1:1 the map becomes the territory

Quim Bonastra

...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, Lérida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges. Of Exactitude in Science (1946)[1]

* 

1. Every 1:1 map always reproduces the territory unfaithfully.

2. At the moment the map is realized, the empire becomes unreproducible.

[…]

Third corollary: Every 1:1 map of the empire decrees the end of the empire as such and therefore is the map of a territory that is not an empire.

Umberto Eco. On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1 (1963)[2] 

*

[…] the map is closed, but the autonomous zone is open. Metaphorically it unfolds within the fractal dimensions invisible to the cartography of Control. And here we should introduce the concept of psychotopology (and -topography) as an alternative “science” to that of the State’s surveying and mapmaking and “psychic imperialism.” Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot “control” its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features.

Hakim Bey. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991)[3]

*

In a central location in the Àgora of the Campus of the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón (Spain), a cubic metal structure holds, above the heads of the students passing by, a two-metre-side map on a 1:1 scale of the piece of space just below it, which is partially occupied by one of the building benches scattered around the Àgora. A sign attached to the bench shows the three texts that open this section. This cartographic installation was made by myself and a colleague in 2018 as part of an exhibition curated by both of us at the Museu Pedagògic de Castelló (MPdC) at UJI and entitled "Nou Atles Il.lustrat" (New Illustrated Atlas).

In mid-2017, the MPdC asked us to create an exhibition on new pedagogical practices based on its collection of educational materials from the former teacher training college, using a contemporary, non-historicist approach. We decided to create, from the materials in the MPdC collection, a series of artistic installations that we placed in various locations on the campus of the Universitat Jaume I of Castellón (UJI) (to which the museum belongs) and in several places around the city. Since the largest and best-preserved section of the MPdC's collection was cartography, we decided that the guiding thread of the exhibition should be the idea of atlases and the act of mapping, understood from a broad perspective. For the idea of atlas, we took as an initial framework the conceptualisation made by Georges Didi-Huberman on the basis of Aby Warwurg's Atlas Mnemosyne. For him, an atlas constitutes a visual form of knowledge and, at the same time, a wise form of seeing, which confers on it an ambivalence that, based on its fundamental impurity in both the aesthetic and epistemic spheres, hybridises the sensitive, diversity and multiplicity.[4] Regarding the idea of cartography, we took as a starting point Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation according to which:

The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.[5] 

In the following, I will show how artistic practices, in this case, our 1:1 map of the part of the campus that is covering, can serve as speculative devices that help us to think new ways of relating concepts and to put in relation different theoretical frameworks, practices and spaces. I will do so on the basis of three of the different lines of geographical survey possible from this artistic installation. In the first section I will problematise the concepts of scale and representation and put them in dialogue with the main cartographic theories, in the second section I will reflect on artistic practices at a scale of 1:1, and I will end with the territorial becoming of this cartographic installation and reflecting on the work in the world that our installation does on the basis of the ideas developed throughout the text.

Scale, representation, and cartographic theories

In this section I want to work with our cartographic installation on the basis of the most obvious paradox it raises, that of the representations at a 1:1 scale. This paradox has already produced a large literature, some of the main texts on it are reproduced at the beginning of this paper and were part of the installation. What interests me in this section is to think about the two main concepts involved in the paradox, that of scale and that of representation, to problematise them by throwing threads towards different disciplines and to establish relations with different cultural products. All this to end up relating both concepts to the main cartographic theories of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Scale is usually understood as the relationship between reality and that which represents it. This relationship and this representation can be of different types, although the one that usually prevails in our imagination when we move between the disciplines that deal with space is the one that solves a technical problem, the mathematical relationship between the dimensions of a real space and those of that other space that represents it. Obvious examples of this would be maps, architectural plans and models. There are different types of relationship between reality and its representation that have to do with the notion of scale and that come to us from different disciplinary fields. In this section we will work with examples from the fields of architecture, art, and geography respectively.

