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Teresa Castro
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Économies du référent 3. The “Mapping Impulse”, or the Cartographic Reason of Contemporary Images
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Cinéma & Cie
Teresa Castro
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Université de Paris III
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Économies du référent 3. The “Mapping Impulse”, or the Cartographic Reason of Contemporary Images
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          ECONOMIES DU REFERENT 3. THE “MAPPING IMPULSE”,
          OR THE CARTOGRAPHIC REASON OF CONTEMPORARY IMAGES1
          Teresa Castro, Université de Paris III/CRECI




            In 1997, Chris Marker, «the most famous of unknown filmmakers»2 released a CD-ROM called
          Immemory. Developed in collaboration with the Centre Georges Pompidou, the work was meant
          to be the first in a series of artists’ CD-ROMs concerned with questions of memory. Conceived
          as an exploration of the artist’s own memory, it quickly became an iconic piece. As Raymond
          Bellour claimed in an essay written to accompany the publication of the CD-ROM:

            One quickly understands that Immemory cannot be one work among others in Marker’s
            œuvre. Whatever he may or may not do after his CD-ROM, it is clear that the latter already
            stands as a final work and a masterpiece, in conformity with its craftsmanly character and
            with its programmatic value3.

            On the CD-ROM’s leaflet Marker reveals that instead of approaching memory as a history
          book, he would rather consider its fragments in geographical terms:

            In our moments of megalomaniac reverie, we are inclined to see our memory as a kind of
            History book: we have won and lost battles, found and lost empires. At least we are the char-
            acters of a classical novel (“My life, what a book!”). A more modest approach, and perhaps
            more fructuous, would be to consider memory’s fragments in geographical terms. In every life
            we could find continents, islands, deserts, marshlands, overpopulated territories and terrae
            incognitae. We could draw a map of this memory, and more easily (and truly) extract images
            from it than from tales and legends4.

             Drawing on Marker’s words, I would like to propose that mapping represents not only one of
          the main sources of our world vision, but also one of the processes that underlie the making of
          many of our contemporary images. This general tendency – what could be called a mapping
          impulse – is not new. However, recent changes in our increasingly global world, where “bound-
          aries”, “spatial flows”, “networks” and other “spatialities of connectivity” are becoming more and
          more conspicuous, have come to make it more evident. Could it be then that some contemporary
          images share a tendency to produce spatial arrangements akin to those created by more conven-
          tional acts of mapping?
             Before I proceed, I ought first to comment on my title. “The Mapping Impulse” somewhat pre-
          sumptuously echoes Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse”5. Foster’s essay, which echoes a quite
          famous text by Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse”6, claims that a considerable number of
          contemporary art works share a notion of artistic practice articulated around the questioning and
          exploration of the figure of the “archive”. Even though I borrow the expression “the mapping

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        TERESA CASTRO

        impulse” from a very different context7, I would like to keep Hal Foster’s text as a conceptual
        horizon for my own examination. Like Foster, I also purport that a significant number of con-
        temporary images, however disparate in subject, appearance and affect, share a certain number of
        traits that give them a distinctive character, enough so as to be taken into account. Like Foster, I
        also believe that these examples could be multiplied many times. Unlike Foster however, what
        interests me is not the archive, but the map or, to be more precise, the act(s) of mapping. In order
        to answer questions about what the “mapping impulse” is how it manifests itself and how it can
        be considered a cross-media tendency in its own right, I will call upon two very different exam-
        ples: a collection of photographs and films by Italian artist Olivo Barbieri and Chris Marker’s
        Immemory CD-ROM.


