May 10, 2005
Beyond the Archive: Bit Mapping
Privileging Mapping
"Let me get right to the point. A «spatial turn» has recently been announced in Cultural Studies: privileging mapping. [1] There is a difference between the culturalogical notion of «mapping,» which refers to cartography, and the technological and mathematical use of the term, which means «mapping one content on another.» Do the respective media in which mapping takes place make a difference for the notion of mapping? In digital operations, «space» is nothing but a metaphor. There is space in the physical world, but a map is just a model of space, not space itself. And this model itself is not spatial, but logistical: anaesthetic; not for physical experience, but for cognition, for our mental computing. Why then is there such an abundance of metaphorical representation in cyber‹space›? This is for users, i.e. human use, because the human capacity for data navigation is bound to spatio-temporal metaphors, whereas communication between computers, operating in discrete states, does not need mapping metaphors at all." Continue reading Beyond the Archive: Bit Mapping by Wolfgang Ernst [via]
Posted by jo at May 10, 2005 10:00 AM
