There have been countless cartographic techniques throughout history. Each has striven to capture facts on the ground while attempting to square the circle, translating and simplifying complex spatial realities. For, the world is a spheroid, and yet most map representations occur in two dimensions. The strangest side-effects of an uneasy traffic between reality and representation are often visible in attempts from the pre-satellite era, which boast whole regions that appear misshapen to more modern eyes. In such examples, the interests and errors of the mapmakers, along with biases inherent in their processes, appear mirrored on paper. But what about today, wherein the hand-drawn figures of old have been supplanted by crisp graphics that convey a sense that subjectivity has no role in the equation, that the representation system ‘works’; that what you see is what you get?
Against notionally transparent design rhetoric, a deeper understanding of cartography recognizes that distortions of shape and scale are a general function of mapping and cannot be washed out of the process—no matter how decisive the final representation might appear. More importantly, such distortions can be put to work, serving as instruments of power, encompassing commercial, military, and, at times, imperial will. Hiding the fact that an image—of a certain territory, for instance—is built upon a chosen value is the ideological project par excellence. Why, for instance, must North be on top, and South at the bottom? Once this kind of question is asked, one encounters turtles all the way down.
Evan Roth takes up the task of visualizing this insight. The artist is intrigued by how cartographic systems are underpinned by distinct distorting effects whose reality is otherwise repressed. He surfaces this truth by running various pictures—of countries, human figures, and more—of through a gamut of cartographic lenses, thus yielding a sequence of defamiliarized images in painting and video formats, whose looks highlight how maps warp their referents to amazing degrees. Each of his examples crystallizes a return of the specific repressed, uncovering that image-system’s partiality. As a corollary, his art opens up onto a broader issue concerning how choosing to use a given frame is inherently political-authorial. Taken together, Roth’s works with mapping form an atlas of cartographic distortions whose implications bear upon the aesthetic idea of visual ‘objectivity’ so beloved by science.
In 1921, relative deformations attending mapping standards were famously visualized by Charles Henry Deetz and Oscar Sherman, in a fascinating series of drawn examples featuring a man’s head in profile, plotted on a series of projections—from globular to orthographic, stereographic, and mercator. The resulting visage was variously pinched, bulbous, with an enlongated forehead, and so on. These results provided a relatable way for readers to understand the challenges of accurately representing the Earth’s surface. But the gallery of rogues arrayed by the pair was just the tip of an iceberg. Roth’s own project deploys 121 projections, developed between 150 AD and present, across numerous paintings, software and video, widening the scope of such analysis.
Of course distortions can hide things, but they may reveal them too. As stated, exaggeration can be a means of demonstrating something that is latent or only hithero presented on a subliminal or barely detectable level. Herein lies the genius of certain caricaturists, who possess the ability to see something in a person and exacerbate it to command attention, such that it becomes recognizable to all and—thereafter—no longer unseeable. Caricatures amplify things, zoom in, or flatten them. But the best are reminders that every seeing is a way of seeing; that every representation is a way of representing. The caricaturist’s project thus contests the priority of a certain paradigm; deploying obvious distortion as a wedge between the representation at hand and other ways that the ‘same’ subject could appear. As the unfurled human heads, atop compacted or whirling continental outlines, in Roth’s canvases demonstrate—geopolitics and data science(s) are more a play of masks than one might initially expect.
Perhaps this is why Roth’s canvases are painted in hues derived from national flags. Normally arrayed in straight-lined fields or sections, for ease of legibility, in these paintings color-blocks whirl and turn, often rolling inwards in the manner of vortices. By subjecting visual borders between the one and the other field to such exemplary stress, Roth, once again, rails at the tyrannical order of two-dimensionality. For, there is a curious parallel between the planar composition of flags and the diagrammatic imaginary of nation states—depicting one territory adjacent to another (as if no functional overlaps really exist)—to the extent that numerous borders are given as straight lines, cutting accross many a geological feature of importance, as well as through the middle of ethnic communities. Such (colonial) modern conceits elide contestations that are far more present in human life than in pictures given to bureaucrats. Perhaps Roth’s paintings suggest the possibility of representing a new state, then—less governmental and more akin to a state of being?
It is just as well, then, that more contemporary mapping concepts involve conceiving geography in layers of real-time data. As Roth’s video works of the Modena sky, taken in April 2023 would indicate, everything is changeable, and potentially co-influencing. Subjecting the etherial domain to algorithmic distortions of the sort already outlined emphasiszes an intricate interplay between mapping and (geographical or biological) territory—or, better put, territorialization. This complexity is amplified when we conceive of maps as dynamic systems that encompass living subjects and kinetic aspects of place. Such tools grant operators the ability to intervene in a manner that brings about alterations, allowing for control and dominance. Through such images, we can intuit how the authoritative gaze of cartography warps and distorts its objects in real time.