        Defining the “Mapping Impulse”
           The idea of a “mapping impulse” is not new. In her book The Art of Describing, an exploration
        of 17th century Dutch visual culture, art historian Svetlana Alpers argued for a connection between
        painting and the techniques of cartography that she addressed under the general designation of a
        “mapping impulse”. According to Alpers, maps were the model for this particular visual tradition,
        which favoured description and emphasised the image’s flat surface. Martin Jay subsequently
        proposed that this “art of describing” corresponded to a “scopic regime of modernity”, i.e. an his-
        torical mode of visuality8. Perhaps more significantly for my purposes, it has also been noted that
        maps have played a central role in 20th century art. Towering and seminal artists such as Marcel
        Duchamp or Robert Smithson, for example, demonstrated a constant and noteworthy interest in
        maps and mapping throughout their careers, as is evident in both their works and writings. Used
        in various ways and contexts, maps seem to constitute a topos of both modern and post-modern
        art in their own right9.
           The point of the matter, however, is not the conspicuous presence of maps in 20th century art,
        but the considerable interest in the idea and the act of mapping itself. It is what “mapping” can
        convey – and the way it conveys it – that has fascinated artists for more than a century and that
        explains maps’ deployment within different artistic strategies. Similarly, it is what “mapping”
        might mean that has made it a fashionable notion among curators and scholars alike. As a matter
        of fact, the “mapping impulse” would be less about the presence of maps in a certain visual land-
        scape and more about the processes that underlie the conception of images. If we understand maps
        to be «graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, condi-
        tions, processes, or events in the human world»10, our focus shifts from object (“maps”) to func-
        tion (“spatial understanding”). “Maps” should thus be regarded as a hinge around which pivot
        whole systems of meaning, both prior and subsequent to their production.
           Works traversed by a “mapping impulse” concern, generally speaking, the production of space.
        They often imply the recombination or juxtaposition of media or, in what is becoming a wide-
        spread strategy, the creative use of concrete mapping devices, like Global Positioning Systems
        (GPS)11. But what distinguishes them is a series of processes and formal strategies, among which
        Denis Cosgrove identifies a number of invariable traits. He says:

          Mapping may be regarded as a distinct epistemology, but one whose specific practices are
          historically and culturally variable. Among the consistent or a priori features of mapping are
          scale, framing, selection and coding12.

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                                                         ECONOMIES DU REFERENT 3. THE “MAPPING IMPULSE”

             These features form a useful starting point for our discussion. «Scale» refers to scale selection
          and manipulation and «framing» to the delimitation of space. «Selection», in its turn, means that
          mapping implies choosing; finally, «coding» assumes that the spatial understanding facilitated by
          mapping is achieved by means of complex semiotic translations. Works that embody a “mapping
          impulse” similarly draw on these procedures, which they will transform and adapt in order to
          serve their own agendas. However, the series of formal tactics associated with the “mapping
          impulse” is far from limited to these large-scale features. To these I would like to add at least five
          other aspects that would give the “mapping impulse” a true character of its own. The first would
          be a certain topographic fascination, if not a real topophilia, in the sense of “love of place”13. This
          “topographic appeal” would cover different manifestations, related either to the politics or poet-
          ics of space. This includes all the works that call to mind the topical notion of “territory” and what
          it evokes, as well as works that engage with the notion of place and that similarly demonstrate a
          strong spatial awareness. Such a “topographic appeal” often goes hand in hand with a second for-
          mal procedure: the seemingly descriptive motivation of the works in question. Much in the man-
          ner of the Dutch “scopic regime” mentioned above, “description” can refer to the presentation of
          objects, processes or events in a straightforward manner, sometimes revealing a real love of enu-
          meration. An obsession with «describing the planet and making use of its spaces, through
          inquiries, stage enactments and stories»14 has indeed been attributed to contemporary art. But
          “description” can also refer to a more complex and paradoxical process that, in order to seize the
          singularity of its object, ends up blurring the latter. A third formal strategy would be drifting, or
          walking as an artistic practice. Again, such a method can take different forms and cover various
          agendas. In itself, drifting can be taken for an autonomous form of art (one wonders about the
          emergence of an eventual “walking impulse”)15. Finally, both serialization («maps only exist in
          the context of a series, of a collective production spaced out in time»)16 and layering, in the sense
          of establishing connections and producing meaningful relationships, should also be mentioned.
             Having sketched this brief panorama, I will now focus on two extremely different works that
          engage with the “mapping impulse” in multiple ways. The first puts into play the notion of scal-
          ing; while the second constitutes a map of memory fundamentally based on the art of layering.


