The Map as a Cultural Technique. Transmedial Approaches to (Western) Cartographic Imagination

Dr. Tommaso Morawski

The project explores the relationship between space, imagination and map with a media-anthropological approach. That is, from a perspective that assigns an active and primary role to technology and media in the constitution of the human and the history of its cultural forms. My hypothesis is that humans as such do not exist independently of cultural techniques of hominization, and space as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of spatial control. The guiding thread of this research is the concept of cartographic imagination and, in particular, the idea of the map as a cultural technique and as a reference system for a media history of space. Insisting on the mediality of the cartographic device particular attention is given to the processes of remediation that characterize the history of the cartographic device.