Linda Valenta
Research Master’s Thesis Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam 27th of June 2019
Supervisor: dr. Abe Geil
Second reader: dr. Bernhard Rieder
Cartographic Catastrophes
Cartographic Catastrophes: The Politics of Performative Maps Abstract
Within contemporary cartography studies, the map has been released from its mimetic bondage: maps are not considered mimetic representations of the world, but ever-fleeting and transitory devices that materialize differently based on each encounter. This ontology poses a fundamental problem regarding the politics of performativity: how can a transient and ever-becoming medium be subjected to political analysis? This thesis aims to trace the political in the performative by elucidating the genesis of the media event – that is, the transformation from real-time event to mediated cartographic image. As Google Earth and Maps par excellence are performative through their interactive features, and as catastrophes and crises are politically vulnerable and sensitive events, Google’s mapping of the latter is discussed as the object of study. Drawing from Christian Jacob and the legacy of historical materialism, a map’s political performativity is considered to be determined by its material conditions. The latter is firstly researched by examining the embodied – and hence material – gaze that is established through Google Earth and Maps’ aesthetic configurations of space: aerial views, landmarks, street views and visual capital. Case studies show that the genesis of the embodied gaze stemming from aforementioned aesthetics are characterized by displacement, and that this displacement accelerates within the medium. Second, the temporal politics as deployed by Google’s cartographic services is examined, inquiring to what extent the database materiality violates the contingent temporality of the crisis and the catastrophe. From it follows that the event is robbed from its contingency by the process of commodification – a process that is found innate to Google’s database logic. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that the material conditions of Google’s maps are entrenched in capital. Consequently, the genesis of the media event in Google Earth and Maps obscures the contingency of time and accelerates the displacement in space.
Keywords: cartography, Google, performativity, materiality, media event, historical materialism, temporality, aesthetics, database
Table of contents
1 Introduction ... 4
1.1 Politics of Performative Maps ... 4
1.2 Materiality as the Cradle of Performativity ... 5
1.3 The Crisis and Catastrophe in Google Earth and Maps ... 6
1.4 Spatial Politics ... 7
1.5 Temporal Politics ... 8
2 Materializing Maps: Moving Beyond Representation ... 10
2.1 Tracing the Political in the Performative ... 10
2.2 Post-representational Maps ... 11
2.3 Beyond Representation: Performative Maps ... 12
2.4 Thhe Politics of Performative Maps ... 14
2.5 Materiality Constituting Performativity: Aesthetics and Spatiality ... 16
2.6 Materiality Constituting Performativity: Temporality ... 18
2.7 Researching Materiality Interdisciplinarily ... 20
2.8 Catastrophes and Crises ... 23
2.9 The Genesis of the Media Event ... 24
3 Spatial Aesthetics: Aerial Views, Landmarks and Immersion ... 26
3.1 The Materiality of Visual Data ... 26
3.2 Aerial Views ... 28
3.3 Landmarks ... 32
3.4 Immersion ... 36
3.5 Visual Capital ... 38
3.6 Spatial Politics: The Materiality of Visual Capital ... 40
4 The Materiality of Time: The Database and the Disaster ... 42
4.1 The Materiality of Time ... 42
4.2 The temporality of The Catastrophe and the Crisis ... 43
4.3 Temporalities of Hurricane Katrina, Darfur Crisis, Tōhoku Earthquake ... 44
4.4 Cartographic temporality and the database ... 47
4.5 Temporal Capital ... 50
4.6 Obscuring the Contingency of the Event ... 53
5 Conclusion ... 54
5.1 The politics of Performative Maps ... 54
5.2 Crises and Catastrophes as Visual Capital ... 55
5.3 Temporal Materialities ... 57
5.4 The Materiality of Ideology ... 59
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 Politics of Performative Maps
Google Maps and Earth are the cradle of interactive mapping. Rather than mirroring the world as a representation, these contemporary maps constantly reinvent themselves and the world they depict. Ever-evolving data-feeds, user-generated content, software updates and algorithms are some of the forces causing each map in Google to differentiate according to users’ needs. Users are able to digitally direct their gaze by selecting one of the many modes of viewing and can even imprint their own gaze on the cartographic image by uploading user-generated content. Quite recently, Google Maps and Earth granted loyal users the option to borrow a 360-degree street view camera to capture the corners of the world that were still untouched by Google’s gaze (Google Maps Street View n.p.). Besides the strong presence of users as contributors, the agency of data-driven algorithms has taken a more prominent role in shaping interactive maps. These developments have caused a strong reconceptualization of maps and their ontology. Rather than mimetic representations of the world, scholars now consider maps as fluid and performative vehicles that are in a constant state of becoming (Kitchin & Dodge 340). This entails that one and the same map manifests differently in each encounter (Kitchin & Dodge 333). Even though this especially concerns interactive maps like the ones mentioned above, this new ontology also applies to traditional maps: a paper map of Amsterdam is a different product for a tourist than it is for a local resident. Consequently, every map is not only a product of its maker, but also the product of the forces that cause them to be utilized in a specific way (idem). Classicist Christian Jacob hence argues that the effects of maps highly depend on their materiality (Della Dora Performative Atlases 244).
However, if maps are transient and ever-fleeting vehicles that materialize differently based on each encounter, how can they be politically pinned down? Put differently, if maps are not representations of a spatial world, but the product of specific interactions, how can they be politically assessed? Wouldn’t such an analysis entail a search for a truth value in the ‘representational’ symbols that maps emit? These are issues that are not addressed by the scholars who reconceptualized the map as an ontogenetic medium, but should be tackled to adhere to a map’s fluid character. Furthermore, a representational analysis follows the very logic that should be critically assessed in a political analysis of Google Earth and Maps – that is, the logic of capital. The latter considers value as a given rather than a procedure, for instance by ignoring the process in which a commodity gained its monetary value (Lotz 173). Following
the same line, a representational analysis treats maps as a given, rather than the product of an ever-evolving procedure.
This thesis aims to counter the order of representation by seeking the political in the performative. It develops a political methodology that does not depend on the hermeneutics of representation, but traces ideology in the genesis of the map, rather than at its end product. By researching how an event in time and space emerges into the mediated image – the media event – this thesis acknowledges the cartographic image as entrenched in performativity. Subsequently, the ideological violence that is done to the contingent, real-time event – through its transformation into a media event – is scrutinized and subjected to critique.
