Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics

Abstract

As an academic and artist working at the intersection between architecture, visual culture and digital technology, Laura Kurgan presents an intriguing socio-historic account of the development of satellite imagery, GPS navigation and the spatial revolution ushered in by these technologies. Today, maps dominate our social landscape. They are incorporated into nearly every piece of digital hardware from Smart watches to Smart phones to computers and tablets to the dashboards of millions of vehicles worldwide. Getting lost has never been so difficult. Yet, for Kurgan, the notion of the map is far more expansive and ideological than this might suggest. She notes that ‘the spaces that maps try to describe can be ideal, psychological, virtual, immaterial, or imaginary – and they are never just physical’ (p. 16). Thus, it is through the optics of satellite imagery (specifically those images derived from a militaristic or logistic worldview) that Kurgan examines how we might critically examine the complex relations between ‘technologies of spatial representation’ and the ‘space they represent, beyond simply representing them’ (p. 13).