A Map You Can Walk Into: Immersive Cartography and the Speculative Potentials of Data

Introduction

A coloured shadow: an intertwining of fields of emergent experience not yet defined as this or that. Not defined as this or that, yet their qualities already interact. (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 4)

In their book Thought in the Act, Manning and Massumi (2014) describe a precognitive, environmental awareness in which differential fields of relation intersect to produce new patterns of felt experience. This is also a way to introduce immersive cartography as a new approach to inquiry: an open series of intertwining “fields of emergent experience” which are “not defined as this or that, yet their qualities already interact” (p. 4). By the time you become aware that “this” or “that” has influenced the inquiry, the felt qualities of those differences have already been metabolized in ways that produce a new quality of experience. A different movement of experience has taken shape. The field of relations has shifted, taking on a new tonality and transitional potential for aesthetic feeling. This openness to the disjunctive novelty of aesthetic experience makes me hesitant to describe immersive cartography as a methodology, or a set of methods (St. Pierre, 2017). Perhaps it is better described as a speculative adventure into inquiry (Whitehead, 1967a), an adventure that pushes research to the threshold where concept becomes practice, and thought becomes creation: research-creation (Manning & Massumi, 2014). As an incipient process of thought in the act, immersive cartography is an adventure that unfolds through creative and conceptual experimentations with research-events-in-the-making.

This article aims to perform a kind of induction into immersive cartography, teasing out certain concepts and techniques that lend immersive cartography a distinctive style and character as a new approach to creative inquiry. As situated within the ontological turn and the associated dissolution of qualitative methodologies in the social sciences (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013), immersive cartography emerges through a novel convergence between Whitehead’s (1967a, 1978) speculative empiricism; the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1994); diverse genealogies of practice in the environmental and socially engaged arts (Irwin, 1985; Kwon, 2002; Lacy, 1994); and the increasingly broad spectrum of work associated with the critical posthumanities (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013). This convergence draws pragmatically on disjunctive fields across the arts, humanities, social, and physical sciences, building on recent scholarship calling for “new empiricisms” (Clough, 2009; de Freitas, 2016; St. Pierre, 2016) capable of forging more nuanced, flexible, and undisciplined modes of inquiry within a dynamically shifting posthuman condition (Braidotti & Bignall, 2018).

New Conditions of Inquiry

While immersive cartography takes the works of process philosophers as primary “data” for cultivating a new approach to creative inquiry, its most intense shock to thought does not come directly from philosophy, but from the rapidly mutating material conditions of Earthly life. As I have argued elsewhere (Rousell, 2015, 2016, 2018), the combined material force and intensity of global climate change, mass extinction, and the computational reconfiguration of planetary life are reshaping the ontological conditions for thought and inquiry in the 21st century. These new conditions of Earthly life necessitate new forms of inquiry capable of thinking and operating across disjunctive sensory ecologies that extend beyond the limited bandwidth of human perception, cognition, and language (Hansen, 2014). Global climate change provides one of the most salient examples of this posthuman ecologization of life. While the situated effects of climate change can be sensed by human and nonhuman bodies inhabiting specific regions of the Earth, climate change as a planetary event only becomes thinkable through data that are sensed and algorithmically modeled by computational networks that exceed the limited perceptual bandwidth of the animal body.

In responding to this radically expanded sensory ecology and the increasing urgencies of the climate emergency, immersive cartography seeks to cultivate an alternative approach to social inquiry that is “new” in two senses proposed by St. Pierre et al. (2016): (a) as an ethical commitment to actively re-imagine and re-assemble social relations under conditions of environmental catastrophe and the colonial-capitalistic degradation of Earthly life, and (b) as an aesthetic commitment to pursue a risky and intensified project of experimentation with alternative forms of social life and inquiry. It is this double commitment to the lived production of an alternative ethics and aesthetics of inquiry that catalyzes the conceptualization of immersive cartography over the course of this article.