To pursue the argument, the second chapter discusses a useful theoretical framework for the political assessment of performative maps: materiality. As matter pushes the map to manifest in one way or another, materialities of the map can be considered as tools that have the ability to ideologically mutate the map. The politically complex event of the catastrophe and crisis is introduced as a feasible case study to understand the politics that arise through their indexation in Google’s cartographic image. The third chapter discusses one first materiality of the map that is involved in this indexation, namely the embodied gaze and the aesthetics that configure such gaze. This is followed by a discussion of how these aesthetics construct a politics of spatiality in Google Earth and Maps. Finally, the fourth chapter discusses the temporal politics of Google Earth and Maps by scrutinizing at what cost the temporally contingent event is mediated in the cartographic image. Put differently: how is the temporality of the catastrophe and the crisis affected in its transformation into media event?
1.2 Materiality as the Cradle of Performativity
The second chapter discusses the way materiality of the map is a useful framework to determine a map’s performative politics. As mentioned above, classicist Christian Jacob argues that the effects of maps highly depend on their materiality (Della Dora Performative Atlases 244) and hence this becomes a crucial aspect to understand the genesis of a specific map (Della Dora
Performative Atlases 252). Researching the materiality of the map correlates with historical
materialism’s endeavor to elucidate the material conditions of history and to, consequently, establish an understanding of the public consciousness that emerges from these material conditions (Marx Critique of Political Economy n.p.). Analogously, the material conditions of
a map can be studied to scrutinize how it develops its political ideas; how the politically laden genesis of the media event arises from the primary matter constructing it.
These material conditions can first of all be found in the literal materiality of the map such as the hardware it is made of. As stated by Lisa Gitelman, data can never merely rely on abstractions; data finds its roots in material resources such as land, water and metals processed to become storage media (6). However, the materiality of the map also concerns the embodied gaze of the map user. In other words, the way a map user is allowed or constrained to sense the map in relation to its gaze can be considered a material condition. The studies of the senses – aesthetics – play a prominent role in determining these conditions, as the aesthetic configurations in a map determine how an embodied gaze emerges. According to philosopher Jacques Rancière, aesthetics are highly political, in that they determine what can be sensed or not: ‘Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.’ (Rancière The Politics of Aesthetics 14)
The subsequent endeavor is to fathom how the possibilities of space and time are delimited through the medium-specific materialities of Google Earth and Maps. These cartographic devices do not only demarcate space; they map moments in time – events, which is exemplified by their use of time stamps. Consequently, this thesis questions what violence is done to an event if it is removed from its contingency in time and space, and subsequently encapsulated in Google’s cartographic image. This becomes especially significant for events that are politically complex, events that have a lot at stake, as their simplification can cause displacements for the vulnerable individuals affected by them. Put differently, their genesis in the cartographic image (the media event) may be entrenched with a political bias that harms the political sensitivity of the event.
1.3 The Crisis and Catastrophe in Google Earth and Maps
The catastrophe and the crisis are events that par excellence embody such complexities. These phenomena are characterized as complex culminations of social problems, ecological issues and hazard itself (Holm 16). For instance, Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophe was intensified as racial make-up of an area, playing a part in victimhood (Holm 17). Even though the hurricane itself did not discriminate, brown communities were hit harder than the white ones, as the first had less access to humanitarian intervention than the latter, despite the fact that their areas were
affected strongest by the floods. The social disadvantages that these communities suffered from hence became disastrous after the hazard hit their homes (idem). This exemplifies the manifold culmination of issues that characterize a catastrophe the way it is, namely an event whose pinnacle is at the intersection of social injustice, ecological negligence and unexpected hazards.
In terms of temporalities, these events are also highly complex due to the fact that they are not just ruptures in time, but conditions of history (Eliassen 49). Some identify the catastrophe as a sudden rupture in an absolute linear order (Doane Information, Crisis and
Catastrophe 318). However, in antiquity, catastrophe referred to an overturning in a theatre
piece in which fortune or misfortune strikes a person, thus stemming from a relative disorder (a catastrophe ‘for someone’) rather than an absolute one (Eliassen 35). Furthermore, in the 20th century, the catastrophe became inherently linked to the disaster: the catastrophe with deadly consequences.1 Being structurally present through genocide, famine and floods, the disaster is considered as a producer of history rather than a deviation from an absolute and stable continuum.
Subsequently, this thesis researches how the materiality of Google Earth and Maps conveys the complexities of the crisis and the catastrophe. It scrutinizes the transformation from real-time event to cartographic image and traces how the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of these events are affected, and the ideology that pushes these modifications to arise. Such an analysis counters the approach in which the map is merely interpreted as a representation of an ideology that can be traced in a fixed truth-value (e.g. by stating that a map is a representation of imperialism because it demarcates space). Instead, the map is considered a performative vehicle whose ideology is traced in the genesis of the map, scrutinizing the map to emerge in one way or another, rather than interpreting its end product through symbolisms.
1.4 Spatial Politics
The third chapter discusses the embodied gaze as part of the materiality of the map. The embodied – and hence material – encounter between map makers or users and specific aesthetic configurations in Google Earth and Maps produces a politics of spatiality. As argued by cultural anthropologist Sarah Pink, photographic aesthetics evoke a multisensory experience (Pink 9), meaning their visuality is innately tied to a movement in space. This is especially present in
1 The words catastrophe and disaster are used interchangeably throughout the thesis, as a lot of authors use both words to refer to the same phenomenon: a sudden event with deadly consequences. Depending on the word choice of the cited author (catastrophe or disaster), I will refer to either of them.
Google Earth and Maps as the cartographic image ultimately signifies a specific space in time (idem). Drawing from Rancière’s concept of aesthetics as political devices, Google’s cartographic spatiality is evaluated by analyzing the different modes of viewing it enables – its aesthetics. These include aerial views, landmarks and 360-degree street views. For each aesthetic, a case study is discussed.
First, I explain how the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina indicates that aerial views in Google Maps foster a racialized make-up of an area in interaction with map users and contributors. This is followed by an analysis of the crisis in Darfur as indexed in Google Earth with the use of landmarks. The genealogy of landmarks shows that this aesthetic is entrenched in warfare and tourism. Finally, the indexation of Tōhoku Earthquake’s aftermath in Google Street View is discussed in order to show the displacing practice of street view aesthetics, which has its roots in the commercial practice of the 19th century panorama – a commercial medium that was used to immerse people in an exotic space, as a surrogate for travel (Grau 69).
