Mapping the Network: Cybercartographies and Non-Zero Interfaces.
Let’s talk about how information visualizations (re)present, manifest, and/or create the network. In Galloway’s new Interface Effect, he suggests “Only one visualization has ever been made of an information network….Every map of the internet looks the same. A word cloud equals a flow chart equals a map of the internet. All operate within a single uniform set of aesthetic codes. The size of this aesthetic space is one…And where there is only one, there is nothing. For representation of one is, in fact, a representation of nothing. (84)
…it says nothing…no media is happening here (86)
There is quite literally an inability to render the network as an image differentiated from other images. There is a single image and thus there is none. (91)
I want to fiercely refute this by creating a collaboratively-curated digital museum of information visualizations that prove that NOT all cybercartographic maps reduce to one (or, to nothing…to zero). Let’s discuss information visualization, non-zero interfaces (interfaces that do not merge into the ‘single image’ scheme as suggested), and create a collaboratively-curated digital online museum. I’ll have a Tumblr ready for our en-action and we can populate it while we work.
Our Tumblr: Museum of Non-Zero Maps: museumofnonzeromaps.tumblr.com. Please post all non-zero maps!
Amanda Starling Gould, Duke University
texturalLiterature.blogspot.com
@stargould
