Christina Ljungberg

Cartographies of the Future: Julie Mehretu's Dynamic Charting of Fluid Spaces

Abstract If maps make meaning by locating us as agents in the world, the dynamic cartographies by the Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu suggest the extent to which the modern project has given way to fragmented social identities and thus to new kinds of spatial awareness. Such excentric space is shot through with other spaces functioning in relation to and interaction with other spaces. In addition, these new spaces both produce and are produced by our active and continuous interchanges with sophisticated technologies in real time and virtual time, which themselves constitute spaces that are unbounded, heterogeneous and fluid, making spatial orientation indeterminate and jagged, ruled by chance and contingency. How can such territories be mapped? What do these cartographies of the future tell us about our present technosocial world? What relationship between the map and its territory do they suggest? That is what this contribution discusses by examining Mehretus high-velocity urban charts which not only embody these indeterminate, jagged and indeed chaotic facets of spatial orientation and situatedness. Despite their bleakness and the uncertain future emerging from these hybrid fragmented maps, the stor(ies) they tell suggest poetic ways for agents to create new sensibilities and sensualities that do not rely on consumerism or consumption but evoke the potential for collective action and social change.

Thinking with diagrams: the semiotic basis of human cognition

Diagrams and diagrammatic representations in the form of notes, tables, schemata, graphs, drawing and maps pervade scientific and knowledge production. This book explores the role of diagrams in cognitive processes such as experimenting, problem solving, making a choice or orienting oneself in mental of geographical space, demonstrating the extent to which the diagram serves as the semiotic basis of human cognition.

Creative dynamics : diagrammatic strategies in narrative

How do readers make sense of a picture, a photograph, or a map in literary narratives in which visual signs play a critical role? How do authors accomplish their various objectives in constructing such complex texts? What strategies and techniques do they use to project fictional worlds and to provide their readers with the means for orienting themselves there? This book investigates the dynamics of the imaginary diagrams created by cartographers, photographers, and writers of narratives, giving ample evidence of how mapping practices have inspired the imagination of a vast number of authors from Thomas More up to contemporary writers . A special focus is on the effects created by the projection of photographs into the narrative space, and how our seemingly effortless interpretation of photographs and even maps masks complex cognitive processes. The theoretical horizon of this study encompasses the fields of cartography, mental maps, iconicity research, and the spatial turn in cultural studies.

Mapping Practices for Different Geographies

That maps are among our most valuable heuristic instruments has become even more pronounced in our contemporary technosocial environment which demands continuous cognitive activity: the sophisticated new technologies pervading everyday life have not only become an integral part of it but also effectively produce new forms of human positions and positioning involving us in active and continuous interchanges in realtime. This implies that they generate nothing less than new modes of subjectivity. Although maps have to some extent always fulfilled these functions, what is different today are the technologies at our disposal, which not only generate new dynamic spaces but which also enable and challenge us to come up with new strategies of mapping allowing for both improvisational and subjective positioning in constant negotiations for space. This development has been increasingly interrogated by digital artists. Seeing the need to create new mapping strategies, these artists have their works even go so far as to imply that the subject-object framework be relinquished for that of an implicated agent and an expansive field in which the agency of any presence is intertwined with other agencies. Such an approach would involve mappings of the intermeshing between agents responding to their environment in ceaseless participation. What would these maps look like? Are we, as some suggest, at the point of entering a new shift of mapping paradigm, similar to the one that occurred in early modernity when the ‘scientific’ maps produced by cartographic projection replaced the illustrated and highly narrative medieval maps? Cartographic research and cyberart join here as such an approach would seem to carry the potential not only for theorizing forms of mapping our rapidly changing technosocial space but also for a fruitful dialogue among art, technology and science. This will be discussed by examining the works by digital artists Stelarc, Char Davis, Rejane Cantoni and Daniela Kutschat.

