Radical Cartography es un fascinante, y a veces desconcertante, proyecto de Bill Rankin de la Universidad de Harvard. Mediante todo tipo de mapas trata de visualizar el mundo en que vivimos, desde el entorno físico a las infraestructuras, desde tendencias demográficas o la producción agrícola.
Mezcla de una forma caótica información demográfica y económica (como el mapa de cosechas que aparece aquí) con herramientas (como la comparación de diferentes sistemas de proyección que incluyo abajo) y representaciones conceptuales (como un mapa en blanco que cartografía el Sahara). Aunque buena parte de los mapas se refieren a EEUU, Radical Cartography no tiene límites geográficos y recopila visualizaciones de muchas partes del plantea.
La única presentación del proyecto, que posiblemnete sea más que suficiente, es este texto de Jean Baudrillard ("The Precession of Simulacra") :
If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts--the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing)--then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.
