“The Map Is Not the Territory”: An Interview With Nick Greer
By: Isaac Levy-Rubinett
Tags: Literature, Maps, Interview, Cartography, Creative Writing

Information designers and data visualization practitioners are often concerned with The Map — how it’s made, what it shows, its design. The literary project Territory is, as the name might suggest, concerned with The Territory — the people, stories, and intimate details contained within those very representations. Where data visualization is about boiling complex ideas and vast corpora of information into something digestible, the writings and illustrations in Territory are about the bits of place and humanity that end up concealed or squeezed out.

Territory landing page

Territory points out that all representations are fictions to some degree, which could tilt some mapmakers toward existential despair. But grappling with the gap between representation and reality will make us better designers, mapmakers, readers, and consumers of data visualization. Territory pushes us to think harder about what to include and what to leave out of our work. It challenges us to consider the granular stories and personal histories that make up our data or our visualizations.

I was fortunate to catch up with Nick Greer, who is editor and co-founder of Territory. We discussed the origins of the journal, the allure of old maps, the impact of new mapping technologies, and much more.

Isaac Levy-Rubinett: Hello! Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. We’re very into maps over at Nightingale and in the DVS, so we’re always interested in how they intersect with people’s lived experiences and art. To start off, could you give a bit of an introduction for yourself and for Territory? How did you get started and what do you hope to accomplish with the journal?

Nick Greer: I’m a writer and data scientist from Berkeley and I edit Territory with Thomas Mira y Lopez. The project began through conversations we were having in 2014 about the allure of old objects, especially those that have become outmoded, especially maps. There’s something fantastical about these objects, a contortion of the Arthur C. Clarke quote about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. The limitations and distortions of a mappa mundi can’t simply be explained by some absence of technology, but of a completely different reality.

The more we read and talked, the more we found that this appeal wasn’t unique to hind- or foresight. Tommy was writing about capriccio — a genre of painting popular in the Renaissance that presents realistic but fictionalized architectural landscapes — and I was writing about my experiences as a data analyst, how people treated data as a spiritual entity, technocracy’s access to the divine exteriors of objectivity and rationalism. All representations are fictional at some level — the map is not the territory — but some fictions are especially seductive. This felt like something worthy of a larger and more formal investigation.

ILR: Let’s talk about your URL: themapisnot. What is the significance of this phrase and how does it guide Territory’s work?

NG: “The map is not the territory” is a quotation attributed to Alfred Korzybski that encapsulates a paradox people were surely grappling with before his day. Maybe the most succinct and famous articulation is Borges’ absurdist parable “On Exactitude in Science,” in which an empire’s cartographers are so obsessed with accuracy, they construct a map as large as the empire itself so they can match it puntualmente (“point by point”). Trying to wrap your head around paradoxes like this, the mind toggles between competing true and false realities and the URL embodies some of that, asking the reader to juggle two phrases that both complete and contradict with one another. It’s heady but playful, which is hopefully a tone that permeates the project. We want to engage seriously with philosophical and social concerns, but also enjoy getting tangled in their complexities rather than reducing them.

ILR: I totally agree about the allure of old objects, and maps in particular. Obviously, mapping technology and GIS has become more and more sophisticated. Do you find a similar allure in these technologically advanced — Arthur C. Clarke might call them “magical” — objects? And how do you think these advancements in technology have impacted the gap that exists between reality and representation?

NG: Definitely. I was speaking with a friend recently about the splash made by the first Google Earth client download in maybe 2006? Now we think of the larger Google GIS toolkit as commonplace and utilitarian, but when Earth was first released, it was received more like a video game or an art installation than a map in that everyone’s first impulse (and the reason we told our friends they had to download it) was to play with it, test its boundaries, marvel at its detail. There was also something uncanny about seeing yourself — as represented through familiar locations, or, if you were lucky, a grainy, faceblurred paparazzi shot of your person — in this new medium. This activated a desire to go on the hunt for all sorts of Easter eggs, especially ones that created dissonance between the virtual and “real” world, whether technical glitches or concentrations of things that exist in sparsity or obfuscation in the real world, especially when attached to sex (nude sunbathers) or violence (car crashes, muggings). This desire catalyzed a new subgenre of curatorial / found art, as exemplified in Jon Rafman’s 9 Eyes gallery (which Jon rebooted just this last week after years of dormancy).

Interrelated with this is the uncanny of being able to “see” distant, foreign locations as if they are near, an effect that is especially potent with street view. Even if the distant scene is different in content from ones we know, the uniformity with which we access the near and the far creates a flattening effect, one that we has been difficult to inspect because the medium was (and is still) so new. The result is an illusion of experience (or at least visibility) that recalls a snobbishly triumphant Daniel Defoe quote from The Compleat English Gentleman about the transportative powers of fiction, that:

[T]he English gentleman may make a tour of the world in books, he may make himself master of the geography of the universe in the maps, atlasses and measurements of our mathematicians. He may travell by land with the historians, by sea with the navigators. He may go round the globe with Dampier and Rogers, and kno’ a thousand times more doing it than all those illiterate sailors.

I think powerful technologies like GIS and visualization contribute to the conviction that we can know a thing by its representation, but paradoxically there is more distrust of representations than ever before, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. Habituation to a non-native technology can be a source of heavy dissonance, whatever the opposite of a phantom limb is. The sublime horror of parasite and host assimilating into one another.