Response to REDEFINING THE BASEMAP by Alison Sant

The gist of this article seems to be a call to reexamine the traditional, static, landmark-based mapping systems. "New mapping" technologies such as GPS and wireless reveal different patterns. Events, flows, routes, processes, and data based on statistical sums of multiple individual humans define the graphic patterns emerging from the locative-media-based mapping. The author cautions us to consider abandoning the traditional basemaps as well, with the view that some emergent pattern may therefore be more allowed to emerge.

I do think there is a lot of promise in locative technologies for mapping. Pulses and flows of life, for example between locations of day (work) time and evening (home) time for many individuals would reveal emergent patterns of home locations for various elements of the workforce. "Routes" prioritize chosen pathways of movement and may be more appropriate to examining the living processes within cities, while traditional "streets" prioritize official named landmarks but do not reveal use statistics or a myriad of other sociological data. Mapping events and processes, and the discovery of emergent patterns based on locative technological mapping, is a promising direction for understanding our lived spaces.

This is technologically-based, however. Without locative technologies, we would not be entertaining these novel emerging potentials. The technologies themselves, therefore, are foundational and pre-defining in much the same way that a "traditional static basemap" may be. Can we drop the "technology" and imagine mappable potentials beyond both locative technology and static physicalities? Conversational topics, perhaps -- admitedly based on the idea of "mapping" cellphone conversations? Aesthetic reactions throughout daily activity, multiplied by all of the people in a locale? Arousal? Interest? Cognative activity or level of awareness? Feelings of wellbeing? How would these be measured?

Additionally, the argument in favor of the traditional "basemap" is its representation of relatively static physicalities. In terms of orientation, that is an important factor. Will there likewise be more "static" processes -- ongoing events -- which emerge from locative mapping? "Most frequented locations", perhaps, by "the highest variety of people" -- would that be a shopping mall? A public park or downtown plaza? Certainly, these will also shift and change over time, but surely there will still be gradiations of permanence in process-mapping as well as mapping of physicalities. After all, the physical, the solid, the static are processes as well.

eat me

This notation was an investigation of our daily lives and eating habits. Using the GPS as a way of revealing our pedestrian travels across campus, we were able to map and analyze our total exercise put forth in the time period of one week. Ironically these brief segments of walking were usually to a destination where we would eat, or get a snack. By recording also what was eaten, we were able to compare the data of the amount of calories consumed to the amount that was burned. From this research we both realized that we should probably pay more attention to what we eat or start walking a lot more.

Mathematical and Sensual Knowledge, the Body and the City 1.2

The Chronocyclegraph of bricklaying by Frank Gilbreth of 1912 are uncannily similar to the GPS drawings generated by these various city mapping projects. The visualization of the “fine details of hand movement of an assembly worker over time” in the chrnoncyclegraph resembles the accumulation of movements of the city’s individual users in the Amsterdam RealTime, Cabspotting and BiCi_N GPS drawings (26). Both of these types of documents as x-ray looking images reveals ephemeral details of a body in movement. One extreme looks at the activity as related to the human body, the other as related to the body of the city. In the same way that information such as weather, time and topography is derived and graphed from the longitude, latitude location, and altitude information of the city users as marked by the GPS device, the chronocyclegraph, from the Greek term Chronos (time), is itself a graph of cycles in time. This method/device, which continues to be used today in industrial engineering, charts and examines this information in order to improve ease of movement and efficiency. What does this suggest for the potential of the GPS as a device/method between the human body and the city body? Could it lead to the optimal functionality of this intimate relationship? Could it lead to optimal functionality of the city body and to optimal functionality of the human body?

The photographs by scientist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey are also important references in the discussion of this relationship. His photographs, which also look like x-rays in motion or Cine CT scans and GPS drawings, were significant contributions to the development of cardiology, aviation and moving image. As disparate as these areas seem, they refer to the extreme of scales and fields that I am proposing we merge here and of their latent relationship. Marey started his research by examining the movement of blood in the human body and in 1863 he improved a device from the mid 19th century, which measured blood pressure. He made the Sphygmograph, which was originally designed by German physiologist Karl von Vierordt in 1854, portable as well as able to chart graphically the beat of the heart. He was able to amplify this repetitive internal rhythm of the human body of pulse waves into a drawing. While a version of this device continues to be used today as the “blood pressure cuff” (27) that we all know, the portable GPS is very similar yet it is capable of measuring both the human heart as well as the beat of the city. It is possible to write, measure and analyze both of these drastic scales simultaneously and in relation to each other.

26 see chrnoncyclegraph in wikipedia
27 see chrnoncyclegraph in wikipedia

Cycles: From Accumulation to Accuracy 1.1

Amsterdam RealTime and Cabspotting demonstrate the possibility of understanding the city from the accumulation of individual acts. Through the multiplicity of itineraries, the collective order of the city begins to emerge, a map defined not from above but from below, from the interactions of individual inhabitants of the city. Geographer and graphic designer Rebecca Ross in Perils of Precision posits the question; is such a collective map in its accumulative “fuzziness” and x-ray quality even more precise than the maps “presented behind a façade of precision and expertise”. She argues that master builder Robert Moses’s Panorama project, a detailed 3-dimensional model of New York City while being “the most detailed physical map ever made” and while attempting to be used as a “tool for the future of social planning… by being kept up-to-date over time and referred by city leaders as they thought through changes to the city’s master plan”, is not only static, inflexible, quickly irrelevant, but also inaccurate. (22)