Indeed, maps establish a domain for action—making space accessible for control. In the digital era, the cybernetic concept of universal addressability has a profound import: address a location, take a photo, launch an explosive; or dig a mine. It is a matter of pointing and shooting. Today, digitally enabled mapping can encompass everything in the world, eradicating the phantoms that haunted the cartographic imagination, and contemporary antagonists to the security system alike. To the extent that the latter exist, they can be precisely pinpointed, and sent a bunker bustering care package. Otherwise, this same system of address offers the operators the means of confining persons or putative monsters to a place specifically designated for them—a reservation; a prison, and so on.
But the system of address continues to increase in resolution. Mapping techniques have evolved to encompass facial recognition. The level of detail is now so precise that operators can look down from orbit onto an individual face and deduce a mood—perhaps, even, a thought. From surface expressions of the person, the operational image reaches down into the psyche too. The dynamic map moves on, in, and through everything. In terms of resolution—and indeed, resolving control for the benefit of the operator—the third dimension is an order of magnitude more powerful than the second.
Consequently, against the apparent flattening of space and time proposed by communication technologies, recent geopolitical theory has set out to map the technical integration of the globe not only along the horizontal axis, but also along the vertical. According to Parag Khanna, a prominent voice in strategic studies, society is undergoing “a fundamental transformation by which functional infrastructure tells us more about how the world works than physical borders.”1 On the other end of the intellectual spectrum, Benjamin Bratton holds that technical architecture is also an institutional form.2 Both figures seek a higher-resolution analysis of the world’s interior situation; one whose architectural figure is not rendered in plan (viewed from above), but section. Herewith, Khanna’s explication: “There is no undesignated space.… [Even] the skies are cluttered with airplanes, satellites, and increasingly drones, layered with CO2 emissions and pollution, and permeated by radar and telecommunications.”3 Bratton similarly speaks of the interior. His model “does not put technology ‘inside’ a ‘society,’ but sees a technological totality as the armature of the social itself.”4 We “dwell within” an “accidental megastructure … a new architecture” that “divide[s] up the world into sovereign spaces.”5 This megastructure incorporates “infrastructure at the continental level, pervasive computing at the urban scale, and ambient interfaces at the perceptual scale,”6 amongst other things. For Bratton (and reflected in Khanna’s comments on the sky), maps of horizontal space (planar geography) “can’t account for all the overlapping layers that create a thickened vertical jurisdictional complexity.”7 The Stack, he writes, “is that new nomos rendered now as vertically thickened political geography.”8
The presence of mines, cables, and so on in Roth’s art is constant. His projects dig down into matter, in order to master otherwise hidden reality principles buried beneath the ground, or hidden in the depths of the sea—tracing the path of cables emerging from the ocean (or disappearing into it), in Portugal, Australia, Argentina, Hong Kong, Great Britain, New Zealand, Sweden, France South Africa, and the United States—an architecture for global information. Khanna’s analysis gives us a good sense of what is at stake the artist’s Landscapes (2016 – 2020): “The true map of the world should feature not just states but megacities, highways, pipelines, Internet cables, and other symbols of our emerging global network civilization.” Roth’s work with cables, red lines, and more in both sculptural and diagrammatic modes is an artistic portrait of both infrastructure and nomos.
The primacy of the visual sense was famously undermined by modernism—as so comprehensively argued in Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in the 20th Century. The corollary historical emergence of Conceptual Art appeared manifestly anti-sensual, in thrall to certain aesthetic austerity. However, today, as the polemical value of a contra-somatic art appears less urgent, artists like Roth return to the visual while maintaining a critical acuity concerned with systems and processes. Indeed, in a totally saturated media landscape, reflections upon technical/operational visual frames are of immense interest to audiences. As the sensorium expands from embodied to outsourced, from sensuality to remote sensing, the cultural picture complicates—engendering art informed by media studies as a branch of material inquiry, which suggests that what can be seen and heard, is bound up with the history and description of discrete technologies, systems, and even Bratton’s ‘accidental megastructure’. In this sense, maps need not be the sole province of technicians. As we have clearly indicated, they are also visual guides to intellectual and imaginative territories.
Indeed, in contemporary distribution of the sensible, it is not only taste that classifies the classifier but also perceptual capacity. Indeed, classical aesthetics—which was broadly concerned with central perception, as opposed to being overly critical about the body as the sensing apparatus—has given way to science and media studies. Therein, considerations of body peripherals and sensing tech have exploded the aesthetic imaginary. When you start thinking about how the eye sees, and how it sees through glasses, to how we detect through satelites, infra-red and even the apparatuses that detect light outside of the human visual spectrum, the question of representation is writ large in such a way that relations of priority between artists, scientists, and engineers are unsettled. Such is the territory that Roth operates in: the mediation of scientific and technical epistemes relating to perception—as something that takes place with and through complex layers of detection, inscription distortion, and address.