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Rainer Ganahl 19995
Borges, Maps, Computers, GPS, Police,
Kant, Interfaces & Nostalgia
When Foucault discussed the Borges story about the map which occurs at
a 1-to-1 scale - the map is as large as the territory which it represents
- he regarded the charm and paradox of this situation from a conventional,
"myopic" view. He conducted a semiotic reading that was satisfied
with an equation of Signifier with Signified. Now we know that a myopic
viewpoint of the observer is not necessary anymore. One can use an intermediary.
In particular, a camera, or "platform", for remote sensing.
The development of computerized satellite monitoring technologies, with
their potential for displaying each pictured element (or pixel) at colossal
scale, has allowed for a nearly 1-to-1, or at least a very-high resolution
blow-up version of, geographical representations. Mapping has changed
and with this the reading of Borges.
Computerized viewing technologies open up an extremely broad range of
visual accessibility in the macro and micro realms. Whether it deals with
neurological or geographical surfaces, DNA landscapes or interstellar
clusters, computers are by now able to present us with a vast range of
desired representations. One can quickly accept this fact. More difficult,
however, is getting accustomed to its implications, in a new structuring
of knowledge. Let us look briefly at one example of this vast array of
computerized viewing technologies that not only expand into physical or
astronomical space and beyond but also into the social, ideological and
political sphere. A descriptive term may be "pan-voyeurism".
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a network of satellites and ground
computers around the world which processes data received via microwaves
from satellites, to give precise information on the position of an object.
The object is looked at as a numerical coordinate on an orbital scale.
This allows for an exact and absolute positioning on the globe. The points
of reference are not found anymore in a given environment but in the globality
of all positions in the system which in our case is our tiny shaky planet
"Earth". Topographical representation has grown - as with Borges
- as huge as the territories it represents, since everything is indefinitely
split into bits to be traced at any moment from any point on any kind
(screen) of representation.
What seems with GPS to be complicated and futuristic, and what appears
with certain presentations in art circles to be "revolutionary",
has already become a standard, even mundane tool for many users, some
not even being aware of it. Many commercial aircraft now use it, in what
is called a flight-tracking system. GPS's are also sold on the streets
in Japan to car drivers and pedestrians as inexpensive digital maps to
give them their absolute positioning in the labyrinths of complicated
numbered street and house indications. As opposite to the traditional
usage of a map where a person has to know its place in order to place
himself in relationship of a represented place, with these digital urban
assistants that are not bigger than a pocket calculator, the device tells
the lost person not just his or her present position - street corner -
but also where to go and which street to take in order to reach the user's
destination. There can also be enormous military purposes for such technology.
Another example of digital modes of representation and screenings has
more sociological implications. In Germany, for example, it has been used
for the scanning of an entire population. During the 1970s, computers
began to be used by the police for the tracking of terrorists, but in
a way that also produced and radicalized terrorists. The technology was
called "Rasterfahndung" (this means, "grid search",
conducted to find a "wanted" person). As with the GPS, in a
Borgesian way, the full population of the country was taken as a point
of departure for tracking. Data was screened against specific interfacial
criteria: travel itineraries, education, membership in political groups,
information from libraries and other sources, frequency of changed addresses
(in Europe people are required by law to report to the authorities the
place in which they are currently living), even friends and affiliations,
and so on, such that one can arrive at a small population for person-by-person
investigation. Today this technology is used to construct social, economical,
and ideological profiles of otherwise law-abiding citizens. In Germany
in the end of the 80s a detailed national survey - including questions
concerning sexual identity, education, income, health etc. - was conducted
in conjunction with their new digital administration.
All information gathering technologies are interfaces and deliver information
that has to be reinterpreted, rewritten for new interfacial representations.
For example the digital emanations from a viewing territory satellite
in orbit do not just have to be reinterpreted for all kinds of geographical,
geological, terminological, hydrological, urban and sociological readings
but can also be collected or mapped onto other interfaces, such as a musical
instrument for sound production. The need for an interface, and the possibility
of indefinite numbers of interpretations, makes technologies like a GPS
satellite system applicable to almost any other facts. Sites or persons
on sites can be overlaid with information, at that site, or at that specific
person on site. The technology of targeting and locating becomes so precise
that anyone and anything in the world can be tracked.
Viewing observation systems are similar to that in literature, where the
acquaintance with a language and a system of writing allows for open-ended
opportunities in collocation at any given site of different literary productions,
or meanings. With viewing technologies, the digital information collected
is not only open for interpretation but totally dependent on interpretations
operated through interfaces. By precisely fixing, for example, with pixels
each geographical site of information, and by allowing the overlay of
any digital input to the sites and grids of any other collocatable information,
today's viewing and mapping technologies constitute a powerful apparatus
for constructing representations of the world of enormous utility and
appropriation. All these constructions are done with interfaces.
The vast increase in possibilities results from interfacing. Interfaces
are not to be confused with the relatively simple process of encoding
and decoding where there is no difference in the before or after of these
processes, where information or messages as well as the systems involved
do not change essentially. Interfaces perform a translation between two
or more heterogeneous systems and types of data that need to be translated.