          Mapping as “Scaling”: Olivo Barbieri’s Model Cities and the Blurred Referent
            Olivo Barbieri is a leading Italian photographer whose work has focused on urban landscapes
          for more than twenty years. Recently, in 2003, Barbieri started working on the “site specific_”
          project, an ongoing collection of aerial photographs and films of European, Asian and American
          cities. Taken from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens that allows for the manipulation of the plane
          of focus, the images are characterized by odd distortions of scale and peculiar blurring effects.
          These shots usually contain a small and very localised area photographed in sharp focus and sur-
          rounded by a much larger soft-focused zone. When first confronted with these images, either
          exhibited as large panoramic prints or projected as films in gallery spaces, the spectator is often
          disconcerted, unsure of what he sees. Are these images of real cities that have been digitally
          reworked or images of architectural models made to look real? The images sometimes resemble
          miniature sets that evoke archaeological reconstructions of bygone eras or fantastic urban proj-
          ects whose future destiny remains undetermined (Fig. 1).
            The “site specific_” series begs a number of questions concerning some of the issues I have
          already mentioned. Both the seemingly topographic nature of the project (with its emphasis on

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        TERESA CASTRO




                         Fig. 1 – Olivo Barbieri. La Ronde and Jacques-Cartier Bridge, 2004.
                         Chromogenic colour print, 70.7x97 cm. CCA Collection, gift of the
                         Sandra and Leo Kolber Foundation. © Olivo Barbieri.

        “site” and the resulting unavoidable pun on the word “sight”) and the serial mode of its constitu-
        tion (the goal of the project is to cover different cities on different continents by photographing and
        filming each place according to the same procedure) seem to point to a “mapping impulse”17. More
        importantly, it is also clear that the artistic strategy in question relies mainly on the miniaturisation
        of the real, i.e. a manipulation of scale. Barbieri’s work makes clear how scale selection and manip-
        ulation not only are powerfully imaginative and generative acts, but also provide a launching pad
        for speculation on questions of representation and reality. Many of us will recall Borges’ story, Of
        Exactitude in Science, which describes an Empire where the science of cartography became so
        exact that only a map on the same scale of the territory would suffice. Later generations came to
        find such a map obsolete and abandoned it18. Borges elaborates on Lewis Carroll, who has one of
        the characters in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded commenting on a map on «the scale of a mile to the
        mile» and observing that such an object presented some practical difficulties, «we now use the
        country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well»19. These two anecdotes tell
        of the complex relation between the map and its territory and illustrate how “scale” or “scaling”
        significantly alter the form, significance and relations of meaning between phenomena. In this
        case, scaling introduces a trouble, or uneasiness, in the photochemical indexicality of the image.
           The apparent neutrality of Barbieri’s venture – to photograph cities from a helicopter – is there-
        fore misleading. If the “site specific_” series seems to be driven by a will to visually cover and
        describe as many cityscapes as possible according to the same method, its peculiar visual effects
        make clear that the issues at stake go well beyond the inventory of the world. The serial mode of
        constituting the series hints at a strategy that relies on “de-realisation”. This is how Barbieri
        understands the idea of making the world appear as a model:

          There are many artists who make models and take pictures, in a way that they look like real-
          ity. I was much more interested in the contrary, to make a picture of reality that looks like a
          model. So you have the political possibility to look at it and decide if it’s good or not, if you
          like it or not, if it is good or dangerous. To see something for the first time, this is very, very

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                                                         ECONOMIES DU REFERENT 3. THE “MAPPING IMPULSE”

            important, and a very strong possibility for art. At a time when everything is on television, in
            newspapers, on the Internet…20.

