In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
On Exactitude. From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .
Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
On Exactitude. From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999 .
The unfoldings of the new mapping and locating systems are undeniable.
The popularization of the GPSs devices and the accessibility of on line maps are indicative of a new perception of space.
Nevertheless, all those issues also point to new geopolitics dynamics and to a repetitive aesthetic redundancy which seems to pursuit the utopia of a map in a 1:1 scale like a sad Borgean character pictured in “On Exactitude in Science”.
Second Landscapes is a series of imaginary locations produced through the combination of diferent spaces, all shot with cell phone cameras in travelling situations and aims to discuss the Locative Media phenomena beyond the hype.
Giselle Beiguelman, 2008