The world of tags

In a tedious, bureaucratic manner combined with a somnambulist's unwavering intent, some live, navigational data archive is composing the planet's landscape in pages accessible on the Internet. As far as the ascendancy of this particular way of organizing the world goes, the assertions which follow, take up no moral position. The mode in which the landscape is produced as the construct of a live, navigational data archive, is no longer newsworthy or a source of surprise. We are summoned to live within that field, to either survive in opposition to it or be organized by its structure. Some pre-view or post-view of "the" space or "the" places based on archive works constructs the lived experience of these places. Archived and archivable data "build" the experience of spatiality which we are in the habit of designating as "space-in-itself'. The places of the earth are to be imminently mapped out or have already been so. Certainly, the activity of digital archiving impacts on its material references if any such reference is still solid enough outside the archived object: on occasion -with increasing frequency, in fact - we have a hard time establishing a demarcation between the two. In the past, we used to have recourse to the map if we happened to lose our bearings. The present habitation within the map's interior is organized as a loss of the loss. We shed light on the construction of the present-day landscape in the course of pursuing this specific condition: in what ways is loss being lost? What sorts of moves take place "without" loss? The conflict between the habitual and the extraordinary, the commonplace and the exotic, acquires new significations. It is here that some nodal point survives of local particularities on the map: the landscape in the navigation system offers a special condition of contemplation whereby the distinction is eliminated between the map and the mapped-out: within that landscape is also included (or could be) the surveying viewer. This observer of the landscape will now be designated as "incarcerated in the map" or "the map's inmate". He will be "part of the landscape" insofar as the landscape is defined in this manner. This will, then, be a landscape without a perception of its frame.

Read the complete text by Aristide Antonas on
http://www.neme.org/main/1200/the-world-of-tags
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