ABSTRACT
Nothing tests the supremacy of a map more effectively than the failed search for an object once registered and then lost in its domain. In order to understand the disruptive agency of things-that-get-lost, it is necessary first to understand how the very idea of the search, its temporal and geometric logics and the always political necessity of their success, is located deep in the defensive architecture of any map, or indeed any drawing whose job it is to keep-things-in-place. The search that fails can then be understood to be what it is: the defeat of this always corrective endeavor, space outwitting the domination by representation that is all measure. Thus, the architectural drawing, whose job it is to keep-things-in-place and whose authority is founded on measure, is doubly traumatized by any search that fails. With reference to the shared genealogy of SAGE and Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Communication System and their own corrective projects, this chapter examines what happened to the measure and representation of space when, in 2014 Air Malaysia flight MH370 fell from the drawing on the air traffic control screens. In so doing, it reveals how the projected arcs of search areas resurfaced the Cold War cathexis of the nascent digital drawing and the bomb – the dome and its footprint, the circle – reminding us that the logic of the bomb, the ultimate form of correction by deletion, is embedded deep within the ontology of the digital drawing. As the tireless search for the lost aircraft, far from reducing the locus of investigation, simply constructed first mirroring, and then proliferating new territories of doubt, the-thing-that-would-not-be-found not only threatened to undo the whole architecture of the representation of space, its measure and prediction, but also to unravel the enduring Cold War confidence in the circle’s control of all within its domain.
