ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the process of interpreting an artwork remotely, considers viewing from nowhere, panoptic viewing, Apollonian viewing and idea of cartographic silence as abstractions that enable us to 'see with maps'. It proposes to take Targets as a thing to think with, about some of the ways in which cartographic imagery distinctively structures our understandings of the world and its geographical and political relations. The panoptic emerged as itself reconfiguring, in artwork, a god-like view of power and domination into one of engaged, complicit and embedded viewing. Panoptic viewing is a form of disciplinary viewing of the subject, derived from Foucault’s reading of the panopticon, and Apollonian viewing is the now-realised fantasy of viewing the earth from space. The viewer is controlled, then, constrained to view only the selection, although the implied or imagined or inferred view may also accommodate the twenty-first-century remote viewer's association of a map depicting Cuba with the present political standoff or settlement of Guantanamo.
