31maps

signifying nothing seeing something

geography | from space by dennis keen

land patterns rivers

agriculture abstraction political marking

One thing that becomes quite obvious is how physical geography shapes our settlements. Look at a satellite map of the desertous centre of Central Asia and you can see, on the periphery of those smudgy sands, grey and brown quilts hugging the rivers. These are the oases, the urban foundations of Transoxianan civilisation. The major rivers, the Syr Darya, the Amu Darya, the Zeravshan, are all lined by these pads of farmland. Each family’s field is pushed against the next in a tessellated patchwork. If you wanted to make this a political map, you could go crazy with it. Every field is a man’s domain. But that’s part of the appeal of the satellite picture – not having those political constructions there at all. We tend to reify borders on a map, and though some follow rivers and physical features we can see, others are simply arbitrary decisions of a man with a slide rule. The ribbon on the map, that’s a sign for a river; the dot, it stands for a city. But the county line? It’s a sign with nothing to signify. There is nothing there to stand for. On the satellite map, man’s strange divisions are tossed aside and we can only see what is truly there – the earth in infinite detail, too vast to be made into marks. c

Until the advent of satellite imagery, maps were made of signifiers. The grey ribbons that wove their way through the atlases of Central Asia could not claim to be rivers themselves – they merely stood in for them, a necessary and accepted substitution. The satellite map in its purest form, without the overlaid labels and lines, is as close we’ve ever gotten to eliminating this mediating step. The river you see before you is no longer just the mark of a pen or some software approximation. It is a photograph of the Amu Darya itself. A cartographic caricature has been turned into a dignified portrait. On a traditional map, there is only so much information that one can fit in. Look at the map’s legend, and you can see that decisions are made to portray only the most important features of a landscape – the cities, the rivers, the mountains. On a satellite map, you can see everything. The city is no longer a dot on a map, but an oozing, rectilinear mess. A desert is not white space but smudgy patterns of sand in motion. A river’s every tributary can be seen, even just a trickle. It makes for a captivating mode of discovery – one can get lost in these pictures for hours, dragging and pulling the picture around, zooming in on the things that look as if they have a story to tell. Without the labels telling you what is what, it becomes a game of matching this strange new perspective to the forms with which we’re familiar, with the maps in our head or the views on the ground.

Türkmenabat, Turkmenistan

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