Central to this ethico-aesthetic approach is a commitment to pursue modes of inquiry that overspill the capture of language and discourse. As argued in the sections below, a cartography can be considered immersive when it operates outside of language, representation, metaphor, critique, measurement, and rhetorical argument to create a new manifold, or “bloc,” of sensation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). The creation of immersive works of art and media are proposed as open-ended processes of ethical and aesthetic experimentation, producing maps that can be entered, altered, extended, intensified, and reconfigured in ways that carve out new trajectories for thought and experience (Rousell, 2015, 2019). It is in this sense that an immersive cartography can be considered both infrastructural in its extension of material networks and techno-ecological relations (Berlant, 2016), and atmospheric in the production of new spacetimes of affective allure and intensity (McCormack, 2018).

This commitment to art as both infrastructural and atmospheric experimentation distinguishes immersive cartography from other “post-qualitative” approaches in the social sciences (see, for instance, St. Pierre, 2013, 2017). While there is an increasingly robust body of work employing innovative cartographic approaches in education and social research (see, for instance, Kuntz, 2018; Martin & Kamberelis, 2013; Masny, 2013; Ulmer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015), it is still rare for cartographic inquiry to operate substantively outside the boundaries of discursive and textual regimes of inquiry. Artistic techniques often remain yoked to the demands and obligations of language in the social sciences, constrained from having a life of their own beyond the interpretive determinations of the research apparatus (Bolt, 2013). Rarely is art taken up as a modality of collective experimentation with nondiscursive forms of social life, as the expression of an “activist philosophy” (Massumi, 2011) always already capable of (re)potentializing the social along novel micropolitical trajectories (Rolnik, 2017).

In foregrounding the force of art as creative activity, this article develops an immersive rendering of cartographic inquiry which seeks to reconfigure the sensorial and affective conditions through which social encounters take shape. In what follows, I begin by elaborating on the distinction between the extensive and intensive mapping processes that constitute what Deleuze (1997) terms a “cartography-art.” This involves a rethinking of cartography as a function of processual movement, in which new trajectories of experience are made possible through the production of a cartographic work of art. This theorization is extended through discussions of two contemporary environmental artists, along with examples from my doctoral project States and Territories, to elaborate the invention of artful technique as a central premise of immersive cartography. Drawing on the speculative pragmatics developed by Manning (2016) and Massumi (2011), I suggest that immersive cartography works to extend techniques from the relational and immersive arts into the realm of social inquiry. The final sections of the article then turn to the question of data in immersive cartography. Drawing on Whitehead’s (1978) radically environmental theory of “prehension,” these sections work to reconceptualize data through the speculative figuration of the “data event,” while also outlining techniques for sensing, theorizing, and working with cartographic data in ways that foreground its potentials for social transformation.

Trajectories and Becomings

In a brief essay titled What Children Say, Deleuze (1997) proposes a conceptualization of cartography akin to what children are always doing: “exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them” (p. 61). This notion of cartography does not function to survey and represent a static territory or predetermined structure (of concepts, meanings, or associations), but rather moves through and with ongoing trajectories of intensive and extensive movement:

The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement . . . Every map is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures, which necessarily go from bottom to top. (Deleuze, 1997, pp. 61–64)

Deleuze’s child-like rendering of cartography always begins on the ground, as past experiences and future encounters become distributed, conjugated, and constellated in new ways through ongoing processes of mapping and re-mapping, composing and re-composing, inventing and re-inventing the present. Central to this conception of cartography is the concept of milieu, understood in the pluralistic sense of “midst,” “medium,” and “surrounds” for indeterminate trajectories and variations of life and the production of subjectivity, both collective and individual (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie, 2018). As Deleuze (1997) writes, “the trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it” (p. 61). This attunement to a subjectivity inherent within the surrounding milieu establishes a wave of resonance between Deleuzian cartography and the cartographies of many Indigenous and First Nations peoples (Bignall & Rigney, 2019; Cole & Somerville, 2018; Rosiek et al., 2020). Within many Indigenous onto-epistemologies, figurations of place (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) or Country (Barrett, 2015; Somerville & Turner, 2020) refer to a dynamic and inextricable manifold of relations between bodies and environmental milieus. While immersive cartography emerges from a genealogy of thought associated with process philosophy, it shares with many Indigenous philosophies a commitment to think and work through the milieu, immersed in an environmental field of relations which are not yet realized into classifiable units (subjects or objects) or stratified territories.