Our first example, that comes from the field of architecture, is the inventory of types of scalar relationships that Philippe Boudon made for the city of Richelieu in the early 1970s. For this architect, who postulated a redefinition of scale in architecture as the appropriateness of the measure, there are different categories that group together different types of scale.[6] The two main ones, apart from those that refer architectural space to its representation, are the category of scales that refer real space to itself and the category of scales that refer architectural space to an external referent. Among the scales of the first category, we are interested, for example, in what he calls the geographical scale in which the orientation towards the cardinal points, the situation and shape of the terrain or climatic data come into play. He uses the example of Leningrad (St Petersburg) to show its scale characterised by the exceptional width of its roads, which is marked by its high latitude, which means that the sun is always low. Among the latter we find, for example, the formal symbolic scale and the dimensional symbolic scale, related respectively to the form and dimensions of an architectural space that carries meaning and is conceived symbolically. An example of the former would be the cross-shaped floor plans of Christian churches, of the latter the relative size of any building in relation to those around it, such as the enormous Grosse Halle designed by Speer for the Welthauptstadt Germania of the Third Reich.

Our second example of the relationship between reality and its representation related to the notion of scale comes from the field of art. Let’s take for example Ron Mueck's hyper-realistic sculptures. Under the slogan "more real than reality", hyperrealism tries to give a surplus of reality to his works and Ron Mueck achieves this, apart from the techniques and materials used, and through the great profusion of high-quality details, by enlarging and dwarfing his characters to a size that ends up giving the hyperreal sensation he is looking for. Once again, we are faced with a problem of scales, but of scales of reality. The relationship that Mueck achieves with the play of sizes of his human figures is a scalar relationship of reality. In some cases, to achieve the hyper-real effect, he enlarges the character (see A Girl), in others, he achieves the same effect by diminishing it (see Dead Dad). But let us not believe in any case that what we are dealing with here is a scale of representation in the sense of mimesis, of a mathematical relation of what is observed with reality; we are dealing here with something non-quantifiable, with an intensity. Because scale "is neither measure, nor (univocal) dimension, but (ambivalent) relational capacity".[7]

Our third example relating the concept of scale comes from the disciplinary field of geography. Since it is an elusive concept, it has been intensively theorised since the 1990s due to the contradictory and problematic meanings that its use has given it. A first criticism of the use of the concept of scale in geography is the mixture that geographers tend to make of abstract and metaphorical conceptions of scale. Think, for example, of the different uses we can give to the terms local, urban, or global. A second criticism of the use of the concept of scale is the analytical blurring resulting from overloading and mixing with other geographical concepts, such as place, region, or territory, with the problems that derive from this. A third criticism of the predominant conceptions of scale is that it is embedded in a vertical and hierarchical model, reproducing socio-spatial inequalities, and stifling the possibilities of resistance. On the other hand, the use of scales in geography “tends to mix their use as a category of practice - understood as a category of everyday experience, developed, and deployed by ordinary social actors - with their use as a category of analysis - those used by social scientists”[8] - which reifies them as a priori elements and not as strategies for approaching reality. This means that at the level of common sense the reified scale informs our understanding of the spatial organisation of the world and that in the social sciences scales end up becoming categories of analysis with the problems that this entails.[9] 

Related to the concept of scale, another problematic concept is that of representation. In the context of cartography, we can approach it in two ways. First, the mimetic one, for which something, such as the map of a piece of the UJI campus, is a simple copy or mirror of nature, the piece of campus on which it is placed. Another way of understanding representation is one that turns something, the very map we were talking about, into a complex rhetorical apparatus of constructing meaning through language.[10] In the first view of representation, the object it represents, to continue with the example of the map, is objective, a true representation of reality, a conveyor of truth. Thus, the map will be better if it reproduces reality better, which is achieved through technical progress. In the second view, the object it represents is a social construction, a discursive meaning-making practice. This second vision coincides with that of what we could call the first wave of critical cartography, with figures such as Brian Harley, who tried to deconstruct the spatial representations that were maps and the science that produced them.[11] These two ways of understanding maps would fall into the category of what has been called representational cartography or taken more broadly, representational thinking. There is a third way of thinking that attempts to go beyond the representational which in the field of cartography has usually been defined as post-representational. The post-representational considers that maps have an ontogenetic potential, they are creators of reality, they are practices, propositions of new possibilities of existence.[12]

Thus, Borges, in Of Exactitude in Science, handles cartography in a representational way. His approach is kind of deconstructive and, in a way, seems to mark, avant la lettre, Harley's agenda. As far as we are concerned, the text dismantles the illusion of greater adequacy to reality achieved through scientific progress by taking it to the extreme with the 1:1 map, which subsequent generations considered useless and allowed to be ruined by exposing it to the elements. Eco, for his part, in his text in response to Borges' short story entitled “On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1”, arrives, through successive logical distillations, at three corollaries:

