Close Up at a Distance - 9781935408284

The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed fromouter space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and expressfundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are builtwith Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems(GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses asreconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather thanshying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at aDistance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art,architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views,the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have openedup.

Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new andeven inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation,political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has capturedglobal bird’s-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift inour ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, bothphysical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define thisshift.