Finally, the materiality of visual capital is discussed as the force driving the map to exist in the first place. The acceleration of visual content is part of the ideological business model of platform capitalism – a neocapitalist model that monetizes data, including the depiction of disasters and crises. With the advent of Google Maps as integrating geotagged advertisements, the expansion of visual capital proves to be part of a revenue model rather than a humanitarian intervention. As conceptualized by activist Naomi Klein, disaster capitalism finds its roots in society’s misfortunes and subsequently converts it into a business model (6). Geographer and media scholar Lisa Parks argues that this practice also involves the expansion of visual content of catastrophes and crises (Parks Digging into Google Earth 542). Hence, the genesis of the media event can be traced to a spatially and politically distanced corporate vision, rather than a close witnessing of the victim. The displacement of the victim consequently accelerates within the medium, as will be further explained in the third chapter.
1.5 Temporal Politics
A final materiality that is discussed in this thesis is that of temporality. According to philosopher Timothy Morton, each object or event has its own temporal order: rocks live at a different pace than humans do; flowers die at a different pace than stars (Morton 23). The specific materiality of an object or event causes it to have its own structure in terms of time. Consequently, the catastrophe’s temporal order is wired differently from a cartographic device.
By scrutinizing what these temporalities are, this chapter traces the harm that is done to the temporal contingency of the catastrophic event in its conversion to mediated cartographic image (media event).
The catastrophe and the crises are characterized as a condition in time, as they structurally modify history. Their present state is, however, contingent of nature, due to the fact that their presence and outcome are always uncertain (Peters Witnessing 720). It follows then that catastrophe and crises can be characterized as contingent conditions of time. Contrastingly, the materiality of the database causes Google’s cartographic services to construct an absolute linear order, to which the catastrophe is a sudden rupture in time, rather than a condition of time. This linear order stems from the database logic in which Google constructs its own lo-fi universe (Peters The Marvelous Clouds 329): that which is tagged exists, the rest is dark matter. Google gets rid of the contingency of the catastrophic by rendering it part of its own constellations, subjecting the produced media event to its own laws. These laws are characterized by the logic of capital. Contrarily to the victim, Google does not temporally witness the event in time and space, but records the aftermath of the event – severing it from time and space. Furthermore, Google embodies the logic of the victor, rather than the victim, as it is a major corporation that curates the current conditions of history. It does not merely record the catastrophe: it also commodifies it. This accelerates the atemporality of the recorded event and displaces it even further from the historical subject that actually witnessed the disaster. The logic of representations prevails: within Google’s database logic, what matters is the depiction of an event rather than the emergence of it. For this reason, it is urgent to develop methodological tools to uncover the genesis – the emergence – of the media event, rather than its representation.
In conclusion, the politics of performative maps are imprinted in the materialities that enable encounters between users and maps, between map makers and algorithms, between databases and disasters. Moving beyond the symbolisms of representation allows for an analysis that critically examines the logic of representation seeping through the indexation of events. This logic is inherently tied to the commodity as a given, rather than events as products of the contingency of time.
2 MATERIALIZING MAPS:MOVING BEYOND REPRESENTATION
2.1 Tracing the Political in the Performative
The modern conception of maps contends that they essentially embody a mimetic representation of the world (Caquard 231). As such, they have long been neutral objects of science, aiming to represent the world as adequately as possible with the use of spatial data (Kitchin & Dodge 331). Given the technological developments that allow map users to contribute to maps, this modern notion of maps as mimesis becomes obsolete. Contemporary maps like Google Earth and Maps enable users to actively shape the maps they make, either by uploading user-generated content or by simply having the freedom to direct their gaze from a bird’s-eye view to the street view. As the works of several authors show, this challenges the modern conception of the map as a representation, heralding the epoch of the post-representational map. Geographers Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin prominently reconceptualized the map as performative, theorizing that a map is always in the state of becoming, performing differently based on the encounter between map and map user (335). This uncertain shape of the map highlights their condition as unstable devices: one and the same map interacts differently in each encounter. According to classicist Christian Jacob, the effects of a map highly depend on their material configurations, such as the embodied gaze of the map user and the elements that a map is made of (Della Dora Slippy Maps 244).
However, if maps are ever-fleeting, transitory devices that materialize differently based on specific encounters, how can they be politically analyzed? After all, wouldn’t a political analysis entail a certain postulate of a political truth-value that is grounded in the stable reality of maps? This chapter theorizes a possible evaluation of the map’s genesis, without relying on the hermeneutics of representation. First, this chapter gives an overview of how maps have been historically theorized as transient and performative, as opposed to the modern notion of maps as mimetic representations. The problem of representational analysis is thoroughly analyzed, combining the fact that representational analysis is outdated with the argument that representations render invisible the process through which a map becomes its own product.
The tools to analyze these events are discussed using the notion of historical materialism. This theory aims to uncover the material conditions of a social totality and its subsequent political ideas. In analogous terms, the material conditions of a map determine their effects (Della Dora Performative Atlases 244). These material conditions can be found in actual hardware, as well as in the embodied gaze that results from using the map and in which specific
political configurations emerge. In relation to the latter, Fredric Jameson states that finding that which is rendered invisible through the order of representation is an aesthetic endeavor (Toscano & Kinkle 35). Hence, researching how an embodied gaze is established involves the study of aesthetics: the politics of what is made sensible (Rancière The Politics of Aesthetics 14). A less sensible, but just as important aspect of the cartographic image, is temporality, which can be researched through the materiality of the database and its subsequent logic.
In short, this chapter traces the political in the performative by theorizing how an event becomes a media event. I thoroughly discuss the fundamental schism between the order of representation and the ontological fluidity of maps. I then propose a theoretical solution that allows performative devices to be politically analyzed, namely by scrutinizing the material conditions of a map. This allows me to determine the genesis of the map and can thus be taken as the foundation of the media event. Within this framework, the latter is characterized a derivative of the actual real-time event, emerging through the material conditions of the device. Finally, I discuss how contemporary maps like Google Earth and Maps have captured politically complex events such as crises and catastrophes. I show how these are highly susceptible to being politically obscured in the process of mediation, as so constituting a productive object of analysis throughout this thesis.
2.2 Post-representational Maps
One of the first to shake the modern foundations of maps is French sociologist Bruno Latour. In his 1986 paper on media visualizations, Latour discusses how inscriptions onto media create knowledge (Latour 6). He argues that maps are useful practical tools for governance mechanisms because of their mobile character: they distribute knowledge into different contexts (idem). Therefore, he concludes that maps can be understood as immutable mobiles, emphasizing their circular performativity, while at the same time underpinning that they carry a fixed knowledge (Latour 7). Latour’s conception of cartographic media acknowledges that maps are complex rhetorical devices, rather than simply representations of a cognitive or empiricist state of the world (Kitchin & Dodge 335).
