Parmi les terminologies accompagnant le renouveau cartographique pointé lors du colloque Hyperurbain, un terme connaît un certain succès : celui de « cartographie radicale» – radical cartography en anglais.
Pour preuve, le site Radical Cartography, qui s’introduit par le tout aussi radical texte de Baudrillard, en relation avec la fameuse fable borgienne :
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing) — then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.
Jean Baudrillard, « The Precession of Simulacra»
On s’intéressera davantage aux ressources (non exhaustives) : liens, bibliographie, etc.
Par ailleurs, une exposition itinérante est accompagnée d’un livre – An Atlas of radical cartography (cf. illustration ci-dessus) – qui propose deux volets : un ensemble de 10 cartes -dont le projet Isee de Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) pointant l’accroissement de la vidéosurveillance à Manhattan, que nous avions relayé sur ce blog- et un ensemble de 10 essais.
L’introduction insiste sur la dimension politique du projet, par opposition à une cartographie dont la principale ambition serait d’être objective:
This Atlas is an atlas and not the atlas. Rather, it is one of many possible atlases, given the abundance of artists, architects, and others using maps and mapping in their work. While all maps have an inherent politics that often lies hidden beneath an “objective” surface, the contributions to An Atlas of Radical Cartography wear their politics on their sleeve. This publication includes ten pairs of politically engaged maps and texts from within the growing movement of cultural producers who have parallel or integrated activist practices.
The simplest of radical cartographies, the “upside-down” world map, appears on the cover of this book. More than a neat trick, this picture of the world has a historical basis in medieval world maps that were sometimes oriented with East or South at top. The modern north-oriented map continually reproduces the idea of the global North and the global South. The “inverted” map calls into question our ingrained acceptance of this particular “global order.” The maps and texts in this book also serve this purpose—to unhinge our beliefs about the world, and to provoke new perceptions of the networks, lineages, associations and representations of places, people and power. [lire la suite]
Sources :
Radical cartography. [en ligne] www.radicalcartography.net/ (vérifié le 29/06/2009)
An Atlas of Radical cartography. [en ligne] www.an-atlas.com/ (vérifié le 29/06/2009)
