Map template

Maps

According to Nepthys Zwer (cartographies radicales), the map is a schematic image of the world that we construct in order to understand it, to make it less complex. The map is a miniature world, the invention of an object that replaces the world. The map is part of our mental images, reducing the world so that we can move around in it, live in it, survive in it, make it our own, in our day-to-day operations. The attribution of a scientificity to the map with mathematics – objective, Euclidean, measurable – is nothing like what the map used to be: an ephemeral trace on the sand to find one’s bearings. The map then becomes an archive, showing a possession of the world. Today, it’s also a tool for analysis. And depending on what we want to analyze, we can transform it. « We are willing to be fooled when we look at a map », writes Nepthys Zwer. Indeed, the map is a coded simplification of geographical contours, a particular language with rules that standardize its production and reading. Today, however, « the map makes reality happen; it is taken for the territory. » There’s no denying the power of the map to guide regional planning policy. Asking what data should be included in the map, how it should be processed, and who should control the map, helps to clarify a situation, because our gaze is always situated (Haraway). Thus, radical maps, alternative maps or potential maps, show other realities that have not found a place in traditional maps. In the cartographic research « gaiagraphies », these potential maps are nourished by ethnographic experiences and sensor viewpoints that generate new information. 

We map the different instruments and the different environments and their complexity that they make sense-able. Similarly in the past, we can find different examples where the instruments condition the way we understand things, we see worlds; as the work of Hooke who invented the microscope and through it unpacked previously invisible worlds (the dust, the insects). To change our gaze, it is necessary to use new optical instrument to see differently.

This the hypothesis of the book Terra Forma. The book develops seven new optics, lenses or models, to better describe the world in which we live, in particular the agentivity of landscape entities that we used to take for granted as passive objects. With these new optics, or frames of references, that deconstruct and reconstruct the mapping process, we map territories with other dimensions. For mapping the TERRA FORMA observatories, we focus on the one we used to visualize the critical zone – which is the first model described in the book. 

How can we visualize the complexity of the Critical Zone that the sensors are delivering to the scientists in a quite disparate way and make sense of it – for designers for example – in a map where we can actually understand the cosmopolitical landscape? 

1. First, we need to change the gaze completely. Indeed, we cannot see the critical zone at the scale of the earth-planet as it is the very thin layer on its surface (see video below). When we look at it from space, it is very thin and disappears from our view even though it is here that everything, all life, is possible thanks to the soil, air and water interfaces. Similarly when we represent the critical zone by a cross section or a bloc diagram we miss the planetary scale. In both visualizations, the deep ground and the atmosphere (which remains a vacuum escaping into the distant space above the Earth) are excluded. So, we suggest an inversion of the Earth’s layers in order to enclose the atmosphere in the middle. The rocks are placed on the outer circle and the atmosphere on the inner circle. The Earth seems to have been turned inside out like a glove. We don’t map the surface but invert the gaze in order to visualize the layers of the subsurface and further down to the depths. Placing the atmosphere in the center reinforces the idea that there are terrestrial boundaries, that the pollutants that are released into the atmosphere, such as CO_2, Sulphur or nitrogen, do not escape into the infinite universe but remain there, trapped within the boundaries of the planet. Scientists are also studying how cycles terraform territories and how human activities disrupt them in ways that are sometimes unsuspected. They are seeking to understand changes in biogeochemical cycles at specific sites across the Earth and how they manifest on a global scale. 
2. Reversing the earth’s layers is the first step. This allows us to map the depths and subterranean environments that are often overlooked in maps representing only the surface of the land (or land use). A gradual measurement of depths is applied to the model – as on a cross-section – these are the circles. 
3. There is then a way of mapping and reading an observatory, which is in fact usually a watershed, and can therefore be read from upstream to downstream. This is reflected on the map by a counter-clockwise flow. We start upstream (on the left of the map) and end downstream. In the upper part of the map, a break signifies the larger landscape into which the watershed drains (this may be the ocean directly, or a larger river). 
4. Finally, the radius of the map reflects an important feature of the observatory, the internal structure that supports the ecosystem: this may be the seasons, the altitude, or the different instrumented locations with different landscape characterizations. The various elements of the observatory are then positioned according to these radii.