1. No Maps for these territories
Un documental del ya lejano año 2000 sobre William Gibson. A través de una conversación que discurre dentro de una limusina que viaja desde Los Angeles a Nueva York, Gibson explora nuevos territorios que, en muchos casos, 6 años después están ya en todos los mapas. Más información sobre este documental en la wikipedia. JJ Merelo, otro explorador sin mapas, ya habló de No Maps y localizó una transcripción en Archive.org.
It all moves so quickly now. These days it all changes. Nothing stable. Nothing static. Nothing to stand on or cling to. No maps for these territories, though they are of our own creation. No myths for these countries of the mind. Accelerating constantly toward some null point of post-humanity. Accelerating constantly. No maps for these territories.
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2. Dream Maps
Este artículo de Liesl Schillinger en The New York Times parte del reciente, y largamente esperado, libro de Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, para explorar los territorios pynchonianos. Sus mapas cruzan espacio y tiempo de un modo aparentemente anárquico de modo, que finalmente, el lector se encuentra como Gibson explorando sin mapas. No en vano, a Pynchon, por su influencia sobre William Gibson, se le considera uno de los padres de la literatura cyberpunk.
Where to begin? Where to end? It’s both moot and preposterous to fix on a starting point when considering a 1,085-page novel whose setting is a “limitless terrain of queerness” and whose scores of characters include the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant carnivorous burrowing sand lice, straight out of “Dune,” that attack passengers of desert submarines — or, rather, subdesertine frigates. In any case, Pynchon (speaking, one presumes, through his characters) dismisses the existence of time as “really too ridiculous to consider, regardless of its status as a believed-in phenomenon,” asserting that civilization has been dead since World War I and “all history after that will belong properly to the history of hell.” He also rejects a fixed notion of place. To him, delineations of the known world are merely maps that “begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again.” Let us proceed, then, like Pynchon: as we wish, without a map, and by bounding leaps.
Para aquellos con ganas de seguir explorando el universo pynchoniano, tras leerse las más de 1000 páginas de ATD, puede interesarle navegar el The Thomas Pynchon Wiki, que incluye un Against the Day Wiki.
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3. Else/Where: Mapping. New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Este libro publicado por el Design Institute y la University of Minnesota Press ha sido editado por Janet Abrams y Peter Hall, y diseñado por Deborah Littlejohn. Es una fascinante exploración de la nueva cartografía que nos permite navegar redes, conversaciones, territorios e, incluso, las nuevas formas de hacer mapas:
… explores the ascendancy of mapping as an interdisciplinary strategy, one that connects people and places, data and organizations, and physical and virtual spaces. … Each section includes critical essays, reportage, and Q&A interviews, interspersed with a "gazetteer" of full-color images…
Mapping has emerged in the information age as a means to make the complex accessible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable. As we struggle to steer through the torre nt of data unleashed by the Internet, and to situate ourselves in a world in which commerce and community have been redefined in terms of networks, mapping has become a way of making sense of things.
