ABSTRACT
Map-like visuals, practices and imaginings have been populating music video cultures in varied and nuanced ways since the early 1980s. Taking advantage of the peculiar audiovisual qualities of music videos and their transformative intermedial relations with cartography, this chapter proposes them as unexpected sites for doing map theory, practising reasoning on maps and searching for epiphanic moments of inspirations. Considering three music videos as theoretical objects, or meta-maps, this chapter performs three acts of interpretation of cartographic mediality that engender three layers of cartographic thinking: a representational reading that sees maps as technical devices to be decoded, or social constructions to be criticised; a post-representational take on maps as practices and events that emerge when they are lived and performed by humans; and a material and phenomenological meditation on the objecthood of maps that speculates on their own emotional being. The intermedial angle turns out to be crucial, since it is by working on the borders between the two media, and on the sparks produced by the striking of the two media, that map theorisation may fire up.
