicitly) to Foucault’s concept of subjectivation10:
occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from the private self in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order which |
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() | ![]() Ashley Hunt. A World Map: in which we see..., 2005. Image kindly supplied by the artist.![]() Ashley Hunt. A World Map: in which we see..., 2005 (detail). Image kindly supplied by
the artist.
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
connection to the work or subordination of another. (...) Primary research for the map came from years of cultural and political work within activist and reform movements against the United States’ prison system, and emerged from a perceived need to expand the analytical basis for that work beyond the limitations of nationally framed legal, institutional and civil discourse. Especially after September 11, 2001, a condition of statelessness appeared to increasingly define the nature of imprisonment and mass prison expansion (which is now a global, albeit US driven phenomena), making the figure of the prisoner less and less discernable from displaced figures the world over whose resources and power are progressively seized and expropriated.” (Hunt, 2008: 145-146)11 The figure of the placeless, namely the clandestine immigrant and the refugee, is mapped by the collective An Architektur12 through a detailed cartography of the Departure Center at Fürth (a center for illegal immigrants with no passports or similar documentation) in the German Bavaria, as well as by visualizations of the center-mediated relationships between the asylum seekers and the several institutions involved (medical, juridical, law enforcement, among others), as well as the procedures for seeking asylum in Germany.![]() An Architektur in collaboration with a42.org. Geography of the Fürth Departure Center, 2004 (detail). Image kindly supplied by the collective.![]()
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
![]() An Architektur in collaboration with a42.org. Geography of the Fürth Departure Center, 2004. Image kindly supplied by the collective.Quoting from the Geography of the Fürth Departure Center map:
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
“Drawing Escape Tunnels through the Borders: Cartographic Research Experiments by European Social Movements”13, the notion itself of “frontier” has been changing over time to a point where the current “logic of frontier” largely exceeds the geographic boundaries of the State-Nation, fractured into “internal frontiers” that segregate work, institutional and familial relationships, to name only a few, intensifying social inequalities and accentuating feelings of mistrust and social discrimination.Targeting this climate of suspicion and fear that transverses the contemporary experience by creating an ideological context for an expansive application of surveillance devices—namely through closed circuit TV networks (CCTV)—, the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), in collaboration with Site-R, counterattacks in this Atlas with the ironic and activist map Routes of Least Surveillance (2001/2007), based on the online application iSee14—developed by the collective for several cities since 2001—which displays, in real-time, maps of the routes least exposed to surveillance cameras.![]()
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
![]() Institute for Applied Autonomy in collaboration with Site-R, Routes of Least Surveillance, 2001/2007 (detail). Image kindly supplied by the collective.The iSee project lays emphasis on a dynamic cartography in which localization and route are combined into subversive maps that highlight the creation of experimental, communal and creative strategies for appropriation and transformation of both media and new technologies—namely those that are central to the current “surveillance society”—as a means to enhance the sharing, creation and free flux of signals, things, people, actions, and affections. In an interview with Erich W. Schienke, published in 2002 by the Surveillance & Society15 magazine, the IAA called attention to the potential of the iSee application when combined with locative media (on which they were already working), as the intersection between the two would eventually transform the application into a general purpose mapping instrument, open to the creative intervention of its users, specifically through GPS-enabled PDAs, who would thus be able to insert multiple data and narratives onto the maps.2. Allegories of the Surveillance Society.![]()
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
In fact, with the development of systems such as the Geographic Information System (GIS), which combines geographically indexed databases, satellite imagery, and GPS, as well as the proliferation of cell phones, laptops, and wireless technologies, the artistic and activist practices associated with locative media have become more prominent within the contemporary cultural and artistic scene, suggesting a “locational humanism” (Holmes, 2003b) and imagining the potential for collective action of the “smart mobs” (Rheingold, 2002) of the 21st Century. In his article “Open Cartographies: On Assembling Things through Locative Media”, Michael Dieter writes:
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
