Power of the survey: mapping in the age of digital media - Reviews - Mapping in the Age of Digital Media - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, August, 2003 by Annette Lecuyer

MAPPING IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL MEDIA

By Mike Silver and Diana Balmori. Chichester: John Wiley. 2003, [pounds sterling]24.95

'Mapping' has become so hackneyed a term that it is easy to overlook its pervasive and enduring influence in our lives. The value of this collection of essays, which documents the Symposium on Digital Mapping at Yale School of Architecture in April 2002, is its multidisciplinary reach. The essays--grouped under the headings of surfaces, below the surface and mapping in time--include contributions from the fields of art, geography, geology, chemistry, physics, music theory and dance as well as architecture, landscape architecture and planning.

Among the themes that emerge from this broad-ranging foray is that centralized control as exemplified by the Benthamite Panopticon is being subsumed by networks of data gathering and management, which the volume's editors Mike Silver and Diana Balmori characterize as 'multifarious eyes that exist everywhere and nowhere simultaneously'. This is evident, they suggest, not only in overt surveillance technologies, but in the many global digital networks that are undermining traditional centres of political and economic power. From the use of MRI medical scanners in the production of art to the utilization of seismic reflection data in prospecting for oil, this volume provides a useful and thought-provoking introduction to the applications of digital mapping technologies. The relationship between real and simulacrum emerges in a number of contributions. James Glymph of Gehry Partners observes that digital simulations do not replace material understanding and that, in Gehry's work, the difficulty is not in reproducing the form but in capturing the energy of the generative physical model. Similarly, Julie Dorsey, professor of computer science at Yale, admits that her 'too perfect' digital simulations of opera lighting and projection effects have none of the power of the scene on stage. The concluding essay by geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a valuable historical perspective. In arguing that mapping can never be totally scientific and objective but--even with the most sophisticated instrumentation--is always influenced by the subjective eye, Cosgrove offers evidence of the ideological power of maps to define physical, social and moral territory. Concluding that the map is 'at once empirically rooted and imaginatively liberated and liberating', he makes the case for the map as a prosthetic extension of the human body, highlighting the significance of digital mapping technologies not as new, but as the continuation of an important thread of architectural discourse.

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