Francesco Lapenta, 2008, “Mapping the World. A Brief Essay on the Changing Staus of Digital Photography. Google maps, Photosynth, Flickr, iPhoto 2009 and the Digital Merging of Collective Image Production.”, www.visualstudies.eu

I am in my house. It has many rooms and many objects in it. I can take many pictures to portray all therooms and several others to depict the many objects it contains. I could also take a video and while filmingcomment on the many rooms and the same objects. Each picture (re)presents a frame of my house. This one portrays the studio desk and the library behind it. This other one the books and my computer on the samedesk. In the video I can pan from a wide angle shot of my studio down to the desk and the books, and mycomputer. There is another alternative. I can take all the pictures I have taken of my house and merge themtogether in Quicktime VR (Quicktime VR, Apple 1995) or better in Photosynth (Photosynth, Microsoft2008). Instead of a series of pictures or a fixed sequence of a video showing my house, I have now anavigable

virtual photograph

of my house. I can pan right, top, down, left in one room (with Quicktime VR),or zoom on the table, focus on the computer on my desk, pan to the left and move into the corridor, and theninto the living room (with Photosynth). If not satisfied I can go out the front door, zoom out and see myneighbourhood, move down the street (Google Street View 2007) or fly high to watch the all neighbourhoodfrom above (Google Earth 2006, Google Maps 2005, Live Search Maps Microsoft 2005). Remindfull of atechnology that Ridley Scott created for Rick Deckardhas to use in his 2019 Los Angeles (Ridley Scott,

Blade Runner

1982). As it happens reality has exceeded the fantasy allowing us to seamlessly move fromone image into another in a virtual continuum of increasingly global spatial representations. As the map of the Empire that the cartographers continued to grow with increasing levels of detail, the virtual map of theworld is acquiring a scale and scope that further exceeds their ambition. This virtual map deserves attention, because it is different both in its genetic nature and in its multiple evolution. It combines elements (Image,Text and Sound) that never before could be combined so seamlessly together. The map is built by thecooperation of two entities. On the one hand we have the (soon to be interconnected) platforms that areoffered for its growth, we could say this is the equivalent of the kind of “surface” that is offered for therenditions of the map (in our case Google Earth, Google Maps, Photosynth, QuickTime VR, iPhoto 2009 etc,etc). And on the other hand we have the new generation of cartographers comprised by all the individualsaround the world that contribute with pieces of representation of the world to the enormous puzzle of thevirtual map. The new cartographers of the world produce

images (but also texts and sounds) that are geo- positioned on the virtual map. Both the map, and the pieces

composing it, are in continuous

growth andevolution. The virtual map adapts and follows the lives of its cartographers. It changes continuously bymeans of ever new contributions and representations that either replace (like the images of Google Earth thatare continuously updated), or supersedes the existing ones (as it happens when specific contributions becomemore popular or are replaced by others).Although comprised of integrated

images

the virtual map, as the map of old, is still predominantly visual. Its particular symbolic system, once solely graphic has now become hybrid photo-graphic (soon will be audio-visual too). A puzzle of countless photographs

are seamlessly merged together to constitute the new map onwhich signs, texts (and sounds), are pinned down and juxtaposed. This new kind of map and its photographic

representations profoundly questions the tenets of the photography of old. It transforms a time-space

unicum

(the photograph taken at a specific time, in a specific place), in a fractured time within a space

continuum

(a-mimicked- photographic image that merges different times and contiguous spaces). The desire to stop timeis either a fundamental feature, or one of the historically strongest bias in the history of photography. Sinceits invention photography as been described or wilfully constructed as a key witness to a passing moment or event (a “time-biased” medium Innis (1950) would say). This fundamental feature of photography is profoundly transformed in a range of new photographic practices, in which a photograph (and I wonder if this is still the right name to indicate what this image is) is able to seamlessly merge, in one present image,many images of contiguous places taken at different times.It is not my intention in this context to focus on the more generalised theoretical implications of thistransformation. I want however to focus on its theoretical outcomes for our subject matter. Once the two keydimensions of a photographic image, its time and space, are operationally separated they give space to new possible forms of communicative re-articulation. In the case of live audio video communications for examplespace is bended in favour of linear time, the image is transformed in a complementary token of exchange between different spaces to sustain the conditions of a “live” (continuous time) face to face communication.Conversely in the virtual map images taken at different times are combined together in a contiguous linear space, juxtaposed, superimposed and merged by means of spatial (and not temporal) relation. In this systemspace, not time, is perceived as the existing continuous relation. Time is bended to sustain the naturalconditions of objects coo presence and spatial relation. The contiguous space of the image is always impliedin each photograph, but not directly acknowledged (represented). Any photograph is a photograph of something, but also a non photograph of what it excludes. If space is the key variable, all the pictures of theworld then can be seen as interconnected, by relations of relative distance and proximity from/to one another.A system that articulates these spatial relations (such as Google Earth or Photosynth) generates a systemsthat mimics a fundamental condition of the existence of real objects, their spatial relation. They also create a paradox for the photographs they correlate and merge. On the one hand they reinforce the “realist bias” of photography (Burgin 1980). The historical bias that has reinforced our perception of a photograph as a proof of the existence of the objects it represent. These spatial relations create yet another link between therepresented (the object) and its representation (its image) knotting them together at a certain location bymeans of proximity to other images (and objects). On the other end they sanction the (transition of the photograph to Baudrilad´s third phase of the image) with a progressive redefinition of the ontology of theimage that is transformed from a physical relation, that of the image with the object of its representation. Toa cognitive relation, that of the image with what we know to be true, or we think to be true, of the object, (itscondition of spatial relation to other objects for example, but also its aaesthetics).Debord was already well aware of this transformation when he described modernity as an immenseaccumulation of spectacles (Debord 1967: 2). An immense collection of images of every aspect of life thatfused in a common stream created “a pseudo-world apart”. A world where a partial reality, the imagesdetached from every aspect of life, fuse in their own general unity as “a world of autonomous images”. It isnot difficult to see the new digital map of the world, constituted by the many separate images of the world