Call for Entries- Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map

//Announcement and call for entries// Photocartographies: Tattered Fragments of the Map http://thelimitsoffun.org/photocartographies Submission Deadline: March 31, 2009 Exhibition Opens in Los Angeles on May 16 Photography and cartography are entwined in similar processes of subject orientation that structure our experience of social, environmental and virtual landscapes. A map is not a representation so much as a system of propositions. This exhibition reveals mapping itself as a generative process of knowledge creation, a liberatory method for re-imagining and re-imaging our world, its built and natural environments, and the relationship between space and place. Independent curators Adam Katz (Los Angeles) and Brian Rosa (Mexico City) seek submissions of 2D images and artworks that play with the map as an epistemological tool. Appropriate work includes cartographies that use photography as well as photographs that employ a cartographic vocabulary (location, territory, scale). The exhibition will emphasize an interdisciplinary approach to a broad spectrum of visual culture – we welcome submissions from social scientists, urbanists, and designers as well as artists. Images should be sent by email to [email protected] Include "Photocartographies" in the subject Preferred .jpg or .pdf No more than 10 images No more than 5mb of attachments per email Please include a brief introduction, artist statement or relevant links online More about the Exhibition Maps are tied to a history of authority, scientific rationality and use-value, masking the underlying subjectivity and biases of their creation. Practical application, satellite-based navigation, the disciplines of geography and, more recently, urban planning, have popularized and proliferated map imagery while helping to cement an aura of unassailable cartographic objectivity. Maps have become ubiquitous tools in our daily lives, and are traditionally identified in accordance with a few simple assumptions: they are graphic representations of spatial relations and their creators are technicians bound to graphic systems that reflect a physical reality. However, the true nature of maps is one of distortion, beginning with their projections of three-dimensional surfaces onto two-dimensional frames, and compounded by territorialization, a habit of identifying, naming and claiming. Maps are image-objects in which different conceptions and configurations of time and space are created, not just charted. In 1858 Gaspard Felix Tournachon executed the first aerial photographs from a hot air balloon tethered above the Paris skyline. In turn, Baron Haussmann employed this omniscient view to redesign the city, combating its perceived disorder. Over the last 150 years, people have used zeppelins, airplanes, and satellites to photographically capture and archive every piece of our globe with increasing accuracy and frequency. More recently, public access to maps, as well as the access to their means of production, have been greatly enabled by photo reproduction—most notably with the prevalence of digital information tools such as Google Earth and online mapping sites spurred by satellite imagery. Borges' story of mapping the entire Kingdom1 with exactitude may seem improbably complete. And yet, maps can never escape being part of the world their creators try to represent. Like the photographic image, "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious"2 by coding power, politics, and aesthetics. All maps are still projections, and all territories are maps. 1 Borges, J.L. "Of Exactitude in Science." A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975. 2 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. U of Minnesota Press, 1987.