The Map as a Cultural Technique: Transmedial Approaches to the (Western) Cartographic Imagination

Tommaso Morawski

Philippe Mercier, The Sense of Sight (1744–1747). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven CT (Wikimedia Commons) — Philippe Mercier, *The Sense of Sight (1744*–*1747)*. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven CT (Wikimedia Commons)

Philippe Mercier, *The Sense of Sight (1744*–*1747)*. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven CT (Wikimedia Commons)

This project explores the relationship between space, imagination, and map with a media-anthropological approach. Such an approach entails adopting a perspective that assigns an active and primary role to technology and media in the constitution of the human and the history of its cultural forms. My hypothesis is that humans as such do not exist independently of cultural techniques of hominization, and space as such does not exist independently of cultural techniques of spatial control. The guiding thread of this research is the concept of the cartographic imagination and, in particular, the idea of the map as a cultural technique and as a reference system for a media history of space. Insisting on the mediality of the cartographic device, this project devotes particular attention to the processes of remediation that characterize the history of the cartographic device.