{"id":6580,"date":"2012-09-18T18:00:42","date_gmt":"2012-09-18T23:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=6580"},"modified":"2012-09-19T08:07:35","modified_gmt":"2012-09-19T13:07:35","slug":"a-map-for-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2012\/09\/a-map-for-what\/","title":{"rendered":"“a map for what?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shannon Mattern<\/a>, writing “about material networks that span continents… and the strategies we devise to comprehend their scale and composition”:<\/p>\n

What is the \u201caftermath\u201d of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to \u201cmake visible the invisible\u201d and thereby \u201craise awareness\u201d are far too often regarded as ends in themselves. The point of such exercises isn\u2019t merely to make user-citizens \u201caware\u201d of the complexity of the infrastructures that they\u2019re so reliant upon. So now you know where your Internet comes from: now what? We should perhaps also aspire to raise bigger, \u201cdeeper\u201d questions regarding the unique ontological nature of these systems and our place within them: where do they reside on the spectrum between the material and immaterial, the empirical and theoretical, the place-bound and the placeless, the local and the global, the past and present and future, the immediate now and the long now?<\/p>\n

And perhaps, ultimately, we should aim to direct that \u201cawareness\u201d into something with \u201cmaterial consequences,\u201d to borrow Nato Thompson\u2019s phrase \u2013 something that \u201cproduce[s] effects\u2026on the ground,\u201d to echo Scott. There has of course been much debate over the effectiveness of \u201cconsciousness-\u201c or \u201cawareness-raising\u201d art, design, and pedagogical projects, including \u201ccritical spatial practice.[13]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, I think, is an important question (though it is perhaps unfair of me to refer to that bundle of directions as a singular “question”). It also suggests one of the reasons that I think it extremely useful for mapping and revelatory practices to take place within the context of design disciplines, like architecture and landscape architecture — however weak the vocabulary and paths for translating awareness into “material consequences” may seem and indeed, at least at times, be within the design disciplines, at least they\u00a0exist<\/em>, and don’t need to be built from scratch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shannon Mattern, writing “about material networks that span continents… and the strategies we devise to comprehend their scale and composition”: What is the \u201caftermath\u201d of the touring, the mapping, the listening and smelling, the playing of games? The promises to \u201cmake visible the invisible\u201d and thereby \u201craise awareness\u201d are far too often regarded as ends […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,15,84],"tags":[31,748],"class_list":["post-6580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asides","category-infrastructure","category-meta","tag-mapping","tag-revelatory-practices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6580"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6600,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6580\/revisions\/6600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}