Interactive tours using online connectivity, GPS navigation, and interactive maps show us how both space and time unfold in the practice of navigation. The basic principle of screen-based navigation is that we see how we move, while how we move enables vision. This mutually constitutive, discursive relationship between seeing and moving is a new principle in real-time, digital cartography. It is the movement that establishes the map; reading space requires navigation, rather than the other way around. Digital maps make use of the logic of tagging, plot-ting, stitching as forms of interaction.
Taggingis essentially labeling objects or locations with metadata. Tags are clus-ters of digital data and primarily operate on the interface level of internal applica-tions. Usually we refer to‘tags’in relation to the way they appear: as textual or visual information or visual on our screen. It is, however, important to distinguish the tag as data and tag as symbol (visual or in words). The different levels on which tagging works correspond to levels of interfacing incorporated in the map:
as metadata linked to objects, as inserts on screen providing information in rela-tion to specific objects or locarela-tions, or as a visual layering of hybrid screenspace.
This warrants a precise terminology when analyzing how tagging is a central principle of digital cartography. Although tags primarily operate on the level of data processing, when visualized as clickables, they activate the level of user inter-action. On maps they often function as geotags: location-specific hyperlinks that make a connection between data/objects and location.
The specific practice of tagging objects in space, and inserting tagged objects in the map, we can call theplotting of space. This entails marking locations and giving them a layered presence and hence, an added meaning. When these are
‘read’ and used for navigation, we can call this tracing. When integrated into a navigable whole, this process I callstitching. While originally a term used for the montage of separate images into a seamless panoramic image, a more horizontal (two-dimensional) stitching, it also applies to a broader practice of ‘sewing together’visual layers in digital cartography. In similar terms, the developers of the AR browser Junaio speak of“glue”for this practice:
Junaio has extended its capabilities beyond the usual location based internet services. Not only may the user obtain information on nearby POIs such as
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shops, restaurants or train stations, but the camera's eye is now able to iden-tify objects and“glue”object specific real-time, dynamic, social and 3D infor-mation onto the object itself. Enrich your packaging, books, posters, flyers, magazines or whatever you can think of with junaio glue.9
Tagging, plotting, and stitching operate on the multiple levels of the interface:
tagging on the level of software communication (data connecting to data), the spatial positioning (spatially connecting the objects) of plotting, and stitching, become effective on the screen, where the user actually perceives the connections as a navigable space.
Locative media activate different temporal layers within a set of spatial coordi-nates, which can be activated by tags. Dots on the map unfold, like spatio-tem-poral hyperlinks. The city becomes a clickable screenspace, a terrain of pop-ups that are triggered by real-life avatars in the physical world whose movements are tracked on-screen by GPS. In contrast to two-dimensional maps, which are a flat and still representation of space within a fixed frame, based on a fixed scale, and a fixed, abstract perspective, the digital tour-map is dynamic, layered, expandable, mutable, and flexible. It is now possible to attach geographical coordinates (geo-tags) as digital information, placing data back on a map of physical space, as well as tracking one’s current location. Geotags bring together all levels of the hybrid interface: they combine data, they are locative and activated by positioning and/or connection, and they are perceived and activated on the screen.10
Geotagging photographs–attaching GPS coordinates of the time and place of photographing – underscores the geographical as well as a temporal aspect of tagging. It allows for a mnemonic mobility by placing (plotting) and tracing of digital footprints. We can understand this implication of memory as reinstating indexicality that digital photography is said to have lost when we can attach geo-graphical coordinates as digital information: adding data about the exact location from where the picture was taken. This location is not necessarily close to what is photographed, to the object of the image–the GPS tag marks the location of the camera, locating the object as well as the photographer in reality. These coordi-nates constitute the digital footprint of the image-making: its trace.
But it is also its deictic positioning in the present. The main use of this is in applications that integrate geotagged objects or images in mash-ups or in naviga-tion software. Naviganaviga-tion systems like TomTom or Garmin, or smartphone appli-cations using GPS maps, enable downloading POIs (points of interest) uploaded by other users, marked by geotagged images. Online one can find a lot of so-called‘POI collections’or applications that make use of them. Geotags make it possible to retrace these digital footprints and turn the past into a destination: a deixis to the future.
The constructive quality of tagging, plotting and stitching as several aspects of the making of locative, semiotic connections entails possibilities for participatory
engagement. People can make their own personal archives or use them for exchange or for the building of a collective archive. Tagged“mobile mementos” (de Vries 2009) make a subsequent (online) exchange of data, or a collective image gathering or stitching possible. This is essentially collecting information from large social databases.