             The artist’s statement is very clear: it is the miniaturisation of the real achieved by means of the
          soft focus that allows himself and the viewer to rethink both representation and the concrete real-
          ity of our modern metropolises. By turning these cities into models, Barbieri reminds us that
          urban space is an artificial creation, a matter of construction and planning, whose growing com-
          plexity and dimension should not deter us from looking at it critically. As a matter of fact, the
          problems posed by our contemporary cities rely in many ways on a question of scale: modern
          metropolises have become too big for their inhabitants to grasp, urban planners to manage and
          security agents to meticulously control. Barbieri’s “scaling method” allows him to radically over-
          turn these propositions: the cities photographed become the size of miniature toys that we find
          difficult to recognize and identify as “real” and with which we are able to engage on unexpected
          levels. The political possibilities advanced by the photographer himself become obvious and com-
          pelling. To employ another idea put forward by the artist, photography (and film) would consti-
          tute a powerful “machine of thought”, devoted in this particular project to the vindication of the
          constructed nature of both reality and images.
             Moreover, both the film and the photographic series could be understood as mapping devices,
          the scaling process standing for a type of conceptual grid that both contains and positions its
          object with regard to an open system of references. Inscribed on the surface of the filmstrip, one
          finds that Barbieri’s “true” objects depart from what they are supposed to depict, namely the cities
          of Rome, Los Angeles, Shangai and Seville. In this sense, and as James Corner has observed:
          «The function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of the worlds
          in which people live»21.


          Mapping as the Art of Connecting: Chris Marker’s Map of Memory
            Let us come back to Chris Marker’s Immemory and to the author’s purpose stated on the CD-
          ROM’s leaflet. Commenting on the number of images he has accumulated during his lifetime,
          Marker observes that his idea was «to plunge in that maelstrom of images in order to establish
          their Geography». He puts an emphasis on the word «Geography» and proceeds:

            My work hypothesis was that all memory with some reach is more structured than it seems.
            That photos taken apparently by chance and that postcards chosen on the whim of the
            moment begin when they mount up to sketch an itinerary, to map the imaginary country which
            spreads out inside us. By riding systematically through it, I was convinced that I would find
            that the apparent disorder of my collection of images hid a plan, like in pirate tales. And the
            object of this disk would be to introduce the “guided tour” of a memory, as well as to pro-
            pose to the visitor his own random navigation. Welcome then to “memory, land of contrasts”
            – or, as I have decided to call it, Immémoire: Immemory22.

            The fact that Marker has chosen to present his project in terms of «Geography» is particularly
          thought-provoking. Comparisons have been drawn between Immemory and the archive,
          Immemory and the book, Immemory and the museum: all these are fair and stimulating relation-
          ships that have taught us much about the project. However, and to our knowledge, no one has so

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        far consistently explored the connection evoked by the artist himself: Immemory as a map, the
        map of the artist’s memory, that «land of contrasts», which constitutes here the territory to navi-
        gate and to chart.
           This omission is all the more striking among two of the three works that Raymond Bellour
        evokes with regard to Immemory: Gerhard Richter’s Atlas and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne
        Atlas23. Both projects are obviously different not only from each other, but also from geographi-
        cal atlases. However, both call upon the “atlas”, a primarily cartographic device, as their template.
        Atlases constitute one of the possible ways of representing the world as an ensemble, but they also
        illustrate a method of assembling images that goes well beyond the field of geography. During the
        19th century, this notion extended itself to other fields of knowledge and creation: with the devel-
        opment of new and better techniques of graphic reproduction and the blossoming of new disci-
        plines (such as anthropology, art history, linguistics, etc.), scientific atlases thrived and succeed-
        ed one another. With their taxonomical classifications aimed at the transmission of information,
        these visual inventories illustrate a new form of knowledge organized around the associations that
        may be established between different elements.
           Instead of suggesting that Immemory constitutes an atlas, I would like to focus on Chris
        Marker’s own proposal: that his memory’s “archive” or “museum” resembles a map. I have
        already put forward a definition that maintains that maps constitute «graphic representations that
        facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the
        human world»24. Indeed, it seems that Immemory makes possible a “spatial understanding” of the
        complex object that is one’s memory. This strategy is obviously far from new: Marker himself
        refers to the ancient «art of memory», whose method implied a more or less complex «spatiali-
        sation» or «architecture»25. To quote but another example, Walter Benjamin once mused on «set-
        ting out the sphere of life – bios – graphically on a map»26. What matters is that, approached from
        the view of its author, Immemory indeed seems to be conceived as a map, the several zones in the
        CD-ROM (Cinema; Photography; War; Poetry; Memory; Museum; Voyage; and Xplugs) consti-
        tuting places – in the literal sense of portions of space – that Marker has arranged according to
        relationships of contiguity (Fig. 2)27.




