- Topic -

The conference focuses on the issue of current-day mappings related to new technologies and their encompassing socio-cultural spaces and the "radical social transformations" linked hereto.

The human experiencing of pervasively technicized worlds and changing environments is increasingly co-organized by way of medial systems and synthesizing artifacts – like GIS, GPS, informational data-bases, multimedia documentations, bookmark lists etc.. These and other new artifacts functioning like maps enable concrete as well as abstract movements in the manifold flow spaces linked to new "post-industrial" infrastructures.

In reaction to this new situation the aim of the conference is to move the focus beyond traditional forms of (geographical) maps. As a starting point and acknowledging the new realities of the "second media age" a widened concept of "map" is proposed, describing them as topologically structured ensembles of representations and information used in different forms of - ultimately human - orientation and navigation.

At the same time maps - as they occupy an ever more central role in a technically restructured life-world - question any naive view of human actors. Maps here provide access via representation, thereby enabling participation (" or control). The lack of a specific map or the lack of access to them in contrast often means handicap or exclusion. Different and alternative mappings are linked to different actor positions within techno-social universes. Taken their increasing importance and use it seems timely and fruitful to examine how maps generate cultural coherence, articulate and shape local ontologies and articulate changing - possibly conflicting - images of man.

Taken the Background of pervasive technological shifts this cannot be done without examining the resonant interaction between new technologies and the technologies of mapping and their new signatures of symbolization, indexicality and positionality.

We want to explore:

• How are the new spaces (i.e. RFID object-spaces of Ambient Intelligence or Smart Archi- tecture/Fluid Architecture) structured? What kind of changes do we see in logics of interaction when confronted with informatised, highly interactive objects?

• How do we orientate in informatised and dynamically changing spaces? What kind of navigational strategies and metaphors can be summoned as blueprints for these kinds of orientation (nautical navigation, human computer interaction, cognitive mapping)?

• How do issues of access change in the wake of ever more complex anthropotechnical spacing and the encompassing modifications of the lifeworld? What competencies of reading and producing maps become dominant? What kind of "mapping communities" and mapping practices appear in this context? What new technologies appear?

• What role do maps play for orientation and navigation in these spaces? How do they constitute and represent informatised space? What new forms or signatures of maps arise in relation to anthropotechnical space?

• How do new technologies translate into new practices of mapping and orientation? What kind of new personal, cultural or social universes are brought up by the flexibilities and indi- vidualization of mapped space? How does it affect the lifeworld, and what kind of new ontologies evolve?

Registration by 15.2.2007: gab(at)zedat.fu-berlin.de