It is a passage and a transformation of information, energy, or something
that travels from one realm to another one. Different to the communicational
model with an equally equipped sender and receiver, which derives from
the relatively simple 19-century signal transmitting technology, interfacial
communication technologies involve heterogeneous participants without
privileging a mode or a direction in the flux of translational exchanges.
Because of the relational nature of the interface, the common division
between hardware and software does not apply as long as a computer screen
or a computer program transforms, translates and communicates information,
data, or energy. Thus, the interface is a descriptive analytical category
that cuts across traditional boundaries of categorizing things and cuts
across all kinds of technologies, old ones and so-called new ones.
Here one recalls Kant's epistemological and philosophical categories,
which he thought were constitutive for the production of knowledge. For
Kant, perception and knowledge of the world involved not just a passive
capturing of sensual data, but a synthesis of the sensual inputs and transcendental
categories of time and space adjacent to the subject. This meant that
there was no "Ding an sich", no "thing in itself",
but only a mediated, translated knowledge of the world. With this idea,
Kant was first to recognize the translational, mediated and constructed
aspect of the constitution of knowledge and perception. I propose to call
this an Interfacial Passage and the power related to this Interfacial
Power.
If we consider again the Borges' story of one-to-one mapping, interfacial
passages can be found everywhere, even if we are not aware of them. One
can be a visitor to a city which in its very plan is "mapped",
such that for every site, every location where one can possibly be, there
is an overlay of information within. Manhattan above 1st street is a classic
example: the numbered streets themselves make a map as big as the subject
mapped. A scheme has been overlaid not just over the city, but served
also as a plan for its construction. The urban production of Manhattan
was rendered along a grid oriented layout that turned not just the city
into a grid but also turned it into a Borgesian map where a person always
knows where he is on the map and in the city since all the streets are
telling it with the accuracy of a GPS direction.
In the production of knowledge, this interfacial passage also has an influential,
constitutive effect, but is also often unrecognized, for its nature is
to be transparent, translational, and of course functional. This can be
best demonstrated with earlier interfaces that are not at all digital
in our contemporary sense, for example book printing. Every book mediates
knowledge, transforms it, and distributes it. This qualifies a book as
an interface, as does every single letter contained in it. Also, languages
and writing systems bear upon the way in which knowledge is disseminated
depending on their inherent pictogrammatic or alphabetic roots. A very
interesting aspect of the Gutenberg invention was that from that moment
on, books and book pages started to look different. The entire critical
apparatus of academic books that is taken for granted today, could develop
from that point. Tables of contents, indexes, footnotes, page numbers,
paragraphs etc. appeared as maps of texts and were part of the big transformation
of the scientific practice. This "mapping" of the text allowed
direct access to specific parts of the texts and changed the way of working
with texts that themselves started to be texts in response to books that
became portable, mobile, and personal.
All maps also function as an interface. They position the site, people,
and objects they represent, as well as the people making and working with
these representations. Urban space and its representations in common maps
usually tend to give only topographical information (some early maps also
gave racial information through drawings of the exotic inhabitants). But
maps and charts can also take a wider array of social, economical, ecological
etc. data into account - income, age, race, sexual orientations, garbage,
consumption of energy and goods, religion, languages, health, etc. - in
order to deliver a totally different kind of topographical profile of
what it represents. Comparable with the need for interpretations of data
from observation satellites, all these representations are dependent on
what a mapping mind produces even if these "a prioris" are no
longer called transcendental categories (Kant). The political, socio-ideological,
ecological, and economical importance (to name just a few) of the mapping
interfaces at work becomes with the revolution in information-processing
technologies more and more obvious since the data available are so indefinitely
enormous.
Borges story can be read in a way that sees in the unmanageable amount
of available data such a huge mountain that it has to be flattened out
over the entire surface of the territory if one is to still move on it.
Today people are nostalgic for the beauty of traditional and old maps
since they deliver a world that seemed easy and manageable to understand.
But the complexity and amount of data provided today from computers on
all subjects has become so overwhelming that it can only be treated, analyzed
and read through and with the help of computerized interfaces. So walking
through a territory and a map of the size of this territory is also a
poetic expression for the nostalgia of relationships that stay on a 1:1
scale. Unfortunately, orientation on such a 1:1 scale map only is possible
as long as one does not leave the territory with which one is familiar.
Is not this threshold to the unfamiliar and conflicted land also the beginning
of any epistemological and philosophical thinking that is supposed to
scrutinize any interfacial power that makes up - as Kant would say - the
transcendental i.e. the conditions of the possibility of knowledge?
It is said that knowledge is power. If there is a capacity for the formation
of knowledge, due to the capacity for the collocation of information about
any given site, made particularly easy with the computer, then there is
a capacity for immense power. One can build geographical data bases which
create enormous understandings about all that is going on with a monitored
- i.e., data-based and ordinated - terrain. Any digitization of information
through any interfacial matrix involves an enormous, unprecedented increase
in the amount and degree of power over whatever is being produced as knowledge.
One has to observe and struggle to be included in the production of definitions
and representations.
Rainer Ganahl, January 1995
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