Neither Confirmed Nor Denied. For Human Rights Watch 2017

2017

“Neither Confirmed Nor Denied” 5m x 4m for Human Rights Watch. Felt wool découpage on silk velvet. This map work depictes fencing at Guantanamo Bay behind which prisoners were held, a feeding tube and can of liquid food, satellite map of Guantanamo Bay camp.

Some general notes on cartography and maps

Living Maps Network https://www.livingmaps.org/

Mapping as a tool for social change

Daudy is interested in the map as a form of oral history, and imaginary landscapes that form inside the head while looking at a map. Her ongoing series of works making unreliable charts and maps for cities, museums and universities across the world lead us to ask who controls the map? What does a map mean to you. How can lines on a piece of paper explain complex situations and ideas. Daudy’s celestial maps, cognitive maps, participatory maps give us knowledge of the world and stretch the boundaries of our imagination.

Daudy read a lot as a child and maps featured in the frontispiece of many fairytales and imagined lands. The shapes and silhouettes, the names and snaking rivers inform her ongoing work using maps as a sensory, factual and sincere portrait of her engagement with different territories. Maps like the map she made for Selfridges London is not just a participatory mapping project inviting people to share their city, but a portrait of her inner life and childhood, portraying what only she sees and has seen, now and in the past.

Maps reflect personal interests of the cartogapher. Every map says only what you want it to say.

London Underground map by Harry Beck shows a non-existential reality of the city’s tube network; it is more like a diagram.

Charles Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russia 1812 campaign

Flow Map of Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/analyzing-minards-visualization-of-napoleons-1812-march

Maps and Dreams by writer and anthropologist Hugh Brody

https://www.hughbrody.com/book-catalogue/maps-and-dreams

Map of the Radcliffe Line https://www.britannica.com/place/Radcliffe-Line – approx 80,000 people died around this line. W H Auden’s poem Partition https://allpoetry.com/Partition

Mapping Game: https://www.geoguessr.com/

A Queer and Trans map of NYC was shut down after it was used to target gays

A community ICE tracking map was closed down by the government now replaced by a community map

https://deportationtracker.live/report-raid

https://www.iceinmyarea.org/en

ICE and Palantir have a new collaboration for following phone locations. However the state has lost control of information and this information is now available to those looking for it.

4d mapping


Marina Warner maps

Maps and Monsters

https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=43983

The power of maps

Newton says power = function

Maps are powerful as they allow us to navigate and understand

Marxist geography look at practical and economical aspects https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00221348508979261

Maps and law enforcement maps

Deforestation and Forest Loss Map

https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation

Illegal Fishing maps https://globalfishingwatch.org

Poaching Maps eg this one at Kruger National Park https://oxpeckers.org/poach-tracker-map/

Trend of increasing surveillance

However having information about something going on does not change the facts of the thing happening.

Systemic institutional problems cannot be solved just by information 
What does not appear on a map?

Neo Liberal data information

Human trafficking maps 
Google maps used to offer a location history. Google had to remove it as the police followed up on location histories of suspects and tried to pursue criminals using it as evidence (this was not seen to be ethical).

Counter-mapping

Geo-spatial engineers from the Army just now asked Bellingcat to remove information from their website with satellite heat-tracking maps that revealed the location of secret military camps.

Cartographic legal strategies eg this Anti Eviction Mapping Project https://antievictionmap.com/


There is better data mapping now of the surface of the moon than of the earth