project : خريطة الظلام Cartography of Darkness

خريطة الظلام Cartography of Darkness

description

Cartography of Darkness is a transclusive research platform dedicated to exploring universalisms and the unity of knowledge in our highly obfuscated, crisis-ridden age. Beginning with their situated knowledge in Lebanon, the platform’s inaugural chapter “FOR A TRANS-ELECTRIC SOLIDARITY” seeks to publicly probe and critically map the obscure genealogies of Lebanon’s techno-political and ecological histories of dispossession, ecocide and agnotology while studying the unity of knowledge. The cognitive mapping platform is comprised of a sonified accretive map made of several layers of interactive strata and spatialized data, a public media repository that makes accessible for the first time research material found in personal archives created by scientists, artists and investigative journalists and the scraped web, new text and audio research published regularly as part of a seasonal periodical/research chapter that remains open for a period of nine months.

Every periodical/research chapter seeks to expose the regimes of invisibility that contaminate and head Lebanon’s hegemonic modes of production, while fostering new ways to collaboratively see into, study and transform our environment. The contributions revolve around trans-electric and trans-regional solidarity, burgeoning social models based on mutual aid, public access and social justice as opposed to kleptocracy; and ecologies of care as opposed to the local and global economy of toxic discard and denial. By doing so, ‘Cartography of Darkness’ seeks to collectively search for ways to expose, link and see through the regimes of invisibility, the explosive environments and cultures of corruption that denigrate life from the people in Lebanon, while deeply influencing the links between the production of knowledge, the production of space and the articulation of politics.

The entirety of the architecture and code of Cartography of Darkness is made publicly readable and available for re-use through a GNU V3 open-source license. All the material in the repository that the team has directly digitised and archived are available for use and re-use through a Creative Commons license. The three spaces that make up Cartography of Darkness; the Periodical, Repository and Map are interlinked in a transclusive approach to one another. ‘Transclusion’ was conceived and coined by philosopher, sociologist and computer architect Theodor Nelson in the 1960s. It describes media that are brought in from various sources to be ‘knowably in more than one place’. Nelson also coined the relevant terms ‘hypermedia’, ‘hypertext’, ‘xanalogical storage’ and ‘intertwingularity’ that we would argue are not based on the digital advent of computational media, but on trans-millennial theories of emanation found in the quiddity of the circulation of thoughts and media.

Cartography of Darkness is made possible through a joint grant from the Arab Council for Social Sciences and the Arab Fund for Art and Culture. A major part of the digitization and archiving in the repository is made possible through the Digital Earth Fellowship and a grant by the MIT Libraries and the MIT Programme in Science, Technology Society.