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Atlas
Projecting the landscape onto a two-dimensional
surface compresses Earth, which is not
even a perfect sphere, into geometric linearity.
The cylindrical projection of the geographer
and cartographer Gerardus Mercator makes
South America, which was so familiar to Vilém
Flusser, smaller than Greenland. These distortions
are political, with a powerful Europe at
the center. In his text “Mein Atlas” [My Atlas],
Flusser presents two old atlases that belonged
to his grandfather (“Mein Atlas,” in: Dinge und
Undinge, 1993). They are very old books, the state
of the art in the sixteenth century. These atlases
were followed by new maps, with the knowledge
of their epistemic relativity. An explosion of semantics,
a multiplication of one possibility into
thousands of thousands, occurred. For Flusser,
imagination means “making ‘maps’ and reading
them” (Medienkultur, 1997, p. 24; translated from
the German). His grandfather stands for the age
of the book, which is already in upheaval. The old
man began to tear pages out of the more recent
atlases, rearranging them, and moving them
around. Leopold Flusser (1857–1937) seems to
have recognized, around the same time as Aby
Warburg, the power of ludic combinatorial analysis:
“In short, he began to play history.” (“Mein
Atlas,” p. 115; translated from the German)
Every age slaves away with its most advanced
instruments at the task of abstracting the globe.
In Leopold Flusser’s atlas, “the world ran between
his fingers” (ibid., p. 113; translated from the German). In the new atlases, we are the ones
who are running. “No longer people among people,
but instead a person who codifies others in
order to make them the subject matter of atlantes.”
(ibid., p. 116; translated from the German)
As he wrote those lines, Flusser was himself
using precursors of the new, powerful digital
mapping services, which seduce us into revealing
the position of our friends in the vicinity (our
own position is constantly being surveyed and
added to the algorithm).
What is the new relationship of the atlas and the world? Grandfather Flusser could still dip in and out of his atlases. Thanks to the abstract quality of the maps, a region could preserve itself and hence continued to be a desideratum. People of the new imagination, by contrast, themselves become abstractions, signs, and symbols in the atlases that overlie our cities and that feed off what we do.
Original article by Konstantin Daniel Haensch