Waiting for Paglen
Tags: Cartography, Getting Lost, Politics, Walking, Maps

Señor Topos, Archie Lineas, and Jack Scribner have been wandering along the papery folds of an anonymous mountain range for days, clutching handfuls of maps, scratching two beards, and sullying one balding head. They’ve been wracking over the coordinates for Paglen’s rendezvous, but instead have stumbled upon a globally-positioned trail of babelian doubts…



Where the hell are we, guys? This map isn’t right at all.



Right? Is there really such thing as a ‘right’ map? Can maps be right or wrong? Get your vocabulary straight, dude. You mean ‘accurate’, right?



Right! Wrong! Accurate, inaccurate — whatever! All depends on what the map is supposed to show, am I wrong?

This one’s not right, either. Or this one!



The GPS says we don’t even exist anymore. Oh, if only it were that easy to get off the grid!



Hey, you’re the geographer, shouldn’t you be more intuitive about this stuff?



~ A wind blows. It stops. But a Map keeps fluttering.



Coming from an architect, I’d expect you to be a little more, how shall we say, spatially-attuned?



Would you two stop bickering and help get us out of this bog?



You call that helpful, Mr. Scribner? Can’t you at least tell us something about this place? Give us a little history lesson, you know, drop some knowledge or something?



Sure — Breathe. Now, listen. I heard a quote once: “I never know the directions, but I always know where I am…” Let’s just pretend we know where we are for the moment, maybe the rest will follow.



Jack, if this map isn’t…ahem…accurate we’re gonna have to make our own. I say we take a few polemical, debatable, and spatial thoughts, and plot them together on the globe, shall we?



Do you really think it’s useful to be so totalizing with the map like that? Paglen doesn’t trust maps, nor should we. Obviously, any map at this point we experiment with on our own should probably come with some sort of critique.



Forget old school map legends, we need intrinsic critiques!



Oh great, more critiques! This ought to be real fun.



You got a better suggestion, smartass?



Yeah, maybe we should make a musical score instead, chart the sounds of our own disappearance. Isn’t that what a map does anyway, capture hints of a truth? Better yet, how about you write a transcript that makes sense of all our confusions, Mister Confucius? Maybe we could take turns reading it out loud, put it to a beat on our chests. We could make it atmospheric, diffuse into a space. Let the forest resonate with our map! Primal poetic echolocation!



Are you serious, Lineas?

Who’s marking this down? Jack, get over here, we need a script!



Forget about the end product of our would-be map for now, let’s just get into the process and see what we find. Any notation will do at this point, guys. We need to get moving!



I got it! We could play Lars Von Trier to each other’s Jørgen Leth, throwing obstructions at each other, to see who can come closest to making the “Perfect Map”!



You mean, like the Mappa Mundi, the Medieval map of the Holy Land? Taking turns obscuring the path to the Holy Grail? But, the grail was a deceit only known to the cartographer.



Exactly! That’s the point! Didn’t we watch the film together, you morons? The filmmaker-cum-cartographer is one destined to fail, because, you see, the distance between observer and content can never be breached. It’s absolutely unavoidable!



So we’re stuck here.



Hmmm… Perhaps a bit too fatalistic. But I like it!



Wait. The map has got to have some redeeming quality. It can’t just be an inherent deception. Who does the map serve: The maker, or the user?



Okay then, how about we make an architectural fiction, sort of like when Rem Koolhaas and OMA were actually good.



Good as in not-evil, or good as in talent —



— Shut up. The Map as Architecture. Maybe like a series of postcards or montages —



— Architects! Always want to turn everything into a piece of architecture. Get over yourselves already!



Isn’t every map a fiction to some extent?



As I was saying…. Something like a graphic novel that reveals the dreams of maps as dystopic and nightmarish, eerily resembling quarantines, internment zones, or social networks, stripped of privacy. Imagine the city as a map where we are mapped!



I don’t follow, exactly.



How so?? You’re the writer, aren’t you? It’s a series of storyboards that tell the story of a collective trapped by the map. Get it?



The notion that maps dream is certainly a curious one. This is getting very Satre-ian. Jungian. Listen, the real culprit is this flat sheet of paper we are blindingly following. What if this map is really telling us to ignore it?



