Lost and Found: Maps
My research is designed to be an exploration of maps during Search and Rescue (SAR) operations in Northern Norway. I aim to interrogate practices, where, when and by whom maps are employed, with paying attention to entanglements surrounding maps and their processual effect. They are widely used in SAR operations: when planning, carrying out and assessing taken actions. My approach derives from post-anthropocentric thought, which challenges dichotomies and emphasises the constitutive feature of entanglements. In this paper I will explore maps as a “slit experiment” where diffractions happen, enacting different entanglements, or lack thereof.
So far I find maps to be if not paradoxical, then elusive. They are an intrinsic part of SAR operations, but their entanglements are underexplored. Prevalent interest of research concerned with SAR operations is the human social dimension: emergency management and communication between involved stakeholders, and lost people behavioural models. Second, maps per se are rarely mentioned in after-action or incident reports, however, they are noticeable when lacking. Third, lack of maps, or information on the maps, can also be a cause for an incident. And, finally, following a map as a researcher means getting lost in a multilayered network of organizations, infrastructure and other more-than- human actors, spanning through various spatio-temporalities. In other words, getting lost in a hot mess.
It is tempting to compare looking at digital maps to looking into an infinity mirror. However, they do not mirror surroundings. Instead, maps perform surroundings through various interactions, enabling differences of assemblages. Maps can enact movement on the surface, which is not directly visible on the terrain, by visualising it. They can also enact the lack of information from radars by not visualising what is physically there. Maps reveal differences stemming from entanglements. In this regard maps are closer to diffractions as Barad explains them: “diffraction attends to patterns of difference” (Barad 2007, 29). Differences in maps resonate to more-than-human actors that are drawn into networks. They connect to spatio-temporalities stretching beyond immediate horizon. At the same time, they are bound to space and time, because SAR operations are time and location sensitive. Entanglements happen between digital and physical spaces, forming almost a heterotopia, just instead or mirroring, performing differences – a diffractive heterotopia.
Virga Popovaitė Nord University, Norway
So far I find maps to be if not paradoxical, then elusive. They are an intrinsic part of SAR operations, but their entanglements are underexplored. Prevalent interest of research concerned with SAR operations is the human social dimension: emergency management and communication between involved stakeholders, and lost people behavioural models. Second, maps per se are rarely mentioned in after-action or incident reports, however, they are noticeable when lacking. Third, lack of maps, or information on the maps, can also be a cause for an incident. And, finally, following a map as a researcher means getting lost in a multilayered network of organizations, infrastructure and other more-than- human actors, spanning through various spatio-temporalities. In other words, getting lost in a hot mess.
It is tempting to compare looking at digital maps to looking into an infinity mirror. However, they do not mirror surroundings. Instead, maps perform surroundings through various interactions, enabling differences of assemblages. Maps can enact movement on the surface, which is not directly visible on the terrain, by visualising it. They can also enact the lack of information from radars by not visualising what is physically there. Maps reveal differences stemming from entanglements. In this regard maps are closer to diffractions as Barad explains them: “diffraction attends to patterns of difference” (Barad 2007, 29). Differences in maps resonate to more-than-human actors that are drawn into networks. They connect to spatio-temporalities stretching beyond immediate horizon. At the same time, they are bound to space and time, because SAR operations are time and location sensitive. Entanglements happen between digital and physical spaces, forming almost a heterotopia, just instead or mirroring, performing differences – a diffractive heterotopia.
Virga Popovaitė Nord University, Norway
Error, Error, Error in the Encounter...
Realizing the Exhausting Rhythms of a Straying Body.
This performative presentation engages with the motion of straying in durational walking performance in conditions of crises including anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. I take up slow, rhythmic, and durational temporalities in the walking performances Home is Here (2017), Listening With the Nonhuman (2019), and Climate Action (2020), which stray through rural and urban ecologies within diverse bodies, lands, waters, and histories. Of particular consideration is a reoccurring moment that repeats with strange precision in which witnesses ask me (the performer): “Is everything all right? Are you okay?” The question indicates that something unknown must be wrong, that the body itself is somehow wrong, somehow out of place or out of time, in need of care and/or re-ordering. The words stick to the body made visible as an “error” in movement and error of presence within habituated and controlled, often invisible, expectations for encounter. If traveling within Malmö were an option, I would perform a 12-24 hour durational walking performance, straying through the timespaces of the city or conference site as a foreigner, researching and attuning to the atmospheres, impacts and activities of strays (e.g. “invasive” species, immigrants, conference participants, rogue weather) and disrupting or perhaps disappearing within (through slowness and de- familiarizing rhythmicity) the habituated architectures of movement (in and beyond the crisis of the pandemic). In the midst of traveling restrictions, I propose presenting an essay of embodied writing that enacts the rhythms, atmospheres, and (timely) durations of straying. If, as Ben Anderson asserts, “Atmospheres are a kind of indeterminate affective ‘excess’ through which intensive space–times can be created” (2009: 80), I ask: how might the quality of movement in walking as a form of straying (in embodied writing) intervene in the aesthetic and political constitution of, and care for, (remote) reality. Under political and securitized practices of mobility, from migrating bodies to quarantined bodies, how might exhaustive rhythms, durational slowness, and solitude performed with care amongst and in attunement with others enact listening as “an intensification and concern” (Nancy 2007: 5) embedded in a straying body that disrupts the infinite velocity of the production of value (Berardi 2009) occurring at every level of the sensible?
Malin Palini Unaffiliated Scholar and Artist, USA
Malin Palini Unaffiliated Scholar and Artist, USA