1. Every 1:1 map always reproduces the territory unfaithfully.

2. At the moment the map is realized, the empire becomes unreproducible.

[…]

Third corollary: Every 1:1 map of the empire decrees the end of the empire as such and therefore is the map of a territory that is not an empire.[13]

In a sense, Eco's text is somewhat post-representational in the sense that its map has agency and ontogenetic potential. However, he makes limited use of it because, by focusing on the logical consequences of the construction of the map, he does not develop the theme of the map as producer of reality that is implicit in the whole text, and which we can intuit in the third corollary.

Artistic Practices at a Scale of 1:1

In the field of artistic practices, we encounter the paradox that, even though much 20th century art and certain artistic practices of today operate on a reduced scale, as if they were a map of reality, the artwork itself is always on a 1:1 scale.[14] However, there are art practices that in addition to being at this 1:1 scale, operate at this scale: "art and art-related practices oriented towards usability rather than spectatorship are characterised, above all, by their scale of operations: they operate at a scale of 1:1". With this phrase art theorist Stephen Wright begins the definition of the first term in his work Toward a Lexicon of Usership.[15] It is a reflection on the concept of usability in art that questions the culture of the expert, the figure of the spectator and the regime of ownership based on the definition of a series of emerging concepts, of a series of conceptual institutions that, in the author's opinion, should be removed from the art system and of a series of modes of action of the user.  

As far as we are concerned, the text is of interest to us here because user-oriented artistic practices have the vocation of working with the everyday and the cooperative, to the point of largely deactivating their aesthetic/artistic function, which means that they are practices that can go unnoticed as artistic practices, as they can take the form of meetings, gatherings, associations, training, protest events… An example of these is Tania Bruguera's project Cátedra Arte de Conducta (2002-2009), which created a space for alternative art education in Havana. Also, the project Negro sobre Blanco (2014) by Núria Güell, who set up a cooperative with a group of African immigrants who had been evicted from an industrial building they occupied in the Poblenou area in Barcelona. The aim was to create self-employment that would allow these immigrants to avoid the law on foreigners. However, these practices have what Wright calls a double ontology. These kinds of projects are, on the one hand, what they appear to be: interventions, practices, actions that, a priori, have no aesthetic/artistic function or that, at the very least, have this function deactivated. On the other hand, they are artistic propositions of what they are. They have a will to intervene in the world, and in this sense they have the ontogenetic potential that we saw in post-representational cartography, but they are thought of as a work of art, re-activating in a certain way this aesthetic/artistic function that, on occasions, can serve as a passport to practices that, if they were not artistic, would not be allowed.[16]

Because of this double ontology, these practices share with the 1:1 scale maps the paradox of the normal map that Eco tells us about in the text we have reviewed. The territory, when covered by a map, becomes a territory covered by a map, a characteristic that the map that covers it does not consider. To amend this limitation, a map representing the territory covered by a map would have to be placed over the first map, entering an infinite process from which it is impossible to exit, making the territory unrepresentable. In any case, these artistic practices make good use of this paradox since, as we have said, the fact of being formulated as works of art gives them access or allows them to act in a way that, if art were not involved, would often be unthinkable.

Another literary text that deals with the subject leads us to a solution that interests us. It is an extract from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.[17] In this work Mein Herr, an extra-terrestrial visitor, converses with the narrator about cartography:  

"What a useful thing a pocket-map is!" I remarked.

"That's another thing we've learned from your Nation," said Mein Herr, "map-making. But we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?"

"About six inches to the mile."

"Only six inches!" exclaimed Mein Herr. "We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!"

"Have you used it much?" I enquired.

"It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country and shut out the sunlight! So, we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well."

For Wright, Carroll, on the one hand, emphasises that small-scale representations of reality have a subrogated role, a status of abstraction and a use as a convention with reference to the real to which it is subordinate. On the other, that the uselessness of the 1:1 scale map is a creative, generative uselessness. The fact that the territory functions as its own map means that the representation ceases to be subordinate to its subject, and that, moreover, it is interchangeable with it. According to Wright, "the ontological discontinuity between map and land - and by extension, between art and whatever life form it permeates - disappears as soon as the territory is made to function on the 1:1 scale as its own self-styled cartography".[18] We are faced with a becoming-map of the territory and a becoming-territory of the map.

