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Themesicon: navigation pathMapping and Texticon: navigation pathArchive/Map
 
Carnivore (RSG), 2000
 
 
 

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production process. Graham Harwood therefore emphasizes how much the mapping pattern has been co-determined in this case by interaction with the individual ‹cartographers›. The Mongrel project contributes to mapping relations and the subjectivity of visual clusters. The story that will be told by nine images, texts or videos remains open in each case. But generally Net producers feel committed to open, anti-hierarchical processuality that is not remotely interested in anything as ‹conservative› as archiving. All production is committed to increasing the intensity of the moment, but not to the kind of relativity that would stem from knowledge of the past (even though that is not excluded in principle). In that respect, Community mapping is ‹community building› in the first place.

The big picture

One important objection relativizes the contrast between processuality and archiving. Data-mining, in other words pursuing and saving a net-user's tracks, is just as little entitled to claim to be a ‹work› and yet is still extremely interesting—politically, as demonstrated by the example of RSG's «Carnivore,» and commercially above all for website providers. In this respect it would

 

not be merely conceptually interesting if there were a tool available that could capture and illustrate the permanently expanding and changing Internet itself. Computer specialists in California are working on archiving a screenshot of every website in existence. [43] This is one way of showing the Internet but the question remains of what has been gained if I—to draw an obvious analogy—were to collect the title pages of all the books in existence, but did not have any content lists. In contrast with this, it is no coincidence that Lisa Jevbratt's «1:1» (from 1999) project relates to Lewis Carroll (and indirectly of course to Jorge Luis Borges as well), [44] by pursuing the aim of being able to illustrate the ‹entire› Internet in a high-resolution image. Each line of colour in this abstract computer-generated image represents an IP address. Thus «1:1» concentrates on structural analysis, rather than the iconographic aspect of screenshots. The dynamic of the Internet is captured as a ‹snapshot› of a particular moment, in that the whole process is repeated two years later. The change of paradigm is remarkable: now users are not in the data motorway's ‹road network›, which always leads to familiar addresses, above all via search engines. They

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