Spoke (2007) by Blast Theory; approximations to the situacionist dérive17 as is the case with the singular traces superimposed onto the urban cartography as those put forward by Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood (GPS Drawing), and Ester Polak in Real Time (2002); conversion and activism in the case of the Makrolab project (1997-2007) by Marko Peljhan, and the Transborder Tool for Immigrants (2007) by “artivist” Ricardo Dominguez.However, if the tendency to modify technical devices, intervening in their purpose and liberating them from private appropriation through an allegorization18 that layers them with new meanings, intersects these artistic proposals, there is nevertheless an ambiguity that traverses and surpasses them. In the words of Jordan Crandall:
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
In effect, if the aesthetical form of the dérive has made a strong come back in our contemporary experience, be it under the guise of the individual in transit, freed from geographical constrains and available for new encounters through the always-on digital technologies, or through the nomadic navigation on the World Wide Web, never before have wanderings, routes and behaviors been this registered, stored and controlled20, true to the deleuzian concept of “dividual”21 – the current condition of the individual when reduced to a “data subject” (the result of an endless split between an individual’s physical self and his/hers data representation)22. We may thus say that today, more than ever, the imaginary maps, the ones that trace singular trajectories or create a people to come, are drawn in relationship to (and in tension with) a cartography of an overexposed territory, monitored by a gaze that never ceases to calculate and evaluate.![]()
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
Thus, as David Lyon notes on «The End of Privacy» (Lyon, 2007), the contemporary “surveillance society”23—where location-aware corporations such as Digital Angel and VeriChip24 arise, along with the omnipresence of closed-circuit TV networks (CCTV) in urban spaces and the development of a new penology based on the prediction of risk and on the identification and management of the categorized groups according to different degrees of danger (Ericson, R. & Haggerty, K., 1997)—has been progressively replacing the criteria of public benefit with that of risk minimization in what concerns the assessment of public policies, a tendency which only gained strength since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. To question this new condition, to confront the technical apparatus, to subvert and experiment, to rise above its time, this is what we can and should expect from contemporary art.
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
of CCTVs—as part of the Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers26, Faceless is entirely made from surveillance camera footage obtained by the artist under the UK Data Protection Act which gives the individual captured by the CCTVs the right to request a copy of his/hers footage. In “Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow”, Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, who collaborated on the screenplay, state:
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
![]() Still from the movie Faceless (2007). Image kindly supplied by the artist.In this Orwellian fable the fabulous voice of Tilda Swinton narrates
the story of a strange city whose inhabitants have no face and live
immersed in an eternal present, the real time, dictated by the scrutiny of
the New Machine which has abolished the past and the future, and
along with them guilt and unrest, but also any possibility to experience
the real. Suddenly, one woman regains her face and with it the
consciousness of herself and others, rediscovering the city and its areas
of affect and freedom, just like the ones populated by the ‘spectral
children’ with their colorful and clandestine dances to the sound of
which the main character will regain, for brief moments, her memories,
reuniting once more with those who are dear to her.
|
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
Faceless best expresses its strangeness and poetic activism, evoking the contradictory forces that connect us to the spaces we so often cross and forget to inhabit.![]() Still from the movie Faceless (2007). Image kindly supplied by the artist.Monitored, assessed, controlled, divided and owned: such is the complex condition of contemporary space which may nevertheless become our territory if traversed by affects, bodies and gestures that inhabit it and make it communal. It is this possibility that, in different ways, movies like Faceless, the photographs and cartographies of Baumgarten, and the maps of An Atlas of Radical Cartography address. In their singularity and difference, these works of art offer evidence that the creation of this emerging territory, this labor of geopoetics, can’t relinquish a relationship with technology and the media. On the contrary: this is a political relationship and therefore an imperative one.![]() |
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
