The blue dot and the GPS selfie: the critique of the cartographic self

Research Seminar - Organised by the Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, and the Centre for Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media, University of Manchester

The blue dot and the GPS selfie: the critique of the cartographic self

Dr Claire Reddleman, Lecturer in Digital Humanities (Contemporary Art and Digital Culture), University of Manchester

Abstract

In this paper, I will offer a reading of two very influential images of our time - the famous 'pale blue dot' photograph of the Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, and the map app image of the now-ubiquitous blue dot indicating the presence of the self in the map interface. I will trace an entwined trajectory of these images of world and self. The larger context is the critique of capitalist abstraction, whereby the relation to the real is always mediated via illusory forms of appearance; the more specific problematic of cartographic abstraction is brought to bear on the question of how the symbolic form of the blue dot has been collapsed from the macro-scale of the planetary to the micro-scale of the personal, via the symbolic functions of the mapping app.

Biography

Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities (Contemporary Art and Digital Culture) at the University of Manchester. She previously taught in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, and Goldsmiths, University of London, and carried out postdoctoral research at Nottingham Trent University, on the critique of the heritage presentation of France's former penal colonies. Her monograph, Cartographic Abstraction: Seeing with Maps, critiqued cartographic 'ways of seeing' via contemporary artworks. She is currently writing about Marx's concept of personification in capitalist society, and a book of essays charting a visual history of the whole Earth.

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