A similar, but more radical argument is made by geographer Brian Harley. Inspired by French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Harley contests the idea that maps are neutral and objective actors in their pursuit of representing knowledge (Harley n.p.). According to Harley, rather than merely revealing fixed knowledge, maps create knowledge
and can therefore be interpreted as vehicles that produce power (Harley n.p.). Power productions manifest par excellence in the modern thought system that addresses maps as mimetic representations. According to Harley, the idea that maps can mimetically represent the world results in a conception of maps as progressive media that ultimately can perfectly represent the world (Harley n.p.). The pursuit to produce the perfect map eventually fuels the tendency to look down upon older and non-western maps – maps that do not rely on the concept of mimesis – therefore creating a political idea of the Other (Harley n.p.). Rather than representations of the world, Harley deems maps representations of power.
Geographer Jeremy Crampton’s cartographic ontology opposes Harley’s political analysis of maps as his notion of a productive power nonetheless assumes a modern conception in which maps ‘confess’ a (political) truth about a landscape (Kitchin & Dodge 333). Instead, Crampton outlines an understanding of maps that is ‘non-confessional’, one that examines a map’s ontological terms, rather than its political terms (idem). Drawing from philosopher Martin Heidegger, Crampton argues that maps should be examined as beings that exist ‘in the world’ rather than distant objects (ibid.). As an object that is embedded within this world, Crampton consequently questions the very practice of cartography and its ontological foundations in relation to encounters with the map. Put differently, Crampton’s endeavor is to identify and understand the ontological framework in which relational, cultural and technical interactions emerge through the encounter with maps ‘in the world’ (idem).
2.3 Beyond Representation: Performative Maps
Geographers Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge argue that all of these views on cartography nonetheless produce an ontologically fixed framework for the definition of maps, as they tend to equate them with a stable function (Kitchin & Dodge 335). To put it in Latourian vernacular, even the works carrying post-representational endeavors tend to reproduce the immutability of maps. This ontological vantage point is problematic, in the sense that maps are fluid practices rather than static carriers of knowledge and governance (idem), and especially when taking into consideration the complicated technological transformations that they have undergone. For instance, Google Earth and Maps allow a user to actively contribute to a map by uploading content and by directing their embodied gaze – therefore turning map users into map makers as well (Della Dora Slippy Maps 7).
In alternative, Kitchin & Dodge propose a new ontology that is rooted in performativity. They argue that maps are constantly in the state of becoming as they embody spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems, for instance the problem between a lost map user and its environment (Kitchin & Dodge 335). In other words, the being of a map emerges through its encounter with other agents, such as its users. Kitchin & Dodge move from an ontological to an ontogenetic understanding of maps, drawing from the conception of ‘individuation’ as coined by philosopher Gilbert Simondon (Kitchin & Dodge 340). They emphasize a map’s constant state of ‘becoming’ in alignment with Simondon’s theory. In epistemological terms, this means that a map does not have an inherent teleological goal or inscription. Instead,
…its relational power to make a difference was negotiated and debated – evoked, challenged, denied, re-asserted – pushed and pulled through a series of media lens and public debates, bound within a contingent set of emergent social, political and economic relations, embedded in specific sites (computer labs, ministerial offices, pubs, television studios, etc.). (Kitchin et. al 494)
Classicist Christian Jacob complements Kitchin & Dodge’s analysis of maps as performative vehicles, with the notion of materiality: ‘materiality is important, because the effects of a map largely result from its materiality and from the specific pragmatics of its viewer’s body and gaze.’ (Della Dora Performative Atlases 244) This means that maps become material in their encounter with a user’s gaze and body (Della Dora Performative Atlases 252). Geographer Veronica Della Dora further explains this materiality using the unfolding practice of atlases, which come into being through the recollection of memories of certain places, so-called loci memoriae (idem). Premodern atlases open up windows to the memories of its makers through materials (such as figurines) that are connected to a certain place on the globe, which subsequently needs an embodied gaze to be materialized (Della Dora Performative Atlases 247). Here, it is through the physical (and hence material) encounter with a map that memories become matter. But memory is only one of the materializations taking place. Both the atlas and the map are media constantly materializing social identities through their encounter with the performing user, be it the creator of the map or the map user (Della Dora Performative Atlases 249). The embodied encounter of an agent and the map determine the effects of a map.
These materializing aspects of maps are also present in Google Earth, as this software is designed to work like a physical globe on steroids (Della Dora Performative Atlases 250), meaning it is aimed at creating an embodied and intuitive experience similar to the one taking place when in the presence of an atlas or a plastic or wooden globe. Despite its virtual character, these embodied experiences can be understood as material, in the sense that they emerge through an encounter between a user and its performativity on the grid of Google Earth and Maps. In this sense, it shows direct parallels with the materiality of the atlas, as Google’s cartographic services allow for a performing user to upload geotagged content, producing so-called ‘loci’ – icon events, and therefore materializing a user’s position in relation to its environment (Della Dora Performative Atlases 250). Moreover, a user’s embodied gaze itself also determines the effect of the map, as different views produce different social realities.
2.4 Thhe Politics of Performative Maps
However, if maps are ever-fleeting, transitory devices that materialize differently based on specific encounters, how can they politically be analyzed? After all, wouldn’t a political analysis entail a certain postulate of a political reality that is traced in the stable reality of maps? This would demarcate a turn to Harley’s static conception of maps as devices that carry a truth to be confessed. Kitchin & Dodge, Della Dora and Jacob do not tackle this issue in the contemporary ontologies, even though this is of great importance for a framework that fits the performative character of contemporary maps. When analyzing Google Earth and Maps, it would be impossible to sustain a conception of maps as teleologically determined devices, as Google emblematically allows users to interact with the map, for instance by uploading user generated content or by directing their gaze. This is one of the reasons why maps have been freed from mere representational value: their technological transformation inevitably urged a different ontology. That this ontology is being defined as a fluid performativity should not constitute a safeguard from political analysis. On the contrary, the fact that cartographic services such as Google Maps (counting over 1 billion users) are so ubiquitous in people’s lives, makes analyses of how maps materialize political realities more pressing than ever.
