2. The Boundaries of the Map

This chapter, “The Boundaries of the Map,” considers Maya Lin’s online memorial, What is Missing? (2007–present), as a case study of an interactive digital environment. Lin’s constantly evolving memorial to lost biodiversity provides a concrete connection to a longer history of eco-art and techno-utopianism and serves as a boundary object—giving the viewer an insight into several different paths within the history of art. The site’s world map continuously adds the anecdotes and recollections of a global community, fulfilling Sean Cubitt’s vision of the Internet as the “endlessly updatable world map.” Analyzed as part of a longer trajectory dating back to the minimalism of Land and Earth Art, the systems thinking of 1960s New Communalism, and the archival impulses of Net.art, What is Missing? links this multi-pronged art historical narrative with the anti-Romanticism of Timothy Morton’s early environmental philosophy. I argue, however, that rather than doing away entirely with allusions to the Western Romantic separation of human and nature, such digital landscapes are poised to ask critical questions: what kind of “nature” is represented in such a digitized, data-driven landscape? Can the visual of a schematic, non-mimetic “nature” subsume the iconic vistas of Western Romanticism and ask us to rethink our relationship to the non-human, the environment, and ultimately each other?