                        Fig. 2 – Chris Marker, Immemory, 1998. Welcome screen from the CD-
                        ROM.

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                                                        ECONOMIES DU REFERENT 3. THE “MAPPING IMPULSE”

             Using a simple navigational system, the user follows branches of words and images radiating
          out from these zones: like most maps, Chris Marker’s Immemory also combines images with text.
          Marker privileges the accesses, the transitions and the passages from one unity to another, in what
          becomes a topological configuration where the user is to find his or her own itinerary. By putting
          Marker’s map to use, the user-cum-cartographer produces a spatial arrangement, transforming the
          juxtaposed layers of the CD-ROM – or its topological units – into an actual space, organised
          according to different variables. Owing to Marker’s ingenuity, sometimes things follow tradi-
          tional narrative lines and sometimes they do not. The itinerary lines surface and dive, become
          entwined, and end abruptly.
             It is around this itinerary making that one should understand Immemory’s mapping strategy.
          And if the project constitutes, as has been rightly observed, a self-portrait, I would be tempted to
          recall another Borges story, from the afterword to El Hacedor (1960):

            A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years, he peoples a space
            with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instru-
            ments, stars, horses, and individuals. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient
            labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face28.

             I am tempted to quote Raymond Bellour again, as he himself cites Michel Beaujour: «The self-
          portrait is first of all an imaginary stroll along a system of places, the repository of image-mem-
          ories»29. Such an «imaginary stroll» has found here a very concrete map, among the many that
          have since long fascinated Marker, «the child in love with maps and prints»30.
             Undoubtedly, such a mapping strategy is intimately linked to the technology in question31. It
          has been correctly pointed out that the capabilities offered by the CD-ROM and Roger Wagner’s
          Hyperstudio software enabled Marker «to draw together text and images in new, mobile, infi-
          nitely open-ended hyper-media constellations that transcend the existing models of both book and
          film»32. Speaking of the branches of word and image that structure Immemory’s map, the word
          that comes to mind is perhaps rhizomatique. Quoting from Deleuze and Guattari, it is interesting
          to note that:

            The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. […] What distinguishes the map
            from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the
            real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the
            unconscious. It fosters connections between fields […]. It is itself a part of the rhizome. 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. […] A map has multiple
            entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same”. The map has
            to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged “competence”33.

            Such a definition of “map” radically rethinks the relationship that connects the map to the real.
          This relationship, often extremely complex with regard to conventional maps, is certainly not
          reducible to a simple referential model. However, it usually refers to a single and stable repre-
          sentation. Deleuze and Guattari reverse this fundamental principle by proposing that mapping is
          about fostering links between fields and being open to constant modification. Their “map” is
          therefore an unstable object that permanently challenges the referentiality it claims to establish

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        and that seems more akin to a process than to a fixed entity. As I have previously stated, the focus
        shifts from object to function: the object (if object there is) becomes the form of a relation.
          The same could be argued about Immemory, as it attempts to map the extremely complex object
        of memory through the intervention of the user. It is the user who effectively constructs Marker’s
        memory map, as s/he navigates through its multiple entryways, topological units and different
        dimensions. More than the trace of Marker’s memory, Immemory is a way of thinking about mem-
        ory, and from the exploration of its territory, what comes into view is, first and foremost, the cre-
        ative significance of the mapping function.


