ABSTRACT
This chapter initially ruminates on the concept of ‘animated cartography’, which may refer to navigational and interactive practices, maps that move, artificially intelligent mappings, cartographic automata, or even map characters in animation series such as Dora the Explorer. Drawing from image theory literature devoted to the phenomenon of the ‘living image’, I focus on the idea of entering in dialogue with cartographic entities. The empirical part of the chapter is based on four written self-narrations, or brief pieces of cartographic memoirs, which I collected from map practitioners inside and outside of academia. As is practised in object-oriented philosophy, the personal account of moments of attunement to objects may be considered a tactic to put into practice an object-oriented cartography as well. With their narrative form and aesthetics of writing, these autoethnographic pieces show how we project an alien force onto maps and feel them as counterparts to us, apprehend the lively capacities of the cartographic non-human, recognise the vibrancy of cartographic materials, attribute a body to, and commune, exchange gazes, and undertake conversations with map objects.