Deleuze and Guattari, in their enumeration of the general characteristics of the rhizome, speak to us of the principles of cartography and decalcomania. For them, the rhizomatic functions according to the cartographic principle, which is very different from the tracing. The purpose of the latter is to describe a state, to explore something that is already there, something that is already taken for granted, tracing brings to the surface an overcoding structure, an axis that supports. The tracing is representation in the two senses we have given it above. The map, however, is oriented towards an experimentation that acts on the real, it does not reproduce but constructs, it is a matter of performance.[19] However, we are not faced with a Manichean dualism. The map and the tracing are constantly becoming, "the tracing must always be placed back on the map".[20] This operation, although it will be the inverse of the one that precedes it, will never be entirely symmetrical to it, because the imitator always creates his own model, which is why it is so important. In the same way that artistic practices on a scale of 1:1 with their aesthetic function deactivated can take advantage of their condition as art, the map can take advantage of its becoming-tracing, since the tracing can be used as a line of flight that results in the cartographic.

Becoming-map

Let us return, finally, to our map placed in the Àgora of the UJI Campus. The device used to keep the map extended over the heads of its possible users emulates the solution of the suspended map proposed by Eco. Eco realised that placing an opaque map over the territory would necessarily alter the ecological balance of the country of Carroll's character Mein Herr by preventing the penetration of atmospheric precipitation and the sun's rays. For the same reason the farmers of Mein Herr's country opposed its use.

Unexpectedly, our map became famous on the UJI Campus, but not for having given rise to the reflections we have developed, but for the fact that it was one of the few shaded spaces in the Àgora. The students used it intensively and even, in a public survey, asked for more canopies of this style. 

As Hakim Bey pointed out in one of the quotes that open this text, "a 1:1 map cannot “control” its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features".[21] In its becoming-canopy our map becomes territory. This becoming-canopy of our map helps us to think about the work it does in the world in relation to what has been explained so far. 

Our 1:1 scale map helps us, through the architectural example, to reflect on each of Boudon's scale categories described above. In the case of the geographical scale, our map shows and problematises the inadequacy of the urban planning of the UJI campus with respect to the climate of the city, with great sunshine during most of the year and average daily temperatures of 18º Celsius in the coldest season and 26º Celsius in the hottest. This means that the campus agora does not need the spaciousness that the urban planners have given it and that it needs more shaded areas, which could be obtained with more Mediterranean-climate-friendly urban planning and architecture and more shady trees. It is important to add that the campus dates from a period, from the 1990s onwards, of great real estate speculation which, in the field of public infrastructures, often tended towards pharaonic constructions. Regarding the symbolic scale, our map is a nod to one of the solutions presented by Umberto Eco in the text we have been working with. In order to put the map on top of the territory he suggests raising the map at a certain height above the ground with the help of a structure, the technical solution we adopted. This brings us to the symbolic dimensional scale that in the case of our map shows once again the smallness of a canopy unit with respect to the surrounding space, reinforcing once again the inadequacy of the space built around it.

Through the artistic example, and taking hyperrealism as a starting point, we have seen how we could consider scale as a matter of intensity. Let’s think with the anthropologist Alfred Gell for whom the main reason for the existence of a work of art is, thanks to its agency, the power to affect the public that contemplates it, the community that hosts it. Gell considers this community to be created by the work itself.[22] Let's take it one step at a time. On the one hand, we have this community created by the artwork, that of the shadow-seeking students. These shadow seekers, on the other hand, have been affected -for the purpose of this paper and following Massumi we are going to equate affect with intensity- by the artwork, which is the same, the map that has become a canopy.[23] Affect being that which gives us or takes away our capacity to act, or in other words our agency, let’s see what is at stake here. We have an artwork taken by the students as a canopy. We have an affect or a series of affects that have led to this agency on the part of the students. We could say that we are faced with an assemblage in which, under the protection of the sun's rays, the map creates a community which, through the exercise of its agency, turns the map into a canopy.