        Conclusion: Is the “Archival Impulse” Cartographic?
          As a way of concluding, let us return to Hal Foster’s essay, where the author convincingly
        points to an “archival impulse” at work in contemporary art. Such a tendency, visible in works by
        artists like Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant among others, implies, I recall, the
        use of such strategies as the recuperation of images, texts, and objects, frequently in the form of
        installations and in an effort to «make historical information often lost or displaced, physically
        present»34. In many ways, it seems that the “archival impulse” often has recourse to “mapping”
        as a creative strategy. The two examples that I have just discussed could easily, if not wisely, be
        understood and interpreted according to an “archival” perspective. Immemory is, strictly speak-
        ing, an archival piece in the sense that it builds upon Marker’s collection of personal mementoes
        and it could be argued that Barbieri’s “site specific_” project represents a consistent and ongoing
        documentation procedure that creates a virtual archive. The same status applies to the artists dis-
        cussed by Foster: British artist Tacita Dean, for example, has consistently explored different
        dimensions of “mapping” in her work35. Could it be, then, that the “mapping impulse” is but a
        part of a wider “archival” strategy?
          It seems to me that the links between mapping as a strategy and archival art are too conspicu-
        ous to be ignored. However, and perhaps more importantly for the perspective of this essay, map-
        ping strategies would not limit themselves to an archival dimension, as both Barbieri’s and
        Marker’s works seem to confirm. Despite their connection to the idea of the archive, they engage
        with a number of formal strategies (topography, scaling, description, serialisation, layering) that
        point to the fact that the mapping impulse constitutes a tendency in its own right. Commenting on
        “philosophical mapmaking”, Nelson Goodman once warned that «elaborate maps drawn too
        hastily on the basis of too little exploration» do not improve the reputation of such a praise-wor-
        thy activity36. Trusting this sound advice, we can only wish that the idea of a “mapping impulse”
        would be further explored.




        1    The research for this paper was made possible by a grant from the Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia,
             Portugal.
        2    «Le plus célèbre des cineastes inconnus» (Philippe Dubois, “Introduction”, in Théorème, special issue
             “Recherches sur Chris Marker”, no. 6, 2002, p. 5).
        3    Raymond Bellour, The Book, Back and Forth, in Raymond Bellour, Laurent Roth (eds.), Qu’est-ce qu’une
             Madeleine. À propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris Marker, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1997, p. 119.
        4    «Dans nos moments de rêverie mégalomaniaque, nous avons tendance à voir notre mémoire comme une
             espèce de livre d’Histoire: nous avons gagné et perdu des batailles, trouvé et perdu des empires. À tout

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                                                              ECONOMIES DU REFERENT 3. THE “MAPPING IMPULSE”

               le moins nous sommes les personnages d’un roman classique (“Quel roman que ma vie!”). Une appro-
               che plus modeste et peut-être plus fructueuse serait de considérer les fragments d’une mémoire en ter-
               mes de géographie. Dans toute vie nous trouverions des continents, des îles, des déserts, des marais, des
               territoires surpeuplés et des terrae incognitae. De cette mémoire nous pourrions dessiner la carte, extrai-
               re des images avec plus de facilité (et de vérité) que des contes et légendes» (Chris Marker, Immemory,
               Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 1997, my translation).
          5    Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, in October, no. 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3-22.
          6    Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Post-Modernism”, in October, no. 12,
               Spring-Summer 1980, pp. 67-80 (Part I) and pp. 58-80 (Part II).
          7    Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Ducth Art in the Seventeeth Century, University of Chicago,
               Chicago 1983.
          8    Martin Jay, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Bay, Seattle 1988,
               pp. 3-23. The term “scopic regimes” is inspired by Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire.
               Psychanalyse et cinéma, U.G.E., Paris 1977.
          9    See, among others, Wystan Curnoe, Mapping and the Expanded Field of Contemporary Art, in Denis
               Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings, Reaktion Books, London 1999, pp. 253-68.
          10   John Brian Harley, David Woodward, Preface, in Id. (eds.), The History of Cartography, Cartography
               in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, Vol. 1, Chicago University,
               Chicago 1987, p. XVI.
          11   One example is Japanese media artist Masaki Fujihata, who started using GPS technology in 1992 (see
               his Impressing Velocity project).
          12   Denis Cosgrove, Introduction, in Id. (ed.), Mappings, cit., p. 9.
          13   This notion was first put forward and explored by Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia. A Study of Environmental
               Perception, Attitudes and Values, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1974.
          14   Nicolas Bourriaud, Topocritique: l’art contemporain et l’investigation géographique, in GNS. Global
               Navigation System, Cercle d’Art, Paris 2003, p. 9.
          15   See, among others, the exhibition catalogue Un siècle d’arpenteurs: les figures de la marche, Réunion
               de Musées Nationaux, Antibes 2000; Thierry Davila, Marcher, créer: déplacements, flâneries, dérives
               dans l’art de la fin du XXe siècle, Regard, Paris 2002; Francesco Careri, Walkscapes. El andar como
               práctica estética / Walking as an Artistic Practice, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 2002.
          16   «Il n’est de carte que dans le cadre d’une série, d’une production collective qui s’échelonne dans le
               temps» (Christian Jacob, L’Empire des cartes. Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoi-
               re, Albin Michel, Paris 1992, p. 465, my translation).
          17   One could also convincingly argue for the apparently descriptive ambition of its purpose: to cover dif-
               ferent cities in different continents.
          18   Jorge Luis Borges, Of Exactitude in Science, in Id., A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin, London
               1972, p. 131.
          19   Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, McMillan, London 1893, Vol. 2, p. 169.
          20   Olivo Barbieri interviewed by Stephen Hepworth in the exhibition leaflet published by The Bloomberg
               Space to accompany the exhibition Site Specific (held at the Bloomberg Space, London, April 7-May 20,
               2006).
          21   James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.),
               Mappings, cit., p. 213.
          22   «Mon hypothèse de travail était que toute mémoire un peu longue est plus structurée qu’il ne semble.
               Que des photos prises apparemment par hasard, des cartes postales choisies selon l’humeur du moment,
               à partir d’une certaine quantité commencent à dessiner un itinéraire, à cartographier le pays imaginaire
               qui s’étend au dedans de nous. En le parcourant systématiquement j’étais sûr de découvrir que l’appa-
               rent désordre de mon imagerie cachait un plan, comme dans les histoires de pirates. Et l’objet de ce
               disque serait de présenter la “visite guidée” d’une mémoire, en même temps que de proposer au visiteur
               sa propre navigation aléatoire. Bienvenue donc dans “Mémoire, terre de contrastes” – ou plutôt, comme
               j’ai choisi de l’appeler, Immémoire: Immemory» (Chris Marker, Immemory, cit., my translation).
          23   The third one is Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Edison’s dream. See Raymond Bellour, The Book, Back and
               Forth, cit., pp. 131-3.
          24   John Brian Harley, David Woodward, Preface, cit.
          25   Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Pimlico, London 1992.
          26   Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, in Id., One Way Street, Verso, London 1979, p. 295.