~ The Map shakes loose from his hand and falls into the dirt.



Whao. Do you think maps face identity crises, for having been made in the image of someone else’s imagination? It’s such a violent carto-paradox: The Map torn between its own and someone else’s truth.



Who knows, every map could secretly yearn to be free. There could be a secret truth to every map unbeknownst to both its maker and user alike, that no one ever learns.



That would be a tragedy, man. Maybe we should let the map make itself, a map that can speak to its own truth! Imagine it as a sensitive membrane that mediates between real and virtual space, actual and perceived power, machine and skin, truth and nontruth, secrecy and transparency; let’s strive for THIS, gentlemen! — something to measure the fading bruises on the geopolitical body.



~ The Map suddenly becomes blotched soaking up juices from the earth.



It’s Mapping as detective work, with a little acknowledgement of a subterfuge at play we cannot fully know — because the map has its own suspicious agenda. You see, getting out of here is a great crime novel.



Sounds like a Calvino story: A mapper is called in to map something impossibly mappable by the Emperor. He, who is actually a She in disguise, wants to please the Emperor, but also secretly resists being a pawn to his totalizing imaging of virtual power. So, she wrestles with what and how to map, and decides to offer the emperor a map of would-be maps; stairwells down into the possibilities of place cavities; potential maps glimpsed in sidewalk mirrors; on window reflections; inferences of traces of power; all the while exposing the falsity of the Emperor’s territory as virtual spaces of imagination.



I think we should just stick to deciphering the rules in these maps if we’re ever going to figure out where we are, or else we just start fresh with a blank page.



Who says we should start with a blank page, or even a page for that matter? What we need is a viewfinder for all the metaphorical islands that are left in the world — everything else erased.



Like the only places left where the three of us would want to retreat to…Since our paranoias seem to be getting the best of us here. Have you lost it, Mr. Architect?



Paranoia is good. We should be self-reflexive about this, aware of our own map’s political trappings. Let’s just ask: can a map be critical of itself? Can it demarcate while exposing an awareness of its own shortcomings? Is there even such thing as an ideal, perfect map??!



~ The Map on the ground wrinkles up seemingly by itself.



Right! We need to map, and then infer the unmapped as a space of its own; an inferred map. Map everything first you don’t want to map. Map, map and map until it hurts, and see if we are left with some sort of accidentally mapped zone.



That’s brilliantly ridiculous. We’d be left with a map of all the uninhabited and perhaps disputed islands that the United States has in its possession, like the Navassa Island.



Wasn’t that your proposal a minute earlier: the unmapped, the de-mapped, an anti-map of sorts? The real islands where we can’t be mapped are pretty much invisible. Like a cave in the Afghan mountains. Or a closet in your bedroom.



…Guys, we haven’t moved.



Let’s disassemble this Map here and use the pieces to build a new Map. Recompile and draw some new connections. Maybe then we can see what we’ve been missing all along.



Paglen says, it’s all about “making the invisible visible” and getting people to become active in the production of their own space. As a kind of activist practice.



We could sure use some activism right now, that’s for sure. Let’s see what happens when we hold one map up to light in reference to another place. One map serves as the unwitting map of another zone, another invisible geography. Can these juxtapositions unveil new geographies? Can the rules from one place be applied to another?



Like those soldiers losing their way in a snowstorm and unwittingly using a map of entirely different mountains to find their way back.



Yawn. That’s so Situationist. And another example of male-dominated cartography. Not to mention that it doesn’t seem to address map-making as a radical tool, only as an experimental recombination, like an Eisenstein film.



We should commit to something soon… Or we might just have to eat these maps to stay alive. Señor, just because you are a geographer doesn’t mean you get dibs on the first bite!



Be careful. You never know what the map doesn’t show, what is lurking just beyond its edges, or within its lines. Maps might just be the great poison pill of humanity.



~ The Map starts to move slowly. Its paper kinking back in myriad folds ever so spectacularly.



It’s Us or Them. Either we eat this map, or it’s going to consume us.



I kind of like being lost. Is there a way to map that instead?