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Mapping brings about one of our most oldest and deep-rooted desires, namely understanding and structuring the world around us and our place in it. From the earliest maps on clay tables to today’s in-car navigation systems, maps tell us not only where we are, but show us as well something about whom we are. Maps are artefacts, produced and as such are part in constituting our everyday life and our cultural memory. They are made to lie, to spy, to govern, to represent, to construct race, class and identity, to exercise power and to express the imagination.
The aim of this course is to subvert the ‘cognitive model’ of mapping with its emphasis on ‘wayfinding’ and navigation’ and to re-situate this model providing an alternative mapping approach. Mapping is not only about ‘reading and navigation’, just a cognitive activity, but it is as much a social and cultural practice. Here, mapping becomes a method of re-inscribing power-relations. Mapping will be theorized and looked at as a performative practice; there is no essential being to any map. This performative turn will give us the possibility to look at the socio-cultural aspects of the practice of mapping and the forms of knowledge this practice produces.
By using everyday technologies, such as: smart phones, i-Pods, digital camera’s, watches with integrated gps devices etc. we will look into the ways these technologies are part of and engage us in new modes of relating to our environment and our interpreting of urban space. This year we will trace and map urban bicycle culture in all its aspects and the city of Copenhagen will be taken as an ‘urban laboratory’. The metaphorical usage of the notion laboratory is used to make the claim that the city above all involves situated investigations concerned with making visible the hidden potentials inherent to specific milieus.
While tracing and mapping urban bicycle culture Bruno Latour’s ANT (Actor-Network-Theory) will be critically applied as method to render visible and develop an understanding of the networked associations between technology, culture and artefacts and their socio-cultural denotation.
Based on existing literature on the subject, students will explore the following subjects: trace, map, history of cartography, urbanity, place/space, augmented reality, ANT, and visualization. We will read texts from Jane Jacobs, Henri Lefèbvre, Michel de Certeau, Marc Augé, Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Ignacio Farias, Jeremy Crampton, Elizabeth Coulter-Smith, Thomas Bender, Tim Ingold, J.L Austin, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Wiebe Bijker, Bruno Latour, Peter Sloterdijk, Lev Manovich, Michal Migurski and more.
The course will be divided into three parts.
-In the first part we will start out reading and discussing ‘philosophers of the trace’, in special Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, theories on mapping, space and urbanity.
-In the second part the students will be divided into groups and will trace and map bicycle culture in Copenhagen by doing fieldwork by means of different technology.
-In the third part the student’s work with the collected materials by producing their own map. In doing so the students will reflect on how bicycle culture shapes urban surroundings and will reflect on the role of technology in doing research. The student present their results while using theories discussed in class.
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