[wikilike_img src=http://design.umn.edu/upload/resource/elsewhere_book00-Book_Comp_small.jpg|url=http://design.umn.edu/go/project/ELSEWHEREMAPPING_overview?init=1|caption=Else/Where Mapping, Janet Abrams, Peter hall, eds|align=thumb tcenter|width=415]
Else/Where:Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories is a new book edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall from the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota. It features a long list of US and European artists’ projects — 40 in all — that work through the topic of mapping. It looks like it’s richly illustrated , which means it’ll be a fun book not only to read, but to look at, too. PDPal is also in there, which is exciting.
Featuring 40 essays by U.S. and European historians, designers, cultural critics and social scientists, copiously illustrated with over 250 color images in extensive visual “gazetteers” — including specially-commissioned portfolios by artists and designers — ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING investigates:
* how new technologies of navigation and location are emerging to chart “virtual” terrain such as social networks and online conversations
* how these new mapping strategies borrow and reinvent metaphors adapted from the cartography of physical terrain, considered at various scales — urban, regional, continental, global
* how new modes of representation of spatial data are evolving to explore the potential for collective “bottom-up” (rather than “top-down”) mapping
* how cities, communities and social networks are being re-envisioned, as artists and designers use technologies such as GPS, GIS and digital interface design to devise alternative mappings of social and spatial relationships.
Why do I blog this? I’m interested in how territories are represented through maps and cartography and different kinds of non-canonical ways of describing, visually and otherwise, space and the lived experiences of a place.
Technorati Tags: cartography, mapping, maps