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Themesicon: navigation pathMapping and Texticon: navigation pathArchive/Map
 
EARTH (Klima, John), 2001
 
 
 

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representation problems, from today's point of view the fundamental problem still remains that relations, priorities and interpretations always present themselves differently for each viewer or user. As each user has different hierarchies of interest, it is worth investigating the extent to which this can also lead to individualized presentation options. An early example of a differentiated option is John Simon's «Archive Mapper», which presents a given number of websites as a separate quantity and makes the graphic presentation dependent on the users' decisions. They can submit variables on file size and date (on the horizontal axis) or subjective variables (on the vertical axis). After that, the «Archive Mapper» presents a scatter-cluster of coloured pictograms as a non-hierarchical information set. This was a very early attempt to arrive at individualized presentations forms for connections, but already identifying the filtering problem visually: how can users filter out redundant information so that the (subjectively) relevant data are in the foreground?

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has been examining the map's relationship with the

 

virtual and with the map-reader's view for years, and links it with the concept of the plateau. [38] The plateau (a reference to Deleuze/Guatarri's «Mille Plateaux») is a multiple-access action field. We can say more, it is also an action field for socially linked protagonists/agents. But as a rule these social structures remain invisible. Now a central criterion for mapping in digital space is to display invisible relations in relation to statistics, subjective perceptions, discourses or social networks which will be discussed below using artists' projects as examples.

Mapping stategies

First of all, four mapping strategies [39] have to be distinguished:

1.Using data to transform objects: John Klima's «EARTH» offers an impressive 3D zoom function for the geography of the USA, but without ever being more than an elaborate design innovation for navigation on a geographical map, which also unquestioningly accepts the problematical aspect of data-mining in its networked variant as a surveillance function. [40] In contrast with this, Ingo Günther's series of globes pick up the globe shape in order to generate an abundance

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