Today I was fortunate to attend the fourth 10 Minute lectures, held in DUMBO at the Melville House Bookstore. This lecture series previously featured Lewis Lapham, Forrest Hylton, and Rene Ortiz, and like Pecha Kucha the brevity makes for a pleasantly dense presentation.
Today’s lecture was presented by Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat Editors of both the website and book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography; a collection of maps and essays about global issues ranging from garbage to globalization, statelessness to visibility and deportation to migration. Their main contention is that all maps and the process of map making is inherently political, with the book’s contributors shedding the allegedly false sheen of objectivity. The book was previously reviewed by We Make Money Not Art. An Atlas of Radical Cartography shouldn’t be confused with Bill Rankin’s Radical Cartography, an equally worthwhile website.
Mogel & Bhagat gave three simple definitions to open the lecture:

• Cartography
  The art or science of map making
• Critical Cartography
  Posits that geographic knowledge is a basis for power and is inherently political
• Counter-Cartography
  Cartography which counters the official cartography i.e. – why are maps oriented South? (ed – a cousin of Sousveillance)

New York City Garbage Machine, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy
Lecture Notes

• Showcased two different maps: The Routes of Least Surveillance, a map showcasing all of the CCTV cameras in New York City and plotting the unsurveyed route, and the NYC Garbage Machine, which illustrates the path of garbage bureaucracy which moves and profits from it.
• The authors repeated many times how maps and cartography itself was a political construct and contained bias. Every act of gathering data, editing, graphically presenting the data are filled with human choices and political decisions.
• The authors were amazed by the increasing map literacy, anecdotally noting that map literacy improves year by year. Kids in Idaho when asked to draw their surroundings, drew their neighborhood in plan and were very comfortable with the concept of map views. The authors note they would have drawn their surroundings in perspective.
• Limitations of the paper media – maps by their very nature are historical artifacts.
• Crisis in cartography due to the compressed timescale of creating maps; where some cartographers spent years creating and curating a handful of maps, there is a real push for quick updating maps.
• Culture is thinking in terms of networks starting with location aware devices such as sat-nav guides or gps phone handsets leading into the shift in thinking of relationships as a series of networks.
• Current cartography as embracing the ideas of the Situationists and psycogeography. Art and design is responding to the tools at their disposal. Artists in the 1970’s were influenced heavily by office worker’s tools creating typewriter based art. Similar effects are being felt today as GIS and GPS tools are ubiquitous and easier to use.
• Digitization of culture
• Divide between cartographers and laity in terms of both economics, knowledge, and traditions. It is hard to compile large correct datasets if you are not paid to do that like the government is.
• Groundtruthing – looking at the facts on the ground to verify that the constructed map is accurate.
• Interesting trends in cartography: Conflux, Glowlab, and Invisible 5 (a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles).

The next 10m Lecture is September 18 featuring Jeff Sharlet Author of The Family: Fundamentalism’s Avant-Garde.