Another reason to fathom the politics of performative maps is that maps may not be as equally performative as they seem. As geographer Chris Perkins argues, though new technologies empower users to engage in crowd-source mapping, only a minority has the knowledge and skill to do so (314). This is also the case when it comes to accessing maps. When Google Earth released satellite imagery of the damage done by Hurricane Katrina, the
affected people in African-American neighborhoods had considerably less access to information than other neighborhoods (Crutcher & Zook 532). This means that the potential to access is not the same as actual use of satellite imagery to affect events on the ground (Dodge & Perkins 499). Therefore, geographers Michael Crutcher and Matthew Zook argue that the simple viewing of imagery fosters inequality, due to racialized cyberscapes that emerged in the context of the Web 2.0 and its devices like Google Earth (533). Thus, although maps are performative and materializing in relation to their users, one must consider which actors are able to perform more actively and what materializations possibly emerge from this practice.
Furthermore, contemporary maps like Google Earth and Maps do not just map spaces: they map events – moments in time and space. This is exemplified by the way Google Earth and Maps show timelines and always depict the year in which the cartographic image was taken. By capturing events through this image, the event is turned into a media event: a mediation of a moment that happened in the contingency of time and space. This mediation transforms the event in several ways, which will be further explained throughout the thesis. In short, the event is not mimetically represented through this mediation, but it is being repurposed and reincarnated. The spatial and temporal violence that is done within this transformation – the genesis of the media event – cannot be understood using the logic of representation, for the two reasons that follow.
First of all, a representation articulates an event as a given rather than a process which has come into being. Perceiving maps as mere representations of events simplifies the complex mechanisms behind their transformation into a media event. In this context, the media event can be understood as the representation: it is the product of a procedure in which something is captured. But the fact that it is an event already indicates its performative character: it did not just spontaneously exist and mimetically represent, it emerged from specific conditions and produced something. As described by Fredric Jameson, the representational order of things assumes that there is an objective order that can be known, which subsequently renders invisible social totalities that are considered Other (Toscano & Kinkle 35). An analysis capable of challenging this representational order of things can shine light on those invisible social divisions that characterize the map as a performative device.
Second, the logic of representation adheres to the logic of capital, which is intertwined with the ideological embedding of the devices (Google Earth and Maps) that this thesis aims to critique. As Karl Marx demonstrates in his work, commodities rely on their appearance as thing-like totalities, making the social relations that produce these commodities disappear (Lotz
173). In other words, the fluid, performative genesis of a commodity’s value is treated as a given, rather than a result of a complex social process that results in the unrepresentable notion of capital (idem). As Marx put it: ‘commodities find their own value already completely represented, without any initiative on their part, in another commodity existing in company with them.’ (Marx Capital 187). I would argue that Google, in its use of data as commodity, follows this same logic of capitalist simplification of value. As described by José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal – and as further scrutinized in the following chapters – platforms like Google make revenue through the commodification of data, in which data becomes a monetary value as a given (33). The process through which this data becomes a commodity is obscured within the representational logic of commodification. Moreover, the way commodified data becomes a map is also rendered invisible and instead, the map is present as if it was nothing more than a de-politicized blueprint of the world. However, as stated before, the map is a performative vehicle that is always in the state of becoming.
2.5 Materiality Constituting Performativity: Aesthetics and Spatiality
Scrutinizing the materiality of a device can constitute a productive tool for the political analysis of performative maps and for going beyond the hermeneutics of representation. Historical materialism theorizes that the production of ideas, conceptions and consciousness is interwoven with the material conditions the world (Lettow 114). This theory embodies two premises. First of all, it defies a deterministic view on the course of time and premises that mankind is the producer of history (Mitchell 39). Second, the world is not a miraculous given experience, but the product of an already existing world that manifested itself over the long haul of history (Mitchell 40). In other words, history is made from primary matter and the subsequent actions and ideas about the world result from these material conditions that are embedded in it. An example that shows how this manifests in practice is, for instance, global warming: the material conditions of the changing climate of the world change our ideas about how to politically handle the world. In the same way, by studying a map’s material traits, its political effects may become evident without having to turn to the hermeneutics of representation.
In alignment with this historical materialist theory, Jacob argues that the effects of a map highly depend on the map’s materiality (Jacob 5). As previously described, Google’s cartographic services produce an embodied experience in that they stimulate users to actively interact with the globe as if it were non-virtual. This experience can be articulated as a material experience in as such Google’s database is grounded in actual hardware (Lammes 1029).
However, materiality can also be found in software. Drawing from historical materialism, matter is not just ‘the stuff you can kick’ – matter is the foundation through which history is produced and through which political ideas arise. Maps like Google Earth and Maps are politically material at the intersection of a user’s gaze and the device: it actualizes an embodied gaze of the map user with the environment that is presented in Google’s cartographic services. Google allows the environment in which a user is able to choose its gaze, which subsequently becomes embodied, even though it is being witnessed through a screen. The embodied gaze by both the map maker (Google) and user-contributor produces the aforementioned environment and can therefore also be scrutinized as material. So, instead of analyzing the actual content that depicts a political phenomenon – the representational approach – I propose a scrutinization of the medium-specific traits in which Google allows users to materialize their gaze, as a method to uncover the production of the media event in a map.
For instance, studying the aesthetics as developed within cartographic devices can serve as a political tool for scrutinizing this genesis of the media event. As mentioned before, Jameson stresses the fact that a representational order renders invisible many aspects innate to society (Toscano & Kinkle 35). The cultural critique called cognitive mapping is theorized to counter that regime by developing an aesthetic that produces unrepresentable phenomena like social totalities (Toscano & Kinkle 26). This aesthetic would be a political gesture with the purpose of solving the inability to cognitively map a subject’s imaginary relation to a totality (idem). Even though this thesis does not develop an aesthetic that depicts a social totality, it does delve into the genesis of the representation by examining how aesthetics produce a relationship to a totality – the totality of the disaster and the crisis, as will be explained further on this chapter. Philosopher Jacques Rancière reinforces the idea of aesthetics as a political tool. His theory on the image as a sense-enable mechanism describes aesthetics as:
...the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (Rancière The Politics of Aesthetics 14)
In short, politics is the materialization of aesthetics. Within the framework of post-representation, politics do not so much determine what can be represented, as much as defining what experience can be sensed and what tropes are made sensible, for instance by deciding what is rendered visible and what is obscured through visual measures. Within Google Earth, events are injected with sensibility as they become spatial, visual and temporal media events in Google’s database. In other words, a sensification of data takes place. Especially in an age where users sense their surroundings through their devices – be it navigational or any other way, Google’s cartographic services have gained the ability to materialize what can or cannot be sensed. As Donna Haraway prophetically stated in A Cyborg Manifesto, humans have become cyborgs that are enmeshed with technological devices (153) like smartphones. Within this process, users’ senses have been relocated to the device, and are now being governed by corporations like Google Earth and Maps. Hence, through the analysis of aesthetics a new set of embodied sensations can be revealed. These then become evident in the realm of critical cartography studies, without depending on a representational order.