“This paradox of representation—in which summary is valued more highly than the experience to which it refers—enables official maps to become information-spaces within which power is accumulated and maintained. Highly detailed maps are presented to culture as if they were flawless reflections of space. In fact, they are more typically accumulations of the maker’s own experience from a single point of view, subject to the limits of space and time.” Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 P. 185

Amsterdam RealTime and Cabspotting instead of becoming quickly irrelevant and of the past, regenerate and are constantly up-to-date. They present the potential of a different kind of accuracy, where the map is made accurate out of the accumulation of their users activities in the space of their city in time, they are made accurate and real out of the accumulation of the real life of the cit. Likewise, ants will adjust their behaviors based on their local ground level interaction and its repetition over time as a way of achieving accuracy. Johnson states that “because the decision-making process is spread out over thousands of individuals, the margin of error is vanishingly small… for every ant that happens to overestimate the number of foragers on duty, there is one that underestimates.” (23)

The accurateness in the “fussiness” that Ross speaks about in the Amsterdam RealTime project is what emerges out of accumulation. It is like the blurry yet definite triangle revealed by the routine of the young’s girl in Paris over a year. However in this case the “fussiness” is the collective accumulation of the numerous users of the city and not the accumulation of one single user. More importantly it is the accumulation of ground level reality and not the abstract reflection of an authoritative single mapmaker. The authoritative map in its stillness and inflexibility is stagnant and irrelevant. The authoritative map does not breathe, change or adjust. Is the authoritative map more akin to a dead body?

Ironically, Ross notes that this fussy quality is x-ray looking. (24) It is important to note that it is x-ray acting also as it reveals to us the true inner-workings of the city as a body under analysis. This interiority is visualized through the markings of activity that accumulate as GPS lines that emerge, move and flow like the life of the city and like the systems of a living body under analysis. But are they x-ray acting in that it provides us with a view inside? Are they really sectional views into the interiority of the city and are they analytical?

The Cabspotting project is experimenting with the analytical potential. The site is open for proposals and several artists have already begun analysis of the material in an attempt to understand the social, economical and cultural tendencies that are revealed by such a drawing. (25) While the studies featured on the site gives us a fore view into the possibilities, are these two projects, Amterdam RealTime and Cabspotting really looking inside?

While these two innovative projects are incredibly interesting by attaining the multiplicity of the city and of the multitude of trajectories happening daily and in being temporal and changing as the city does, these documents are still views from afar, they are planometric and flat, and from above and do not possess the picturesque “evoking of lifelike images” aspect of the city. Is it possible to return to the balance between the “intellectual and mathematical” and the “pictorial and sensual knowledge” of the early maps that Lucia Nuti describes?

GPS undoubtedly has the mathematical accuracy and as demonstrated by these two projects, GPS also has the potential of revealing a kind of sensuality of the city through the emerging temporal lines that are suggestive of body movement and activity. However the documents remain mostly abstract and distant and the balance is not yet achieved.

22 Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 p. 184
23 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 77
24 Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 p. 186
25 Cabspotting website http://cabspotting.org/

Amsterdam RealTime website
Cabspotting website

Cycles: Collective and Individual 1.4

Cabspotting, by The San Francisco Exploratorium and Design and Technology Studio Stamen Design, is a project in which the city of San Francisco is mapped via the trajectories of individual cabs moving through the city. These cabs are already equipped with GPS devices to orient the driver through the city but in this case they are also used to capture in real time the cycles of the city. The Cabspotting web site is a living map of the city of San Francisco which regenerates as the cab rides change, stop, pause, repeat, as passengers are dropped off, picked up and transported through the city day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. In looking at this document, in looking at the intersecting lines and markings representing cab with passenger, pause, exchange, empty cab moving and throbbing on the black screen of the website one can begin to imagine the life and activity held within, around and about the cabs of San Francisco. Like the taxi rides in director Jim Jarmush’s 1992 film Night on Earth as described by literary theorist Trui Vetters in ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory; these moments transmit and contain networks of relationships and each is a “paradoxically mobile point of stability”. Vetters continues, “The random encounters that take place in this confined space between places, which is usually invisible to all but its occupants, are fleeting and transitory, yet meaningful and in some cases life-changing”. (21) Is it “life-changing” like the effect that the single interaction of two ants in the colony while focused and contained is transmitted one by one to have a significant effect on the overall system? In that essay, Vetters like de Certeau and Nuti argues for a more immersed experience of place and against the all encompassing view from afar, as removed, singular and totalizing.

21 Vetters, Trui. ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory.

Cabspotting website

Cycles: Collective and Individual 1.3

Recently with the ability of GPS instruments to record human movement in utmost precision, a couple of studies have taken what Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe did with Trajects pendant un an d’une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement to the scale of the collective. In these experiments the routine of multiple inhabitants of the city are documented. These experiments have the potential of revealing what was discovered by the Gordon’s ant studies that Johnson refers to. The “ants think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior”. (19)

In 2002 Amsterdam's Waag Society and Artist Esther Polak provided several inhabitants of the City of Amsterdam with these portable (GPS) devices to create Amsterdam RealTime, a plan drawing of this city that emerges out of the movements of the participants as they go about their routines during the period of two months (Fig.). This drawing, like the Louis Kahn example, “does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real people". (20) In this case it is the pedestrian movement that is captured but not as a frozen moment in time as in Kahn’s studies but as an alive document, moving and changing. Here the document also embodies the temporality that it represents. Here the streets and sidewalks do emerge as white lines, human traces of different densities and qualities as defined by the specifics of city dwellers’ routine and their movement through their city in time. In their abstraction, they visualize the cycles of the city (fig. 4)

19 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 74
20 See Amsterdam RealTime website http://realtime.waag.org/

Amsterdam RealTime website