ABSTRACT
Mapping has always been a powerful tool in the constitutive imaginary of regimes of governance, from pre-modern cosmologies to modernity’s wars of development and colonisation and the postmodern questioning of the nature–culture divide. The power to visualise the location of entities in time and space has been a vital technology of political claim-making and contestation. Today, new digital technologies have become central to mapping as a practice of formulating alternative political visions: from the tracing of river delta changes to the detection of Amazonian ethnological and ecological infrastructures; from the monitoring of prenatal abnormalities to the reconstruction of war crimes and military drone attacks; from participatory mapping practices in marginalised communities to speculative designs in the post-Anthropocene. Today’s mapping projects and networks, from open source mapping to crisis mapping programmes, or from projection mapping to map art, increasingly rely on the power of algorithmic computation and machine-learning, drawing upon new software applications and increasingly sophisticated information collected from orbiting satellites. 1