Here, Jacob’s ontological take on maps as materializing vehicles is useful, not only because it takes into consideration that cartography has moved beyond representation, but also because it shows how this enables (material) agencies that evoke political configuration. In relation to Rancière’s synthesis of the politics of aesthetics, Jacob’s approach leaves room for cartographic aesthetics to be politically examined as enablers of a(n) (embodied) sensation of experience, be it emotional, spatial or visual. More importantly, Jacob’s ontology encourages a reflection about the material conditions underlying these maps. Google’s cartographic services mostly consist of images with specific aesthetic configurations determining the ways in which bodies relate to the device. Especially the cartographic image relates not only to a visual product, but also to a material space and how one relates to that space (be it map maker or user). Consequently, in terms of these embodied gazes, political materialities can be uncovered within the cartographic image by dissecting its aesthetic configurations. Hence, by asking what materializations take place within a map’s aesthetics, parts of the genesis of cartographic images become visible.
2.6 Materiality Constituting Performativity: Temporality
According to geographer Jason Farman, maps reiterate ideas about space (90) and therefore have the ability to engage in the political practice of changing a person’s bodily experience of a certain space (91). However, as explained in the first part of this chapter, a purely
representational approach to analyze these dynamics would fall short, as representation is intertwined with practice (Farman 85). Stating that cartographic image A represents space B simplifies the process in which an event in a certain space becomes a cartographic image. In relation to this, Jacob argues that a map is greater defined by the new visibility it imposes on its objects – that is, how it produces the media event – than by the objects it aims to capture (13). Therefore, through the analysis of the indexation of media events in maps, the present investigation focuses on how the aesthetic (sense-enabling) alignments of Google impose new light on the event and its spatial characteristics. These aesthetics can be considered material, in that they determine the embodied gaze of the map user and producer. Taking this into account enables the uncovering of political agents that are grounded in the gaze that produces this media event as related to a certain space.
However, locative media like maps are not merely spatial products. Time and space are interdependent metaphysical preconditions of the way a map politically functions (Farman 85). According to media scholar Sarah Sharma, the focus on spatiality within cartography studies stems from the imperialist practice of demarcating space as a territory of power (66). Nonetheless, temporality can be just as political in determining the way a media event is temporally structured. The way time is structured, and the way history is written are highly political issues. Being a witness of an event in a certain time and space constitutes an ethical endeavor before an epistemological one, as it determines the narrative throughout history (Peters Witnessing 714). In short, time and space are co-dependent in the genesis of the cartographic image and should, accordingly, be both scrutinized in order to revive the material conditions of the cartographic media event.
Whereas spatiality is a highly visual mode of being, temporality is less sensible. The genesis of time exceeds the notion of aesthetics, and therefore needs spatiality to make sense as a total image. Nonetheless, materiality can be used in the analysis of temporality as a distinct dynamic within the cartographic image. The materiality of a medium reveals a lot about how it sequences time and about how it generates the event as a product of a time. Just like the celluloid frame defines the boundaries and freedoms of the way film can sequence time, the medium-specific materiality of the cartographic device allows for a deeper look into how it establishes the media event as a product of history and present-time.
2.7 Researching Materiality Interdisciplinarily
The study of materialities in cartography allows for a promising cross-disciplinary field of studies, considering that the genesis of a map is constructed through several materialities that can be found in the image as a ubiquitous phenomenon. In art studies, the image has suffered from ‘death’, just like cartography, as an aid for mimetic knowledge. Encountering the same fate as maps, images turn into operations rather than mimetic representations (Rancière The
Future of the image 3). As such, they become relations between ‘whole and parts, between a
visibility and a power of signification and affect associated with it, between expectations and what happens to meet them’ (idem). Through their emerging social and commercial purposes, images become a ubiquitous phenomenon, leading to their own annihilation (Rancière The
Future of the Image 18). After all, what can be defined as an image if anything can be one? The
arts respond to this by endeavoring to separate themselves from the image (Rancière The Future
of the Image 17), by trying to express the unrepresentable, the absolute Other (Rancière The Future of the Image 18). But like Jameson’s call for a cognitive map, this is an impossible task.
In The Future of the Image Rancière describes arts’ unfeasible duty of conveying a witnessing that does not have a language, like the depiction of the unrepresentable essence of a catastrophe (126).
By archiving events such as disasters and crises, Google has leapt through the endeavor of the arts by trying to capture something that exceeds the notion of representation: ruptures in time, witnessings that have no fitting language. This does not mean that Google has entered the realm of the arts, but rather that visual aesthetics have entered a complex ontological epoch in which disciplines overlap. Even when trying to convey the unrepresentable, the arts cannot escape the black hole of the image that corporations like Google also take part in. Rancière addresses this issue by noting how the introduction of radical autonomous art, severed from the image, also abolished the distinction between the representable and other modes of existence (Rancière The Future of the Image 123). Put differently, the unrepresentable event does not merely belong to the arts, as media outside the arts take part in the same endeavor to make the unrepresentable visible. One question arises from this: that of knowing what kind of aesthetics’ regime is then deployed by Google in terms of ‘imageness’ – the regime of relations between elements and between functions (Rancière The Future of the Image 4) – which is answered in the following chapter of this thesis.