Dynamic instances of interaction: The performative function of iconicity in literary texts

According to C. S. Peirce, resemblance or similarity is the basis for the relationship of iconic signs to their dynamical objects. But what is the basis of resemblance or similarity itself and how is the phenomenon of iconicity generated? How does it function in cultural practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated (say, for example, the cartographical procedures by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented)? To what extent are they themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings and the impetus for re-mappings)? With examples from texts by Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald and Reif Larsen, I will argue that literary texts provide us with unique resources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimension of iconicity in the complex interaction among icon, index and metaphor as a prerequisite for semiosis, the generation of signs.

The bell jar, the maze and the mural: Diagrammatic figurations as textual performance

The practices and processes by which various forms of signs are generated, for example, the cartographical procedure by which maps are drawn, more generally, the diagrammatic ones by which networks of relationships are iconically represented, are themselves performances (maps are always both the result of mappings and the impetus for re-mappings). Literary texts provide us with unique resources for exploring, among other matters, the performative dimensions of these complex procedures, turning them into stages on which subjectivity is played out. Looking at texts by John Banville (The Sea), Carole Shields (Larry’s Party) and Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion), I will argue that diagrammatic figurations in narrative texts involve not only performance and performativity but also strongly enhance the complex interaction between narrativity and visuality as they transform the text into a stage on which textual activity is performed, 1) as a dramatic dialogue between writer, text and reader and 2) in the dramatic and visual positionings of agents within the text itself. Three kinds of textual performance of subjectivity can be discerned in the diagrammatic figurations in these three novels: on the diegetic level, as the subjectivity performed by the characters and, especially, the narrators as instances of performativity that is established and maintained in relation to both author and reader; on the level of the author, whose subjectivity is textually performed as self-expression; finally, on the level of reception, as the subjectivity of the reader is itself established performatively in the act of reading.

Dimensions of Iconicity

This volume addresses five different Dimensions of Iconicity. While some contributions examine the phonic dimensions of iconicity that are based on empirical, diachronic and theoretical work, others explore the function of similarity from a cognitive point of view. The section on multimodal dimensions takes into account philosophical, linguistic and literary perspectives in order to analyse, for example the diagrammatic interplay of written texts and images. Contributions on performative dimensions of iconicity focus on Buddhist mantras, Hollywood films, and the dynamics of rhetorical structures in Shakespeare. Last but not least, the volume also addresses new ways of considering iconicity, including notational iconicity, the interplay of iconicity, ambiguity, interpretability, and the iconicity of literary analysis from a formal semanticist point of view.

Laurie Anderson's Versions of Massenet / Corneille,Melville's Moby Dick and Döblin / Fassbinder

Laurie Andersons versions of Massenet / Corneille, Melvilles Moby Dick, and Doblin / Fassbinder Laurie Anderson’s performances sample elements from various components of cultural performance such as theater, ritual, dance, music, popular entertainment and sport (!), which she meshes with autobiographical references, everyday life events and media culture. This also includes the ancient art of story telling and works of literature, which she brilliantly adapts, transforms and reconfigures in order to build into her intelligent and idiosyncratic performance art. How can we account for these pre-texts and how important are they for an understanding of Anderson’s multimedia performances which thus concern adapting a highly complex intersection of narrative, visual, musical and gestural ‘pre-texts’ mediated by new technologies and the performing arts? Such an undertaking would seem to call for a theorizing the performative effect of the intermedial processes involved in adaptation. What needs to be explored is, I suggest, is • What do issues of intertextuality mean to performance and visuality studies? How does the sense of openness and of unraveling the pre-ext translate into the adaptation that a performance involves? • What is at stake when this performance not only clearly alludes to other performances but also intermedially to other media and intertextually to other texts? • What is the relationship between performance and performativity in multimedia art forms? What new spaces are created? These issues are explored in Laurie Anderson’s multilayered multimedia performances O Superman (Corneille /Massenet), Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (Melville/the Bible/Shakespeare), and White Lily (Doblin/Fassbinder).