Traces, tiles and fleeting moments: art and the temporalities of geomedia

Macdonald, GE (2018) Traces, tiles and fleeting moments: art and the temporalities of geomedia. In: Time for mapping : cartographic temporalities. Manchester University Press. ISBN 1526122537

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Abstract

This chapter looks at the ways artists working with geomedia technologies have exposed and exploited the complex temporalities of digital mapping, dealing first with the trace of movement in locative media art practices of the early to mid 2000s, and secondly with the appropriation of remote sensing imagery and Street View imagery by artists. The aim is to challenge the idea that geomedia's only temporal effects are ones of timelessness; crucial to this challenge is a separation out of two different versions of timelessness that are often ascribed to cartography and new media respectively, and sometimes conflated. I argue that the stress on atemporality effects in studies of the aesthetics and cultural impact of geomedia, and the conflation of the cartographic and technological/cultural versions of timelessness in particular, moves too quickly to read a surfeit of temporal markers as a collapse of temporality as such.