What is visually allowed to be sensed or not – in other words, the politics within the regime of aesthetics – is a broad area concerning a crystallization of materialities. Media scholar
and visual artist Hito Steyerl addresses the aspect of verticality in satellite imagery, which embeds a certain politics that creates the illusion of orientation, while actually hiding how horizontalities have been fragmented; how there may seem to appear a remote and stable ground, while it actually emphasizes a position from a distanced and superior viewer (8). As such, it symbolizes the fractured class divisions, as well as the shattered subject-object relations that modernity aimed to solidify (idem). So, the verticality of aerial views constitutes an aesthetic to be taken into account when analyzing gazes as materially constituted in and through Google Earth and Maps. Another important visual aspect would be the turn to chorography – the use of vivid images as landmarks and snapshots, as discussed by Della Dora. These landmarks are an aesthetic that concern the marking of territorial land and thus produce political inclinations. A third visually determined aesthetic is Google’s 360-degree view, which would entail a closer view on the world, but complicates the user’s gaze through the technology of immersion. A final dimension that images of disasters in Google Earth and Google Maps embody is visual capital. Google is a corporation and therefore its cartographic imagery is part of its capital. These four visual aspects (aerial views, landmarks, immersion and visual capital) are developed to produce a specific embodied gaze in relation to the event being captured and can therefore be considered as material: they are the building blocks of the media event – the processing of spacetime happenings through media that some call representations2. By discussing medium-specific aesthetics that produce the embodied gaze, and hence looking for a politics, an interdisciplinary approach related to arts studies emerges.
In relation to ‘imageness’, another materiality is closely involved: time. Temporality is related to many other scopes of the cartographic image such as its database, its image and its archival traits. As mentioned before, Farman emphasized that space and time are inseparable dimensions of the cartographic image and should not be treated as binaries, if the goal is to grasp the power dynamics of locative media like maps (84). Yet, there seems to be a lack of instruments to avoid this. One of the few authors who elaborately addresses the temporalities involved within cartography is Pablo Abend. He designated a threefold temporality that helps define the time-oriented characteristics of maps: individual duration, the heterogeneous timeframe created by algorithms and the navigation deployed by users (Abend 108). However, his analysis does not include aforementioned power dynamics.
2 I avoid calling media events representations, as the word representation implies that there is a mimesis of an event, which is the very thing contested throughout this thesis.
The notion of temporality can contribute to the current post-representational cartographic discourse in the sense that its political counterpart is historicity. The latter allows to politically define the temporal structures that are produced within Google’s cartographic services. As philosopher Walter Benjamin asked himself in his notes on historical materialism: with whom does historicism sympathize? To which he answers: the victor (Benjamin 391). And continues, by arguing that historicism, in its opposition to historical materialism, preserves time as an ‘eternal’ image of the past; a temporal continuum (Benjamin 396), which enables this narrative in which the victor always prevails. Material historicism aims to open up this continuum and ‘wishes to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger.’ (Benjamin 391) In other words, it tries to break with the representable history as a timeline and instead opens up fragments of time by turning to the witnesses that were present in time’s contingent events.
This brings me to another interdisciplinary support act, this time based on the realm of film studies. The structuring of time in media is a topic that thoroughly is discussed within these studies, both metaphysically and politically. In her book on cinematic time, Mary-Ann Doane discussed the media event as a contingency that is structured through the cinematic experience. Just like any other medium, cinema has its boundaries that either allow or constrain a certain duration to manifest. Cinema is limited by its frames, but it is that very same frame that allows to manipulate the contingency of time (Doane The Emergence of Cinematic Time 140), by creating cinematic experience that is distilled from the chaotic orders of real-time. Cinema either structures this duration by creating a narrative (Doane The Emergence of Cinematic Time 141) or it simply denies the contingency of time by turning the image into a spectacle (Doane
The Emergence of Cinematic Time 142). In both cases, an actual event in time and space is
mutilated into something different: a cinematic experience. Quite the same way, the cartographic medium transforms the actual event into a media event (cartographic image).
Summarizing, the cartographic image as producer of the media event is a topic that seeps through all disciplines of media studies, ranging from cartography to art studies and from film to platform studies. This echoes something described by John Durham Peters, that the different forms of media are ultimately elemental and therefore belong to the earth, sky and fire, rather than one fixed discipline (The Marvelous Clouds 2). All media have in common the capturing of an event in time and space and its transformation into something different: the media event. The media event can be a cinematic experience, a cartographic image, a photograph or a sound recording. It is not a mimesis of the real contingent world; it is the
performative product of mediation that is injected with ideology, because it is the very product of human beings and the long haul of history. By tracing the genesis of the media event in the production of maps by Google, this thesis aims to unravel the politics of contemporary cartography, without neglecting its performative character.
2.8 Catastrophes and Crises
Strictly speaking, all events can be turned into a media event: the mundane, the shocking, the vivid. However, some events have stronger political complexities and therefore ask for more care when undergoing the process of mediation, for instance when they concern a wide arrange of political issues and vulnerable bodies. The catastrophe and the crisis are, par excellence, events that embody such political complexities. Traditionally speaking, catastrophes can be understood as sudden ruptures in the course of events, whereas crises are human-caused sequences of events (Doane Information, Crisis, Catastrophe 261). Disasters are characterized as catastrophes with deadly consequences (Eliassen 49). More specifically, disasters constitute phenomena that are considered as a manifolded culmination of social problems, ecological issues and the hazard itself (Holm 16). Isak Winkel Holm, for instance, argues that disasters intertwine with crises, as disasters refer to events that do not simply include non-human actors but also often human powers that produce a disaster as it is (idem). Such an understanding entails that disasters are not merely exogenous calamities, but rather ‘endogenous results of human agency invisibly working their effect slowly over a period of years’ (ibid.).
For instance, hurricane Katrina became a racialized event that did not strike all of its victims equally (Holm 17). Put differently, the disaster was a culmination of the hazard itself (the hurricane) and the social problems that were already manifesting over a vast amount of time (a social crisis), causing extra harm to some social groups rather than to others. Within the discipline of sociology, this interpretation turns the disaster into a fractured event that is materialized based on all kinds of factors such as vulnerability and hazards (idem).
This also has consequences in terms of temporality. In his research on the semantics of the catastrophe, Knut Ove Elliassen strikingly addresses the fact that it is not clear whether catastrophes are the advent of something new or the actualization of something that was already happening (34). Hence, even the distinction between crisis and catastrophe becomes blurry in terms of temporality. Perhaps a catastrophe is not so sudden as it seems; perhaps most catastrophes are already crises – actualizations of social and ecological issues that were failed
to address. In short, both crises and catastrophes concern a temporal order that cannot be adequately represented due to their complex nature.
Nonetheless, Google Maps and Earth have put effort into depicting disasters and crises, thus capturing events that defy adequate mimesis due to their manifold character. In order to understand how these phenomena are politically solidified within its medium, this thesis traces the genesis of the media event by researching the map’s performative materiality. Medium-specific traits of Google Earth and Maps are scrutinized by questioning how they arise and how they shape a map’s cartographic object – in this case crises and catastrophes. These medium-specific traits are material in the sense that they need a certain body to interact with. Moreover, its materiality can also be traced in hardware and in the database logic that is derived from such materiality. That is, the understanding of that cartographic image actively produces a media event, rather than mimetically representing an event. This, in turn, allows the scrutinizing of the ecology in which the disaster is contextualized and materialized, surpassing the impossible mission of finding truth-value in events like the catastrophe or the crisis.
