Critical Gis: Examining the Art of Mapping

Critical Gis: Examining the Art of Mapping is an article including Kanarinka and David Pinder, both Conflux participants.

Is cartography art or science? This is an age-old question that's undergoing re-examination by a series of cartographically minded artists. It seems that the swing toward science is being complemented by an emerging swing toward art.

An example is Kanarinka, a Boston-based artist whose social activities hover almost equally between the virtual and the physical (Kanarinka is an online name that has become her regular name). At a recent talk to North American Cartographic Information Society members in Portland, Maine, Kanarinka, co-director of the nonprofit collective iKatun (www.ikatun.com), described three interesting geo-artistic projects that challenge our way of thinking about time and space. The projects could be called "psychogeographies."

According to geographer David Pinder, these psychogeographies...