Society and space

Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics, Zone Books, New York, 2013, 232 pages, 175 colour illus., $ 36.95, £ 25.95 hardback, ISBN 978-1-935408-28-4.

Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics is an insightful and innovative book that defies straightforward classification, ‘poised’ as it is “at the intersection of art, architecture, activism and geography” (page 17). Its subject matter—satellite images, satellite mapping and remote-sensing images—is by now an established concern of critical geographical scholarship in particular (see, amongst others, Cosgrove, 2001; Crampton, 2008; Crampton, 2010; della Dora, 2012; Dodge and Perkins, 2009). Readers familiar with that scholarship will doubtlessly recognise many of the issues and debates broached by Close Up at a Distance: over the military origins of satellite technologies, images and mapping and the extent to which this still imposes secrecy and restrictions on their availability; on the promise and perils of ‘participatory’ cartography and the ‘democratic’ potentialities this may or may not offer; and finally, whether and how the increasingly ubiquitous use of satellite images and mapping might “transform … our ways of seeing and experiencing space” (page 14). The distinctive feature of Kurgan’s work in addressing these issues, though, is that it rejects the proposition that scholars can or should simply evaluate and respond to these at a ‘critical distance’: “[W]e do not stand at a distance from these technologies, but are addressed by and embedded within them”, Kurgan argues. Hence, “Only through a certain intimacy with these technologies—an encounter with their opacities, their assumptions, their intended aims—can we begin to assess their full ethical and political stakes” (page 14).

Close Up at Distance is consequently comprised of a series of practical ‘encounters’ and critical engagements by Kurgan with satellite images, mappings and their related information systems. These ‘projects’ include experiments with GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers as art installations in New York and Barcelona, and evaluations of the political uses of image mapping in and after the 1991 military intervention in Kuwait. Other projects reflect on the uses of overhead images to evidence atrocities and mass graves in Kosovo and to both police and memorialise Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11. The significance of colour in satellite images in denoting changes in Arctic landscapes and deforestation in Brazil, and practices of ‘data visualization’ in the depiction of cross-border flows of capital and patterns of incarceration are also the subjects of Kurgan’s art installations and exhibitions discussed in the volume.

In terms of the overall implications of Kurgan’s work there is a sense in which, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the method is the message. Her ‘projects’ are the functional equivalents of standalone chapters. Each of them is situated within a broader approach that Kurgan labels as “para-empiricism”, whereby an image (and/or the associated data used to construct or contextualise it) is not left to “speak for itself” but it is rather used to “offer a reflection on what can be done with it” (page 34). In adopting this approach Kurgan seeks to challenge extant interpretations of satellite images. Her overall goal is to show that it is possible to “repurpose any image from its intended functions to new ones” (page 14). Images themselves, such as the Ikonos satellite image of smoke rising from Ground Zero on September 15^th 2001, for instance, “unfortunately or fortunately … no instructions about how to understand or respond to what it has recorded in memory” (page 131). A subsequent project then details how satellite images of Ground Zero were ‘repurposed’ in maps which Kurgan helped to create depicting a suggested path around the site and indicating the location of spontaneous, unofficial memorials. “The site around what was the World Trade Center was manifestly disorienting for obvious reasons, and in a sense, that was as it should be. The [‘Around Ground Zero’] map tried to address the unnecessary confusion and allow visitors to begin to take stock of what had happened” (page 147).

Such concern with ‘disorientation’ is arguably the overriding theme of Close Up at a Distance. Kurgan’s work leaves a sense that ever more accurate locative technologies and even the highest resolution satellite images have a disorienting effect precisely because they are accompanied by the expectation that they will provide a clear and unmediated sense of where ‘we’ are—and they are disorienting precisely because that expectation goes unfulfilled. The images and data provided by satellite and remote-sensing technologies are often far from self-explanatory and have to be constantly deciphered and interpreted.

Kurgan’s account suggests that it is both possible and in many cases desirable to challenge dominant interpretations of satellite images and data by engaging with those selfsame objects and technologies “from within” (page 14). In that process, however, her own politics remains somewhat submerged in the detail of the projects, even as they reveal a ‘small p’ progressive orientation towards, for example, mappings of incarceration, poverty and migration. In other words, Kurgan succeeds in highlighting the ethical and political stakes involved in the use of satellite technologies and images, but her book might have benefitted from another layer of reflection on the author’s own ethical and political reference points.

Broadly related work in critical geography has, for example, sought to ‘re-imagine’ the use of satellite mappings and associated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a ‘method’ to enhance feminist geographical research (for example, see Kwan 2002) and GIS knowledge production as a critical practice in itself (e.g. Sheppard, 2005). In this literature the implication that satellite images and technologies can be used to buttress different political visions is extended more explicitly than in Kurgan’s book. This said, Close Up at a Distance nonetheless stands as a thought-provoking invitation to the productive possibilities opened up by the ‘disorientating’ effects of satellite images and mappings.

Columba Peoples, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, UK.

References

Cosgrove D 2001 Apollo’s Eye. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Crampton JW 2008 Cartography: maps 2.0. Progress in Human Geography 33: 91-100.

Crampton JW 2010 Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

della Dora V 2012 A World of ‘Slippy maps’: Google Earth, global visions, and topographies of memory. Transatlantica 2: 2-20.

Dodge M and C Perkins 2009 The ‘view from nowhere?’ Spatial politics and cultural significance of high-resolution satellite imagery. Geoforum 40: 497-501.

Kwan MP 2002 Feminist visualization: re-envisioning GIS as a method in feminist geographic research. Annals of the Association American Geographers 92: 645-61.

Sheppard E 2005 Knowledge production through critical GIS. Cartographica 40: 5-21.