Mapping and Projecting

Mapping and Projecting

Project Description

My project, with the working title Mapping and Projecting, is based on the relationship between mapping and projection. Does the method of searching for knowledge create a projection of the same method? More specifically, I am interested in the formal qualities in the organization of agricultural land and its relation to mapping. When studying satellite images depicting the agricultural landscape in the Central Valley of California, with its grid placed in a perfectly north-south direction, it appears to have a direct relationship to the longitude and latitude lines of the map and the grid of digital sensors that captured the image from the satellite. Has the landscape become the map as in Borges’ Del rigor en la ciencia (On Exactitude in Science)? In Borges' story, a map is created that covers an entire empire. The map is abandoned by later generations who consider it excessive and impractical. The story describes the necessity of abstracting complexity to make knowledge practical. The landscape in the Central Valley could rather be described as a reversed version of Borges' story, meaning that the landscape itself has been abstracted into a low-resolution grid of monocultures that imitates a map-like form.

A large portion of the crops in the Central Valley is cotton, a crop that requires large amounts of water but cannot tolerate large amounts of rain. The area's dry climate, combined with the grid's efficient irrigation system, creates an optimal environment. Therefore, I have been interested in working with cotton as an artistic material to explore the relationships between mapping, projection, abstraction, efficiency, and knowledge.

When the jacquard loom was introduced in the early 19th century, it revolutionized the possibilities of efficiently weaving complex patterns. The machine was the first to store information in binary code on punched cards, which, among other things, inspired Charles Babbage in his development of early computers. The jacquard loom is therefore considered the first precursor to modern computers. By weaving images of the agricultural landscape, a connection is made between the way the land is cultivated, the crops that are grown, and the formal structures and characteristics shared by the weaving and the farmland. Sending pattern files from Sweden to have them woven in California becomes part of implicating the work in a digital cartographic globalism created by the forms and techniques the work investigates.

The form the project addresses includes, through cotton and the map, a historical relationship to colonialism, slavery, and imperialism. It has also led to the destruction of biodiversity and natural water flows. At the same time, it has created the most productive agriculture in history, but there is a big question mark as to whether it is sustainable in the long term. Agriculture is now said to be facing a digital revolution that will increase the resolution of mapping and the ability for machines to analyze crops almost infinitely. This is happening with the help of satellites, computers, and a multitude of sensors on farming machines. The natural follow-up question is whether this creates solutions or if, as Paul Virilio describes in The Original Accident, a new invention is also the invention of new catastrophes.

Result

The work resulting from this project consists of eight cotton weavings, four of which measure 120 x 120 cm and the remaining four measure 240 x 120 cm. Each weaving is based on a satellite image of a cotton field in Central Valley. Like the weavings, the landscape consists of fields with a 1:2 and 1:1 ratio, forming a grid system of fields. Each field was selected from different parts of the landscape for its special visual and contextual characteristics. What interested me about the fields was how they displayed an interaction between "natural" geological features in the landscape and technological interventions, such as irrigation systems. The even fields with straight irrigation channels reveal, like a frottage, an underlying layer of a landscape that existed before wetlands were drained and cultivated, the land’s geological disposition, natural water flows, and drainage.

A satellite map is like a patchwork of images from satellites circling the Earth. The images are taken over a longer period, and the map can therefore show a field where it is summer next to one where it is winter. This was something that interested me and demonstrated a map's limitation in how it relates to time. The fields I chose to weave represent all seasons—from a dusty field being plowed in the wintertime, to a fully green field in late spring, to fields suffering from drought, and the harvest in autumn when the cotton plants have dried out and died, and the white veil of cotton is harvested from the fields.

Two decisions were made to break the experience that the weavings represent pure abstraction: one was to include an image with a tractor plowing a field, and another with a power line crossing over one corner of the weaving. This also became a way to depict the mechanization that has shaped the landscape and is reflected in the weaving technique.

The work on the project has been rewarding, both in terms of developing practical knowledge about weaving images and serving as a visualization and materialization of a conceptual figure, acting as a sort of hub for further exploration. The work highlights an epistemological—or, if you will, cartographic—problem, where the knowledge of an object will inevitably, over time, reshape the object in question, something the observer often remains blind to.