person:hans ulrich obrist

Experiments in mapping the intangible - Boing Boing

▻http://boingboing.net/2014/11/20/experiments-in-mapping-the-int.html

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I never tire of the conceptual trick of applying the metaphor of a map onto something non-geographical. Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies by Hans Ulrich Obrist rounds up a set of maps created by artists and thinkers that chart what is often hard to visualize. The editor labels them “alternative cartographies.

▻http://40.media.tumblr.com/b0c00ecae196c45a49b94e9289c1344a/tumblr_ne9rfxEoD21t3i99fo3_1280.jpg”

Disclosure: one of the entries is mine. Several years ago I began asking people to “draw the internet” on a sheet of paper, and my own map of the internet is included here. That’s the kind of conceptual cartography this atlas contains. I think of this as experiments in mapping the intangible.

#cartographie #art #cartographie_radicale #atlas #bibliographie

The Mapmaker’s Conundrum - The New Yorker

▻http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-mapmakers-conundrum#slide_ss_0=1

Images and text are drawn from “Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies,” edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, out July 15th from Thames & Hudson.

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Louise Bourgeois, “Paris Toujours Paris” (Set No. 7, detail), 2006. © Louise Bourgeois. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read. Photo: Christopher Burke, © The Easton Foundation.

A few years back, when Google’s various cartographic apps became ubiquitous, discussion groups were flooded with accounts of strange anomalies. Buildings, streets or, on occasion, entire cities disappeared; coastlines and mountain ranges warped; highways kinked and buckled; giant lacunae sprung up, sinkholes yawning from innocuous fields and deserts. The cause, of course, was glitch-ridden software and faulty collating techniques. But to dismiss this as a uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon, a digital quirk, would be to overlook an essential feature of all maps: namely, that they don’t work, and never have. Pick up any textbook on cartography, and the very first paragraph will invariably remind you that the Earth is spherical but paper is flat; and, as J. A. Steers points out in his 1927 Introduction to the Study of Map Projections, just ‘as it is impossible to make a sheet of paper rest smoothly on a sphere, so it is impossible to make a correct map on a sheet of paper’. Maps are not copies; they are projections, ‘means’ (Steers again) ‘of representing the lines of latitude and longitude of the globe on a flat sheet of paper’.

#cartographie #art #projection

In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem | e-flux
▻http://www.e-flux.com/journal/in-conversation-with-raoul-vaneigem

Hans Ulrich Obrist : I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

HUO: Could we talk about your beginnings? How did your participation in situationism begin, and what was your fundamental contribution? At the outset of your relationship with the SI, there was the figure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he mean to you at the time? Why did you decide to send him poetic essays?

RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label.

#situationnistes #Vaneigem #anarchisme #spectacle