An Architektur & a42.org (2008). Geography of the Fürth Departure Center, 2004, in Mogel, Lize & Bhagat, Alexis (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics Protest Press.Carvalho, Margarida (2008). “Mapas Imaginários”, in Virose, b#21, October 2008. [Online]. Available at: http://virose.pt/vector/b_21/carvalho.html (Accessed 7 March 2009).Carvalho, Margarida (2001). “Pela Água Trazido Recolhido Partido Enterrado”, in Interact, nº4, Novembro 2001. [Online]. Available at: http://www.interact.com.pt/interact4/ (Accessed 7 Março 2009).Casas-Cortes, Maribel & Cobarrubias, Sebastian (2008), “Drawing Escape Tunnels through Borders”, in Mogel, Lize & Bhagat, Alexis (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics Protest Press, pp. 51-65.Crandall, Jordan (2006). “Precision + Guided + Seeing”, in Virose, x#5, July 2006. [Online]. Available at: http://www.virose.pt/vector/x_05/crandall.html (Accessed 10 January 2009).Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (1991). Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.Deleuze, Gilles (1990). “Post-Scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle”, in Pourparlers. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 240-247.Deleuze, Gilles (1990). “Contrôle et devenir”, in Pourparlers. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 229-239.Deleuze, Gilles (1990). “La vie comme oeuvre d’art”, in Pourparlers. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 129-138.Dieter, Michael (2007). “Open Cartographies: On Assembling Things through Locative Media”, in New Network Theory. [Online]. Available at: http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/27.pdf (Accessed 27 February 2009).Ericson, Richard & Haggerty, Kevin (1997). Policing the Risk Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Foster, Hal (1996). Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Foucault, Michel (1998). “De Outros Espaços”, in Virose, archive a, 1998. [Online]. Available at: http://virose.pt/vector/periferia/foucault_pt.html (Accessed 13 March 2009).Holmes, Brian (2008a). “The Affectivist Manifesto”, in Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. [Online] Available at: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/11/16/the-affectivist-manifesto/ (Accessed 13 March 2009).Holmes, Brian (2008b). “The Ground”, in Continental Drift. [Online] Available at: http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/intro2008.htm#top (Accessed 13 March 2009). |
![]() |
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
Affective TerritoriesMargarida Carvalho |
![]() |
Holmes, Brian (2003a). “Imaginary Maps, Global Solidarities”, in Piet Zwart Institute Publications. [Online] Available at: http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhimaginary/ (Accessed 25 de September 2008).Holmes, Brian (2003b). “Drifting through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure”. [Online] Available at: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1523&lang=en (Accessed 13 March 2009).Hunt, Ashley (2008). “A World Map in Which We See”, in Mogel, Lize & Bhagat, Alexis (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics Protest Press, pp.145-146.Institute for Applied Autonomy (2008). “Tactical Cartographies” in Mogel, Lize & Bhagat, Alexis (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics Protest Press, pp. 29-36.Luksch, Manu & Patel, Mukul (2007). “Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow”, in Stocker, Gerfried & Schöpf, Christine (eds.), Ars Electronica 2007: Goodbye Privacy. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, pp. 72-78.Lyon, David (2007). “The End of Privacy?”, in Stocker, Gerfried & Schöpf, Christine (eds.), Ars Electronica 2007: Goodbye Privacy. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, pp. 52-56.Manovich, Lev (2004). “The Poetics of Augmented Space”. [Online]. Available at: http://www.manovich.net/nnm%20map/Augmented_2004revised.doc (Accessed 13 March 2009).Miranda, José Bragança (1998). “Da Interactividade: Crítica da Nova Mimesis Tecnológica”, in Giannetti, Claudia (ed.), Ars Telemática: Telecomunicação, Internet e Ciberespaço. Lisbon: Relógio D’Água Editors, pp. 179-233.Owens, Craig (1984). “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism”, in Wallis, Brian (ed.), Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, pp. 203-235.Paglen, Trevor & Visible Collective (2008). “Mapping Ghosts”, in Mogel, Lize & Bhagat, Alexis (eds.), An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: The Journal of Aesthetics Protest Press, pp.39-49.Plant, Sadie (1992). The Most Radical Gesture. London: Routledge.Rheingold, Howard (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books.Schienkle, Erich & Institute for Applied Autonomy (2002). “On the Outside Looking Out: An Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy”, in Surveillance & Society 1 (1), pp. 102-119. [Online]. Available at: http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1/iaa.pdf (Accessed 15 March 2009).Surveillance Studies Network, (2006). A Report on the Surveillance Society. [Online]. Available at: http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/prac tical_application/surveillance_society_full_report_2006.pdf (Accessed 20 February 2009).Williams, R. (2005). “Politics and Self in the Age of Digital Re(pro)ducibility”, in Fast Capitalism. [Online]. Available at: http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/1_1/williams.html (Accessed 20 de January 2009). |
![]() |
![]() |
||
Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. Vol 3, October 2009. |