2.9 The Genesis of the Media Event
As a post-representational medium that is constantly shape shifting based on encounters with its users, the map defies political analyses of the kind that tend to solidify truth-values through its interpretations. After all, stating that a map represents a certain space or political phenomenon contradicts its ontological status as ever-fleeting and transitory. Moreover, in an age where maps can be constantly re-defined and altered through algorithms and user-generated content, a strictly representational analysis seems impossible. Google Maps and Earth can be said to especially embody this post-representational ontology and therefore be considered ubiquitous in their appearance and methodologically tough to pin down in terms of its politics. Another problematic aspect of representation is that it adheres to the logic of capital, in the sense that capitalism obscures the genesis of commodities by treating them as a given representation of value (Lotz 184).
In order for a political analysis to take place while avoiding such hermeneutics of representation, the material character of maps must be brought into play. According to historical materialism, political forms emerge from the material conditions of society, produced over the long haul of history. In the same way, Jacob argues that the effects of a map are based on its conditions of materiality; on the way a map produces an embodied encounter with its user (5).
As the cartographic image reiterates ideas about both time and space, the materiality of these aspects within the cartographic image should be analyzed in order to fathom its politics. I then propose to study its spatial politics in relation to the catastrophe, by researching the embodied gaze that is enabled by the aesthetics of Google Earth and Maps. On the other hand, its temporal politics can be researched through the materiality of its database. These political elements should then be brought in relation to each other. After all, a map is a spatiotemporal device and the ideas it produces about time and space are always interrelated (Farman 85).
Throughout the following chapters, this methodology is followed to examine the indexation (by Google earth and Maps) of the contingent event: the catastrophe and the crisis. Being a politically vulnerable and sensitive event, this topic emphasizes a deeper underlying political issue, namely that of the genesis of the media event: how to trace the transformation from event to media event and what elements are potentially obscured through this process? Subsequently, the latter can be subjected to critique, as the process of cartographic mediation may do violence to the character of the event and the vulnerable bodies affected by the event. As the political performativity in mediation concerns media in general, an interdisciplinary approach is used in order to produce a methodology capable of reaching further than only one discipline.
3 SPATIAL AESTHETICS:AERIAL VIEWS,LANDMARKS AND IMMERSION
3.1 The Materiality of Visual Data
As described by Gitelman, data cannot merely rely on abstractions (6), as it finds its origin in materiality. The era of big data is enabled by the widespread availability of electronic storage media that can be traced to their material resources (idem). Whereas broadcasting signals transcend human sensibility, their infrastructures can be scrutinized in their associated material resources, such as land, water, electricity and heavy metals (Parks Earth Observation and
Signal Territories 303). The way Google stores cartographic data is also grounded in their
databases as electronic storage media.
These are the material aspects that describe how data is generated. But what about the visual content of the media? Is visual content as translucent as the emission of broadcasting signals? Does the virtual character of Google’s cartographic content undermine its material character? Considering the fact that the map needs an embodied gaze to become actualized (Jacob 5), its materiality can be found in the agents that perform with the map. These agents are based at the creation of the map, as well as at the receiving point of it. Therefore, its materiality can also be traced in human senses as a phenomenological performativity – in a movement in which a subject relates to a visually manifested object: an embodied gaze. In other words, part of a map’s materiality lies in the production and receiving of sensations: aesthetics.
Mostly manifesting as a gaze, these sensations can be characterized as visual. However, as described by Sarah Pink, the image is a polysensory phenomenon, as it is taken in ephemeral movements that can never be retrieved. Images are part of constellations of processes within which humans become corporeally and sensorially engaged (Pink 9). Hence, the image is enmeshed with the activities of moving bodies that are emplaced in a specific environment (idem). This is par excellence the case of the cartographic image, as cartography finds its roots in geographical space. This space is one that people engage with in order to create the map as it is, which finds its origin in both the map maker and the map users. Besides, due to its polysensory character, the cartographic image is not only visually expressed, but within this expression there also manifests spatiality. Moreover, in its relationship to an embodied movement, the polysensory image also takes into account the performative aspect of cartography. It considers that the production of the cartographic image is always emplaced in a spatially specified movement, be it in Google’s database, or a third party’s photographer’s gaze.
This performative conception of the image complies with Rancière’s notion of the image as an operation, rather than a ready-made visual product that conveys a teleological essence. This performativity underlines the media event as actively produced within a medium, rather than miraculously given representation from outside. In relation to this, Andrej Šprah points out that ‘entering’ an image is not a matter of interpretation, but of action (132). However, while analyzing the filmographic depiction of catastrophic Nazi crimes, he argues that these films should set in motion an action revealing the truth of the catastrophic image (idem). But such truth would be impossible to be materialized, as the catastrophe embodies a witnessing that has no language to be expressed in (Rancière Future of the Image 126). Instead, understanding that images actively produce a media event – rather than represent an event – makes possible the analysis of the ecology in which the disaster is contextualized and materialized, surpassing the impossible mission of finding a truthful and representable essence.
This chapter researches the embodied – and hence material – gazes in which the media event of the disaster or crisis emerge in Google Earth and Maps. As mentioned before, these gazes are tightly enmeshed with the spatial dynamics of the media event in Google Earth and Maps. Consequently, an analysis of the gaze discloses information about the spatial politics that is practiced by Google. As the gaze partially is determined by their input in terms of aesthetics, this chapter scrutinizes the embodied gaze by the aesthetics that Google uses for its cartographic services.
Such medium-specific aesthetics for instance have to do with the way a Google user has the freedom to geographically explore landmarks from aerial to the close-up view. Moreover, users can direct their gaze not only from an aerial point of view, put also from one that is grounded in the immersion and horizontality of its street-view images. Following this versatility, the present chapter analyzes the catastrophe and the crisis as materialized in Google’s cartographic image in terms of aerial views, landmarks, immersion and visual capital. These elements of its aesthetics disclose information about the genesis of the gaze, and the ideological performativity of this genesis. Hence, rather than asking: ‘what does this represent and how should it be represented?’ this chapter asks: ‘what embodied gaze establishes these cartographic modes of viewing on crises and catastrophes?’
