Cognitive Mapping

How do conceptions of territory, land, boundaries and space become modified with the emergence of computational tools? Fundamentally, my focus will be to inquire into the role of an array of technologies and how they render manipulable potentially novel capabilities of diagramming, spatialising, and formatting, and how particular technologies are employed through the likes of Simultaneous Location and Mapping in Real Time, defined as “the process of creating a map using a robot or unmanned vehicle” that navigates the environment while using the map it generates? Ultimately, my endeavor becomes to conduct an investigation into these technological affordances and their relationship between orientation and Frederic Jameson’s invocation of a New Aesthetic related to Cognitive Mapping. Jameson’s characterization of a stark disjunction between a phenomenological experience of an individual subject and the apprehension of a global and social totality raises questions as to how to recuperate tools for navigation, and perhaps opens a framework toward understanding space and its relationship to totalities topologically and importantly dynamic.

Dustin Breitling (b. USA) is an M.A. Student at Charles University studying geopolitics. He organizes the Diffractions lecture series.