stuck in books

This stuff about maps is making me think about the way our conceptions/perceptions of space are framed by the page. I think this is something you’ve been reading about a lot, Adrian, but maybe not quite so explicitly in terms of how materiality is affecting mapping/our perceptions of the world.
What you said, Adrian, about the distinction (or lack thereof) between the representation of the world and its reality made me think about navigation and the literal experience of mapping yourself—representing coordinates, for example, to communicate or discover where in the world you are.

Mapping oneself according to horizontal/vertical coordinates—I did it a lot when I first came to Brown, standing in Faunce Arch squinting at the little buildings, tracing over and across from 3C to find Wilson or whatever. And this is not a layman’s form of self-orientation. I don’t know much about latitude/longitude but I think it works pretty much the same way. The world-made-page is not something that’s just done when actually drawing on or creating a page that depicts the world; it is a self-orienting process that helps us map ourselves in real-time, in real-space.

I think the act of finding oneself on/against/through a map is always a strange one when done in day-to-day life, and could be an EXTREMELY productive “scene of interpellation” to use for this project (Althusser).

Longitude/latitude—the ocean keeps coming up…I think it’s the exception that constantly snags our attempts to orient ourselves in space, or, more precisely, to orient space according to the limitations of the 2D page. Maybe that’s why the internet keeps being compared to an ocean—because it can be but doesn’t have to be a surface??

The persistence of the horizontal/vertical axis indicates powerfully how representation/the-world-known-only-through-representation is still imprisoned by the material limitations (ontological and ideological) of the 2D printed page.
We know the world is round, yet we still represent our placement in space as if we are standing on a big flat page/map (When has a map ever NOT been a page??? Got any examples, AQR?).
A horizontal/vertical system of representation seems a pretty weak one through which to imagine our placement in the world, let alone the universe, at this point in our scientific knowledge. I think these thoughts I’m having are things you’ve been reading about for awhile, Adrian—Cartesian imagining of space vs. some kind of disorienting post-modern 3D?
Thinking about horizontal/vertical I think, in addition to time (which is a fascinating element to translate into visual representation—how to represent time a-temporally?!), DEPTH is a big one that gets ignored (re: the blue marble, etc). When 3D space gets translated into a 2D representation, where are we (as viewers) supposed to “be”? In outer space?

This makes me think about two powerful and associated viewer experiences experienced through maps/the world as a surface, as a page—

1. Being the one holding (or viewing) an actual (or virtual) page, being constructed ambiguously outside the map (because there is no way to map the coordinates of the viewer of a map on a page depth-wise (forget about zoom for a sec), except in an always-fixed statement of distance (the world from 10,000 ft. or whatever)

2. Envisioning oneself as a tiny figure on a big flat map of the world, i.e. producing one’s understanding of space through horiztonal/vertical coordinates. Who’s watching you then?

I also think it's interesting, in the satellite maps Adrian shared, that those are constructed out of many images, compiled carefully so as not to obstruct "reality" with cloud wisps.