Invisible Geographies 

Subjective Cities

Guy Debord, a key Situationist theorist, made a series of maps, or 'psycho-geographic guides', of Paris. Recording his aimless wanderings, Debord would cut up and reconfigure a standard Paris map as a series of turns and detours. The resultant map reflected subjective, street-level desires and perceptions, mapping alternative itineraries and subverting dominant readings and authoritarian regimes.

During the late 1980's Stefan Szczelkun did a series of Collaborations called Duets documented in the book "Collaborations" (Working Press London 1987). In this work the two people collaborating took a series of 24 "aimless" pictures over the day.

During the spring of 1998 Mongrel built a series of workshops commissioned by Hull Time Based Arts with local people in which we explored notions of the unofficial city. Groups of participants started from a number of specific sites related historically in the town centre, and walked around. If people came to an obstacle they tried to enter the site or they tried to negotiate an entrance. Participants took 24 photographs in the 4 hour sessions. The compiled images in this work acted as a subjective map that would hopefully reveal something of the social geography of the place.

Mongrel has since worked in Rennes, France, where we worked with the students to establish the model for Linker.

Cartography and the Technologies of Location

Forgetting the invisible city is a normality for most of us: a common sense that can help amass someone an empire a small business or - as in Bristol - transport people half way around the world against their will. This forgetting offers us a temporary blindness that allows us to go about our daily business, walking past the sick, the homeless or the building built on glories that meant other peoples' pain. In the same way that we forget the map and remember the journey, we also forget the software that wrote this text.

Software exists in some form of invisible shadow world of process something like the key we find in maps.

Software is establishing models by which things are done yet, like believing the objectivity of maps, we forget that software is derived from certain cultural positions.

Software can never just be a tool; it is always culturally and politically positioned, and part of this positioning is the invisibility of the software's construction. We follow our menu items like we follow our maps moving from place to place transfixed by the representation we see before us, while seeing nothing of the social geographies from which they were derived and on which they act. We ignore the built-in cultural and political bias - the implicit totalitarianism of prescribed menu options. Instead we are transfixed by the outcome of our interaction with applications. We forget the program in order to get on with the task.

Although maps depict what is actually visible, they also visualise what is invisible in everyday experience and through the selectivity of the mapmaker certain elements are shown and given relative importance whilst others are not.

The map is an abstract visual composition, a view from a vertical rather than horizontal plain, usually drawn at a constant scale across its surface. Software attempts to visualise and structure creative processes and procedures along instrumental lines. It objectifies the invisible cultural constructs within the work, reducing it to a series of binary choices that are hierarchically defined. This is an everyday experience, and through the selectivity of the programmer certain elements are shown and given relative importance whilst others are not.

This series of statements explains something of the apparent objectivity we feel when looking at a map. It is also a pointer toward why this graphic illusion of our urban space is so compelling over and above its use as a method of knowing where we are and where we are going. It is also obvious that maps present only one possible version of the earth's surface, an eidetic fiction constructed from factual observation. This fiction maps itself onto the cities exterior: the city image as a mediated concept, the city as seen from elsewhere.

The modern map presupposes a certain worldview, a specific style of visual geography, one that takes a kind of birds eye view.

The map is a scale drawing not an exact reproduction.

The map is a symbolic representation by an agreed set of symbols figures, lines and shading.

Software also presupposes a certain world-view, a specific set of visual devices such as menu names and items like File, Edit, View, and their subsets; cut; paste, save, Save As, open and so on. These represent a specific style of visual geography of the creative processes that acts as a distance to its subject.

Software is a systematic modelling of the creative process not an exact reproduction of that process. Software is a symbolic representation of creative processes by a culturally agreed set of symbols menu items and processes of interaction.

Harwood