"There is no Earth corresponding to the Globe - An Interview with Bruno Latour" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Earth, World, and Land: The Story of the Missing Term
This talk takes its start from two recent concerns of mine. On the one hand the idea of the end of the earth, its very edge, and on the other the importance of land as a middle term between earth and world. The first stems from an ancient obsession with discovering the limit of the physical planet we inhabit, its endpoint or ultimate horizon.
LAND, MEANING AND TERRITORY: THE GEOSEMANTIC EQUATION
Inclusiva-net: Dgitial Network and Phisical Space. 2nd Inclusiva-net Meeting. Directed by Juan Martín Prada, march, 2008. MEDIALAB-PRADO. Madrid, 2009
This is a Utopian analysis of the development of KML and mashups of virtual maps. Utopian is defined here in its etymological meaning of ‘another place’. Not a matter of philosophy, this Utopia is operative in reality and virtually. The construction of the territories we inhabit is starting to be displaced by a new way of understanding land, territory, and homeland. Virtual maps, once merely tools to help us get from point A to point B, have become creative contingencies. KMLs take on geosemantic power, although they are not made according to W3C Semantic Web criteria, given that they make a new concept of geosemantics necessary. Today we can create territories at will and they can reach levels of validity in the real world depending on community behaviour. The geosemantic equation proposed here aims to open up the real and virtual potential of the tendencies generated by the virtual maps. The construction of the geosemantic equation requires the development of a theoretical framework that clarifies and orders the ontological complexity presented by the paradox of the ascensional mirror implicit in Google Earth, primus inter pares of geographic software for final users.
Un-Earths: Landscape, Memory & the Global Map
ISEA 2017 Conference Proceedings, 2017
This paper addresses the failures of the modern mapping project understood through three creative works in video and projection-mapping, discussing them in terms drawn from Bernard Stiegler's writing on industrialized memory. The three works harvest moving satellite images associated with significant geopolitical frameworks: the 49th Parallel, the Greenwich Prime Meridian, and Canada's Dominion Land Survey, exposing anomalies and opacities in imagery gathered there. One of these videos, parallel, is being screened at ISEA 2017. The paper articulates these works as amplifications of the failure of the modern project to transparently map the world. Rather, such frameworks-in both their historical forms and their contemporary manifestations in GPS, GLONASS, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems, and popular tools such as Google Earth-are rife with anomalies and errors. Counterintuitively, such failures are built into the industrialization of knowledge; as Stiegler puts it, the straight line generates the bent. This is even more the case as the mapping project becomes a temporal archive.
Progress in Human Geography, 2010
This paper outlines a way toward conceptual and historical clarity around the question of territory. The aim is not to define territory, in the sense of a single meaning; but rather to indicate the issues at stake in grasping how it has been understood in different historical and geographical contexts. It does so first by critically interrogating work on territoriality, suggesting that neither the biological nor the social uses of this term are particularly profitable ways to approach the historically more specific category of ‘territory’. Instead, ideas of ‘land’ and ‘terrain’ are examined, suggesting that these political-economic and political-strategic relations are essential to understanding ‘territory’, yet ultimately insufficient. Territory needs to be understood in terms of its relation to space, itself a calculative category that is dependent on the existence of a range of techniques. Ultimately this requires rethinking unproblematic definitions of territory as a ‘bounded sp...
The Dynamic Concept of Territory in a Globalized World
2001
Space has long been studied in relationships with Geography, Economy, and Management. These sectors pay attention to the influence of space in their own analysis and some effort has already made to define space. This lack of definition is becoming crucial in a world where spatial actions are more and more global and not only local. This shift complicates human environment where relationship with space is no longer just reducing distances but trying to propose the right conditions for the emergence of proximities. To present a structured view of space taking into account this new scale of spatial action, we propose to adopt a new methodology based on ethology studies. The territory and its dynamic management are at the centre of this new way of thinking what space is.
From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land
This article explores the geopolitical importance of the word “land” to the field of Indigenous studies. Rather than simply take the word “land” as a given and natural element of the world around us, in this article I suggest a closer interrogation of the multiple social and geopolitical meanings that make land a key concept in indigenous political struggle. The processes of colonialism and neocolonialism resulted in abstracting land as part of making nations that are recognized by the liberal settler nation-states. How have concepts of land changed in this process? How do we make Indigenous spaces that are not based on abstracting land and Indigenous bodies into state spaces, while maintaining political vitality? How are the lived realities of Indigenous peoples impacted by concepts of borders and territories that support the power of the nation-state? I draw on the narrative dimensions of land in the work of Indigenous writers in order to intercede in limiting the meanings of land to those mapped by the state.