Competing Cartographies: Mapping as practice of recursive becoming

Benjamin Bacon and Vivian Xu

Art, Media, Cybernetics Working Group, American Society for Cybernetics

CONTRIBUTIONS

• Psychogeography and Cybernetic Cities—Explorations in Experimental Cartographic Practices with Ben Pulver
• Models With as Explicit Models with Guillermo Sanchez Sotes
• The Raw and the Pixel: Fire Recursivities in the Brazilian Savanna with Guilherme M Fagundes
• Recursive Cartographies of Abandonment: Mapping Post-Militarisied Landscapes with Sofia Quiroga
• Cartographies of Resistance: Deviant Mapping Against the Copy-of-the-Copy with Leonardo Foletto and Rafeal Bersciani
• Gathering the Cracks: Poetic Counter-Mapping of Informal Networks in Bacheng with Mark Ma, Junyi Yu, and Jiaxin Wang

Competing Cartographies treats mapping and modelling not as neutral representations of an already-given world, but as practices that participate in producing the realities they describe. Beginning with Korzybski’s distinction between map and territory and George Box’s reminder that models are necessarily partial, the track asks what becomes possible when the limits of representation are taken seriously. Maps illuminate, omit, organise, and direct attention; historically, they have also been implicated in territorial rationalisation, administration, and governance. Their partiality is not simply a defect, but a condition that makes plurality visible.

The contributions extend this proposition across digital, spatial, artistic, environmental, and political settings. They explore visual reasoning in computational and latent spaces, participatory and urban cartographies, embodied and performative mapping, environmental sensing, simulations and digital interfaces, extractive landscapes, and maps conceived as shared or common infrastructures. Across these practices, mapping becomes recursive: observers alter what is observed, representations feed back into action, and the territory itself may be transformed through the act of making distinctions. The result is less a single authoritative image than an evolving field of competing perspectives.

This cybernetic reframing shifts attention from correspondence to relationship and function. Rather than asking only whether a map is accurate, the track asks what a map enables, whose distinctions it carries, what it excludes, and how it changes the conditions for further observation and action. The programme proposes an alternative to cartographies organised primarily through surveillance or unilateral observation: mapping grounded in intimacy, reciprocity, participation, and situated knowledge. In this sense, the map can become a conversational apparatus—a provisional means of negotiating relations with places, systems, and one another while keeping open the possibility of revision, disagreement, and recursive becoming. Mapping thereby becomes a practice of responsibility as well as description, because each representation intervenes in the relations through which a place, problem, or possibility can subsequently be understood.