- THE BOUNTIFUL WORLD OF MUTINOUS CARTOGRAPHY

Amanda Steggell
February 2005

Following the December 26th earthquake in South Asia some sceintists claim that the Earth wobbled in its orbit around the Sun causing some small islands off the coast of Sumatra to move up to 20 metres, and the northern portion of Sumatra itself, the world’s sixth largest island, to move over 63 metres. However, others claim it was more likely that the islands have risen higher out of the sea than that they have moved laterally. Whatever the reason, the general consensus seems to be that the earthquake has changed the shape of Asia to some extent, rendering maps of the area as innacurate representations of a certain aspect of reality. They are no longer telling the truth.

“That earthquake has changed the map,”said US Geological Survey expert Ken Hudnut in an interview with a Los Angeles correspondent of Agence France-Presse on 27th December 2004. Reading this statement it seems like this natural calamity has, as if by sorcery, redrawn all existing maps of the area just as it swiftly, tragically and irreversibly altered the lives of all it touched.

Sometime just after this event I watched the 1962 version of “Mutiny on the Bounty” (starring Marlon Brando as 1st Lt. Fletcher Christian) in which an 18th-century British naval vessel sets off for Tahiti to obtain a cargo of breadfruit plants. During a mutiny on the homeward journey the captain is cast adrift and the mutineers settle in the Pitcairn Islands located between Chile and Australia.

I want to pick up the film at the point where, having taken command of the Bounty from the treacherous Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian inadvertently leads the homeless mutineers to the uninhabited Pitcairn Islands. The Bounty is crashed, and, against Fletcher’s wishes, is then secretly burnt by the crew, reducing their chances of ever being able to leave the Island. An error in the location of the Islands on the only existing map of the area also ensures that the risk of being found by the vengeful Bligh is considerably reduced. In short, the map lied, and in doing so, provided them with a safe haven. Fletcher Christian became convinced that the mutineers would never find peace on the Island before they returned to England to stand trial. He was sure that their story would override that of Captain Bligh, who would be suitably brought to justice for his malicious treatment of the crew. Fletcher returns to the burning vessel to retrieve the ship’s nautical instruments, but in his attempt is overcome by the fire and consequently dies from the burns he incurs. While the mutineers regret his fate and attempt to save him, they never-the-less stand by their decision to remain on the Island at all costs. The map that lied was also responsible for inspiring yet another mutinous action. There must surely be more to a map than meets the eye.

According to Professor Mark Monmonier, lying, whether by error or intention, is an inherent feature of any map.

“To avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality. There’s no escape from the cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies.” (1)

Several types of highlighting or distorting the map as a representation of reality, such as selection, simplification, displacement, smoothing and enhancement allow for the sorting of prominent features from the background so that a map can be read clearly and as intended. Colours cause strong impressions. For example, red is often associated with danger, alarm and heat whereas blue is associated with water, cold, etc. Two maps showing the same features but using different colours can cause very different emotions. Environmental Groups like Greenpeace tend to give specific areas on the map red, yellow or another not “natural” colour (rendering certain areas as artificial, alarming and disturbing) while forest companies may often give areas on their maps greenish colours.

Just as mapmakers bring subjective elements into their map designs, map readers also bring their own subjectivity into the process. One of the most extreme cases of this I can think of are people with synaesthesia, a condition where a stimulus in one sense modality involuntarily elicits a sensation or experience in another sense modality. For example, a blue area on a map may evoke the taste of an orange, or the sound of C#! Not quite what the mapmaker intended. For some, synaesthetic qualities are tied to specific shapes. A certain shape may evoke qualities of personality (age, sex, etc) or colour - or both, and possibly sound, touch and smell too! Imagine a synesthete reading a map depicting the political boundaries of a country and experiencing the shapes of the collective political divisions as a cacophony of sensory perceptions. A very moody form of map reading by anyone’s standards, and possibly a source of great frustration for the mapmaker.

So, there are many ways to read maps and there are many ways to draw them. Instead of thinking about a place in relation to its absolute latitude-longitude sense, a place may be considered for its relative location. In the late 1950’s the Situationists were drawn towards the notion of Psychogeography, ‘a study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual’, initially developed as a critique of urbanism by the Lettrist International movement.

Psychogeograpical research involves non-scientific methods such as “mental mapping”, or the production of mood-based maps through the ‘dérive’ (also a favourite pastime of the Surrealists) - a supposedly aimless drifting through the city, but with the distinctive purpose of trying to record emotional responses to particular places.

”... to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed. It was very much a matter of using an environment for one’s own ends, seeking not only the marvelous beloved by surrealism but bringing an inverted perspective to bear on the entirety of the spectacular world.” (2)

Mental mapping may be described as each individual’s environmental perception, the images that people have of places - and the way those images are formed. It is a subjective view of everybody’s own world, conditioned by the amount and the type of information we have of a certain place - whether by first hand experience, or simply just by name. The development of digital and communications technologies has undoubtedly extended and conditioned the subjective world view, rendered as multi-mediated experiences.

In the spectacular world of today where impressions of place, space and events are often experienced from diverse mediated sources, the notion of dérive seems to have been hijacked by the mass media, not only in urban terms but also on a global scale – and beyond. On TV authoritative news reporters take us on journies that drift from the local to the global where commentary, photography, video footage and cartography emerge from the TV screen simultaneously and intertwined. Local sports events showing heroic acts in slow-mo are screened directly after reports of widescale disaster (fortified with images of suffering and dead people(, followed up by the weather report (with satellite image renderings and animated maps showing us what’s to come, and where to expect it). It is as if watching the news is like trying to read a map without any indication of scale.

I grew up in England, and my childhood impression was that it was the largest country in the world. At least it appeared that way in my school atlas. I also thought that all countries were islands.

In the case of the exhibition “Geography” it seems as if the artists have been inspired by a nostalgia for revisiting such innocent childhood experiences of simply browsing through a school atlas, letting fantasy and imagination fill in the gaps that either the lack of appropriate knowledge or ability to concentrate create. Like mutinous children they drift through the atlas in a seemingly random fashion, playfully distorting and simplifying the maps for their own demises. Using the same ploys as the mapmaker they present us with bountiful cartographous images of the world juxtaposed with, or connected by (it is hard to tell) unusual landscape paintings and audio-visual work.

But they are not children!

(1) Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991;2nd edition, 1996).

(2) Sadie Plant. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge, 1992).