ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ongoing entanglement of art and mapping, with a particular focus on mobility. Since the earliest maps, the artistic has been intertwined with the production of maps—or mapping—from the creative expression of space and place to the speculative projection of pasts and futures. However, with the emergence of digital mapping technologies, such as GPS, satellite imaging, wearable interfaces and Google Earth, there has been a renaissance of artistic mapping practices, embedded in situated locative art performances, engaged by digital cartographic systems.
In this contribution, we use French philosopher Michel Serres’ notion of the quasi-object to explore how creative and artistic mapping—from the analogue to the digital—can be understood as elicited through the affordances of technologies beyond the limitations of their original designated use. As quasi-objects, mapping technologies become tools that come into being through our engagement with them, often in playful ways, inviting possibility through both hope and failure. Thus, the quasi-object offers a way of thinking through mobile media art and mapping as technology beyond the technical, and mapping beyond the map.