This brings us to the third example of the concept of scale, the geographical one, with its terminological confusion, its hierarchisation and the problem of its reification. The 1:1 scale of our map, taken as a scale of action that does not assume any a priori scale, helps us to escape, thanks to the speculative force of being an artwork, at least from the problem of reification thanks to its becoming-canopy. This places us within the artistic practices on a scale of 1:1. Without having the social content that user-oriented artistic practices usually have and that work on a 1:1 scale, we can say that our map shares its double ontology, but in a somewhat different sense than the one explained above. Our installation does not suffer changes in the functioning of the second clause of the double ontology, since the activation of its aesthetic function is what allowed our cartographic installation to be erected in the Agora of the UJI, without this aesthetic the project could not have been carried out. However, in this case, the first clause that states that these artistic practices that work on a scale of 1:1 are what they are with their aesthetic function deactivated, does not work in our project until the installation was appropriated by the students of the campus and they turned our map into a canopy through its use. We can say that it was the students' use of our installation, its becoming-canopy, that deactivated its aesthetic function. We can say that its ontogenetic potential was produced through a series of translations and tracings that created lines of flight that resulted in the cartographic in a ‘deleuzguattarian’ meaning. Thus, the becoming-canopy of our map produced a deterritorialisation that reterritorialised it into a map.

As can be seen, in this text I have worked based on a site-specific artistic installation carried out within the framework of an exhibition of the cartographic collection of the Faculty of Education of the Universitat Jaume I. An exhibition conceived as a process of research-creation and as a learning device based on the metaphors, meanings, practices, and conceptual frameworks suggested by the idea of atlas, map, and cartography. In this context, the installation has helped us to reflect on problems such as scale, representation, and cartographic theories. These problems have been addressed in the text through their relationship to other literary texts and works of art, in what could be called an exhibition within the exhibition. In this meta-exhibition, the 1:1 scale has created an intermediate space in-between representation and reality that we consider an interesting place from an epistemological point of view, as it becomes a space of possibilities.

Notes

[1] Borges, Jorge Luis. 1961. “Del rigor en la ciencia”. In El hacedor. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores.

[2] Eco, Umberto.1994. “Sobre la imposibilidad de construir el mapa del Imperio 1 a 1.” In Segundo diario mínimo. Barcelona: Lumen.

[3] Bey, Hakim. 1991. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. NewYork: Autonomedia.

[4] Didi-Huberman, Georges.  2011. Atlas ¿Cómo   llevar  el   mundo a   cuestas?  Madrid: MNCARS.

[5] Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2015. Mil mesetas. Capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Valencia: Pre-textos. P. 17-18.

[6] Boudon, Philippe. 1972. La ville de Richelieu, étude de la notion d’échelle en architecture. Paris: A.R.E.A;

[7] Gausa, Manuet et al. 2001. Diccionario metápolis de arquitectura avanzada. Barcelona: Actar. P. 33.

[8] Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘identity’.” Theory and Society 49: 1–47. P. 4 https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007068714468

[9] Moore, Adam. 2008. “Rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice.” Progress in Human Geography, 32(2): 203–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132507087647

[10] Kobayashy, Audrey. “Representation and Re-presentation.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, vol. IX, edited by Rob Kimchin and Nigel Thrift, 347-350. London: Elsevier.

[11] Harley, Brian. 1989. “Deconstructing the map.” Cartographica, vol. 26(2): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.3138/E635-7827-1757-9T53

[12] Kitchin, Rob, Chris Perkins, and Martin Dodge. 2009. “Thinking about Maps.” In Rethinking Maps. New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin, and Chris Perkins, 1–25. New York: Routledge.

[13] Eco, Umberto. 1994.

[14] de Mello, Verónica. 2018. “La escala como punto de partida y de llegada al mundo.” In 1:1 Una reflexión sobre la escala en la arquitectura y la obra de arte, edited by Verónica de Mello, 4-11. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.

[15] Wright, Stephen. 2013. Toward a Lexicon of Usership. Eindhoven: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum. Abbemuseum.

[16] Fontdevila, Oriol. 2018. El arte de la mediación. Bilbao: Consonni.

[17] Carroll, Lewis. 1893. Sylvie & Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan.

[18] Wright, Stephen. 2013

[19] Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2015

[20] Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2015: 19

[21] Bey, Hakim. 1991. P. 97.

[22] Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford University Press.

[23] Massumi, B. 1995. The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. https://doi.org/10.2307/1354446