Quickly following their 2D coverage of the world with maps and satellite imagery ( http://maps.google.com ), the recently launched ‘Google Earth’ ( http://earth.google.com ) highlights the sheer ambition of our global search engine overlords. There are more ways to make maps of course, than 3D fly throughs of the entire planet, with topographical data, satellite imagery and integrated search data overlays.
Body Maps
‘You are here’, it might say on a map of some CBD, some campus, some airport. ‘We’re on the road to nowhere,’ your headphones might be blaring, David Byrne of Talking Heads, wearily, cheerily bleating out his happy go lucky apocalypso. ‘You’ of course, might be a human specimen, one of the organisms with the sort of complex terrain that has tantalised mapmakers for millennia. Students nowadays will happily bark ‘the map is not the territory’, but that hasn’t stopped us from cutting up bodies to try and understand them better. Anatomical lessons learnt have no doubt proven beneficial many times over, but our lack of understanding about the differences between spirit and body or mind and brain, have made some of our mapmaking experiments appear quite daft with a few hundred years under our belts.
Phrenology
Porcelain skulls, with dotted lines to designate different areas of the brain, each representing a particular character trait such as ‘criminal tendencies’, ‘jealousy’, ‘cautiousness’, ‘hope’, can usually be found deep within antique shops, cluttered amongst archaic pinball machines, typewriters & Victorian furniture. These skulls, and the idea that the human brain was a physical map of our character, can be traced back to phrenology, a 19th century ‘science’ that argued the mind’s various faculties has distinct and separate locations in the human brain.
Sounds daft enough, but it was followed by Eugenics in the 20th century, a social philosophy which advocates the purported improvement of human hereditary qualities. Proposed means of doing so have included birth control, selective breeding, genetic engineering, racial hygiene, and even extermination. The chilling footage of Nazi scientists measuring the faces of potential Jews, to determine whether they belong to the master race or not, is all that is needed to remind of those particular ‘mapping’ dangers.
Psychogeography
Wacky artist movements of the 20th century similarly have a lot to answer for ( though they have a much lower body count). The ‘situationists’ of the ’60’s were big on evolution through exploring the possibilities of the everyday, and seeing our everyday environments anew. Their beloved ‘psychogeography’ involved various strategies for taking pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolting them into a new awareness of the urban landscape, creating new maps of their locales. Psychogeography.com sure enough, redirects somewhere else – to an essay called “The Revolution of everyday life” by renowned situationist Raoul Vaneigem.
Google Goggles
But aye, the cats at google are of course more than cartographers ( mapmakers ) at heart. The buried treasure for their new 2D and 3D charting and navigation of the planet, is in how they can financially exploit the integration of their search results into these clever interfaces. Rival search engines MSN and Yahoo have similar offerings ( made or planned ), but google have managed to snare the public’s attention first, and boy are peeps smitten ( and often sleepless) exploring the fly through wonders of google earth. Only available for PC at the moment ( other versions on their way), the downloadable google earth application allows for global searches and then flies in 3D to the location of your choice. Looking for pizza in Brooklyn, a skatepark in California or a bondage emporium in Las Vegas? Clicking on the sidebar results, will fly from your current location through to a 3D map ( including buildings in the CBDs of US cities ) and show little flags where your search results are physically located. It’s a swoony and impressive interface, and already all manner of hacks and add-ons are being thrown around online that merge these capacities with other applications to provide games, entertainment, or value-added searching for various activities online. Noting that google maps ( 2D) has already been ported to some mobile phones ( www.mgmaps.com ), get ready to start seeing even more glimpses of the 21st century approaching faster and faster.
jean poole