[-empyre-] Your Mapped

[M White <mwhite@michelewhite.org>]

I think that it might be useful to correlate Ana's
comments about mapping and belonging/belongings with
Conor's about surveillance. I believe Ana also had
some interesting commentary on mapping on her web
site. 

Mapping is a key aspect of the Internet and new media
practices. Yet, mapping has also been a key strategy
in the colonization and possession of physical spaces.
Cultures, histories, and evidence of specific living
situations are reshaped by the ways that countries and
areas are drawn, how they are named, and where places
end up on a map (centered of represented as smaller
and pushed to the edges). Mapping articulates a place
and who owns it but it can also provide resistant
readings of place and categorizations. Has anyone
considered the ways Rhizome's varied maps and
rethinkings of its structures and the Internet fit
into these practices?

There have been some considerations of how Google Maps
and other Internet-based services, in providing
detailed aerial satellite images, render the
individual and home as further surveilled and at
threat. At the same time, Google Maps, in combination
with varied aerial images of flooded New Orleans,
provided a way for individuals to check on homes and
offered a connection to place rather than an intrusive
gaze.

I find the impossible routes sketched out by attempts
to avoid surveillance cameras, as figured by the
Surveillance Camera Players and others, both amusing
and terrifying. It is clear why their site notes: "Not
intended for use in the commission of any crime or act
of war." However, such gestures also indicate the
difficulties in doing critical work about the state
and all of the private enterprises with a stake in
watching and gathering data on individuals. Feminist
research on surveillance cameras indicates that some
bodies are much more likely to be surveilled, feel
regulated by the gaze, and to experience serious
physical and psychological effects from these viewing
and mapping strategies. In the back rooms of such
institutions as private companies and public
transportation systems, images are alternately ignore
and accompanied by workers' technologically
facilitated sexist and racist commentary about bodies.


In Robert Greenwald's Walmart: The High Cost of Low
Price, the director indicates that shoppers felt
protected from violence because of exterior
surveillance cameras but no one came when they were
attacked. The cameras were only used when Walmart was
trying to prevent employees from participating in
union-building activities.  

In my book, I consider women's active representation
on webcams and too briefly think about how they use or
frame these devices as a way to create a global
surveillance/protection system for themselves and
their belongings. These women alternately control and
celebrate their visibility. At the same time, news
programs, talk shows, and other media encourage women
to submit to being visible for their own safety and
suggest that they remain on populated paths, in
well-lighted corridors, and within the safe purview of
surveillance cameras. Nevertheless, there are some
ways women's bodies are not supposed to be visible. 
Such narratives are much less likely to be directed at
men. Such genres as the slasher and stalker film focus
on the terrifying possibilities of being in the dark
and out of the watchful and protective gaze of
society. These films have indicated that there are
ways of being properly visible and protected and ways
of being endangered through obsessive and invisible
surveillance. Some bodies and individuals face
significant problems in trying to navigate their ways
through both mapped and ignored terrain.

By the way, thanks to Patrick for the terrific
thoughts on throws and the NOLA art communities. It
would be a pleasure to continue this conversation.

All my best,
Michele