Photosynth is an example of an online collaborative image collection, also pro-viding the software to stitch together multiple photographs of the same object, space, or event taken from slightly different points of view into a navigable, panoramic whole. In the company’s words, it is a“viewer for downloading and navigating complex visual spaces and a ‘synther’ for creating them in the first place. Together they make something that seems impossible quite possible:
reconstructing the 3D world from flat photographs.”11
Fig. 5.1: Photosynth ofPanorama Mesdag(Serge van Schie, 2008)
The company’s slogan is, in fact,“use your photos to stitch the world.”Images can be stitched together and users can navigate by scrolling through the interac-tive panoramic rendering of the image. The website offers pre-fab collections, showing buildings, animals, natural reserves, or interiors – basically anything that works in an interactive panoramic image, and gives space to upload one’s own synths to the database. The applicationiSynthtakes this navigational model and database logic of stiching to the iPhone. The iPhone screen interface, then, allows for a touch-controlled visual navigation in a composite stitched image field. In the company’s words:
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Capture, upload, share, and view Photosynth panoramas wherever you go with our new Photosynth app for iOS. These panoramas, which are the same as the ones created using our desktop panorama tools, can be created anywhere, from your favorite restaurant, a space station, or wherever inspiration strikes.
From just a few stitched photos up to full spherical panoramas, the Photosynth app allows you to take Photosynth on the go and use it anytime.12
Stitching is a useful term for the activity of connecting individual elements to create a larger whole, a cooperative collage. Large databases such as Photosynth, much like the online photo-sharing site Flickr, serve the double purpose of creat-ing and sharcreat-ing one’s own, individual archive, and using the network as a larger repository. This makes longer-running events or games possible. Geocaching, for example, is a treasure-hunt game that uses GPS coordinates tagged to‘real’ con-tainers that hold objects. This is a clear case of tagging and plotting, and the user’s reading of the map as a form of tracing. Moreover, when found, these may be taken if they are replaced by new objects. The user thus becomes a participant.
Waymarking is based on a similar concept, to “share and discover unique and interesting locations on the planet,”but does not use‘real’containers for treas-ures. It only offers POIs, marked by other users.13
Yellow Arrow is a famous and long-running project that is a cross between a game, a database, a map, and a locative art project:
Yellow Arrow is a global public art project of local experiences. Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow trans-forms the urban landscape into a“deep map”that expresses the personal his-tories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces.14
Geocaching is an example of a similar, yet slightly different and also very popular formula: it is a treasure-hunt game that uses GPS for treasure hunts or other tours that involve the search of real-world objects using GPS software.15
These examples of locating the (physical) object of the image and the possibil-ity of retrieving it (as image), and subsequently repositioning, collecting or shar-ing it – or better: tagging, plotting and stitching – have consequences for our conceptions of time and space. The integration of photography in applications on hybrid devices contributes to a cut-and-paste worldview: a being in the world that consists of endless possibilities. It makes it possible not only to practice lim-ited ways of framing pictures, to crop and thus make cut-outs, but also to trans-pose, translate, transform and paste these cuts into new contexts. As such, the world becomes a digital, clickable scrapbook that consists of different forms of data, overlapping information, connected dimensions, and multidirectional navi-gation. This transforms our sense of how we can engage in and with the world.
In an analysis of contemporary digital image-making practices, Uricchio (2011) proposes to distinguish an“algorithimic turn”exemplified by software applica-tions like Photosynth and augmented reality, which, as I will discuss below, point towards a performative cartography. This turn in visual culture entails a radically new relationship between the image of the world and the viewing subject. He clarifies how we should on the one hand recognize the algorithimic operation in the constructing of images, but on the other hand also recognize the activity of the beholder of that image, as co-constructor. He states:
Although of a different order than the clearly defined subject-object binary that characterized the modern era for the last few hundred years, the algorithmic turn remains rooted in human experiential and semiotic practices. (34) Here, I am particularly interested in the creative activity as the co-operation of the different levels of the interface and the user as navigating agent in this semiotic practice. Tagging, plotting and stitching constitute a networked and temporally expanding cartography, based on a “cooperative connected performativity” (de Vries 2009), or as I call it in the context of spatial practices, performative carto-graphy. As such, the constructive aspects of this creativity, as I will argue below, are also inherently participatory. While practices in their own right, tagging, plot-ting and stitching also converge in layering in augmented reality applications, which I will discuss next.