Susana Zaragozá has been involved in the media and cultural industries for the last 10 years, always with a deep interest in the convergence of real practice and alternative entrepreneurship. In Madrid, where she is currently based, Susana is involved in several projects spanning crowdfunding, visualization, prototyping, digital humanities, gender and technology.
In 2010 Susana completed an MA (media and culture) at the University of Amsterdam. Her thesis, an interesting exploration of locative mapping and non-representational geographies in relation to affect, was written under the supervision of Dr. Edward Shanken. Below is her abstract and complete thesis available for download.
Abstract
This thesis I will attempt to redefine the connection between maps and territory within locative mapping practices. In doing so, I suggest a different approach from Situationist International; Michael de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life or the criticized use of the current trace-andtrack model by drawing on the Non-Representational Theory (NRT) of Nigel Thrift. The goal is to offer a modern approach that raises possible futures and expectations related to this novel technomapping impulse, and also a fresh perspective in order to challenge the current standardization of space. The performative character of maps when realized through embodiment and relational practices within our daily activities, offers both new knowledges and different ways of transmitting it. Specifically, there are different modes of expression that locative mapping is attempting to create in relation to the affective and political realms. In this light, non-representational theories share an approach to meaning that is based on the idea of thought-in action. This possibility of thinking space through action can be understood as a revival of the possibility of the event itself in a Deleuzian sense but also of a new vast domain of biopolitics for resistance, from Foucault’s perspective. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the taking-place of our everyday life practices – things and events and their possible interconnections – but also on the potential of the human body and its performative character when ideas and meanings are projected onto those bodies. By drawing on locative media art, I illustrate how NRT seems to be an appropriate approach for combining social research and experimental/artistic practices in order to discover how knowledge is spatially distributed. Indeed, the insufficiently illustrated work of Thrift warrants this attempt, that is, to update the discourses of locative media art which have become stuck since 2006, in order to recapture the potential of locative mapping practices for a better understanding of the current technological world and its re-presentation of maps.
Download Susana’s thesis by clicking here.
