ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reading of the now-ubiquitous ‘blue dot’ of smartphone-based mapping apps as the entry of the ‘self’ into the map, such that the digital map now enables a range of ways in which we can visualise and surveil ourselves. I bring together a Lacanian interpretation of narcissism—in which narcissism is taken as a falsifying process of projecting an image of the self in order to sustain a fantasy of the self’s integrity—with the capacity of the contemporary digital map to translate an image of the ‘self’s’ spatial location, such that ‘I’ am translated into the image, or with Lacan, I am turned into the picture. I explore the practice of making ‘GPS selfies’ as a mode of contemporary vernacular self-portraiture that enacts this process of narcissistic projection, and critically presents the entry of the self into the map.