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        TERESA CASTRO

        27 It should be pointed out that the designation “zones” also refer to Andrei Tarkovsky and his film Stalker
           (1979).
        28 Jorge Luis Borges, Epilogue, in Id., Dreamtigers, Souvenir, London 1973, p. 93.
        29 Raymond Bellour, The Book, Back and Forth, cit., p. 123.
        30 See Guy Gauthier, “Images d’enfance”, in Théorème, cit. In his essay, the author discusses the influence
           of children’s books, like those of Jules Verne or the lesser-known Comte de Beauvoir, on Chris Marker’s
           work. Marker’s fascination with maps can be traced back to 1947, when he published an article in Esprit
           called “Pôles” where he imagines a map of the world with the North Pole at its centre (see Catherine
           Lupton, Chris Marker, Memories of the Future, Reaktion Books, London 2006, p. 40).
        31 This point might imply that new media constitute the ideal means for the “mapping impulse”. The
           Internet in particular seems to be relevant to this question, as the ability to create meaning in such an
           environment largely relies on the possibilities of filtering information and creating some form of map –
           be it mental or visual – that can allow for orientation and navigation.
        32 Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, Memories of the Future, cit., p. 210.
        33 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of
           Minnesota, Minneapolis 1987, p. 12 (1st ed. Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2, Minuit,
           Paris 1980).
        34 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, cit., p. 4.
        35 «Tacita Dean is an artist concerned with the concept of navigation – both literally and metaphorically.
           Her work addresses the process of plotting co-ordinates in space and time, making connections between
           past and present, fact and fiction. Dean maps not just the objective world but also our private worlds and
           traces the complex interaction of the two» (Clarrie Wallis, Introduction, in Tacita Dean, Clarrie Wallis,
           Tacita Dean. Recent Films and Other Works, Tate Gallery, London 2001, p. 9).
        36 Nelson Goodman, The Revision of Philosophy, in Id., Problems and Projects, The Bobbs-Merrill
           Company, Indianapolis 1972, p. 17.




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