Mapping Open Space to Visualize Other Knowledges

Mapping orientates and determines ways in which we perceive and understand the world and our place in it. Maps reveal and illuminate, but they also conceal and obfuscate. Early mapping projects like Benjamin Fry’s Anemone (United States, 1999; http://benfry.com/anemone/) visualize connections between webpages, much like information-clouds visualize keywords today. Anemone maps and visualizes using the structure of a tree with branches, revealing connections while concealing context. Digital media also allows for mapping toward the concept of open space that moves away from trees and branches toward rhizomes and nomads. Open space refers to the green commons inside urban areas. Rather than defining and dividing, which are the domain of conventional cartography and historiography, radical and critical forms of cartography and historiography invite new participation and facilitate new questions. By enlisting perspectives frequently ignored or unrecognized, the projects examined in this chapter explore the interfaces and intervals of the digital, abstract, and immaterial with the localized, materialized, and grounded. Mapping projects use data visualization to make visible what might be invisible, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide detected by air-quality sensors, tagged by GPS, and rendered on a Google Earth image of Accra, Ghana, by Participatory Urbanism (United States/Ghana, 2006; http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/), a collaboration between Eric Paulos and the citizens of Accra.