Deleuze (1997) describes two kinds of maps that can be drawn when working through the milieu: a map of extensions; of external relations and trajectories between bodies, space, time, matter, and form, and a map of intensities, of “affective constellations” composed of intensive relations, events, and becomings. Maps of external relations are ubiquitous, and can be found in all manner of cartographic renderings that present a particular image of formal relations between geographical, political, social, psychological, computational, imaginative, or conceptual territories, among numerous other “stratigraphic” formations (Colebrook, 2016). Maps of extension tend to frame the edges of what is thinkable, sayable, and doable with respect to a milieu, to the extent that they purport to “show” a certain range of external relations between a particular set of things in the world. Any photographic image could be considered an extensive map, to the extent that it exhibits a recognizable set of geometric and semiotic relations between objects represented in the image. Yet, Deleuze suggests that the external relations captured by extensive mapping are never as fixed or determinate as a photograph might suggest. Rather, extensive mappings are inextricably drawn along a trajectory of movement to the extent that they are physically mobile (external relations change depending on perspective), elementally conditional (shifts in climate, temperature, light), and iterative with respect to new technologies and data (such as satellite imaging and data simulations). Extensive maps are not fixed or static because they are infinitely extendable. Each instantiation of an extensive map is just one of any number of alternative mappings.

Where an extensive map offers a particular image of the real with shifting conditions, trajectories, and iterations, a map of intensity is more closely associated with the singularity of a particular constellation of affects as felt transitions. Deleuze (1997) situates intensive maps within relations of movement and transition from one state of the body to another, a passage of intensity that is internal to the felt transitions of “becoming.” Deleuze explains how intensive becomings are concerned with the distribution and redistribution of affects that produce “a body” as such, shifting the bodily capacities for movement, sensation, thinking, feeling, and imagining, along with “the cartographic activity of the unconscious” (p. 62). A body is moved by a map of intensity, to the extent that the map charts the movement of desiring forces which orientate and propel a body to think and act, in other words, that make a body “become.” Intensity, in the sense used by Deleuze here, refers to the affective force of felt vitality that constitutes a body and a subjectivity through the milieu. Examples of intensive cartographies include the songlines and Dreamtime paintings of Indigenous Australians, such as Dorothy Napangardi and Kathleen Petyarre; Jackson Pollack’s unconscious action paintings; and Fernand Deligny’s tracings of the “wandering lines” of autistic children’s movements, gestures, and articulations. In each of these examples,

it is the map of intensity that distributes the affects, and it is their links and valences that constitute the image of the body in each case- an image that can always be modified or transformed depending on the affective constellations that determine it. (Deleuze, 1997, p. 64)

Where extensive maps are open to the infinite extension of knowledge and representation, intensive maps are open to lines of continuous variation in intensity that alter the potentials for what a body can sense, think, do, become.

The Cartographic and Ocurrent Arts

Immersive cartography can be understood to operate in the “mixed milieu” between these two kinds of maps, in the virtual threshold of potentiality that lurks in the nexus between the extensive trajectories and intensive becomings of cartographic activity. It strives to achieve what Deleuze (1997) terms a “cartography-art,” in which art is redefined as the creation of “places of passage” that join extensive trajectories of movement with intensive passages of becoming, such that the work itself becomes a laying out of paths, a collective voyage, an adventure. In contrast with the “personal process of memory and the collective ideal of commemoration” that dominates what Deleuze terms an “archeology-art,” a cartography-art is orientated toward the creation of new external pathways (literally, new movements) that depend entirely on the internal relations of the work itself. This makes cartography an art of transitions and forgettings rather than one of historical memorializations, biographic remembrances, or archeological excavations. To enter a work of cartography-art is to lose track of oneself and one’s categorical “place” in historical time and discourse. Here, Deleuze’s (1997) account of a cartography-art deviates from an archeology of knowledge as undertaken by Foucault. In deviating from the search for discursive “truths” or structurations of biopolitical governance, a cartography-art is inflected instead by a Neitzschean spirit of unrestricted affirmation and anarchic experimentation with aesthetic techniques of existence. Rather than excavating or memorializing the past, a cartography-art opens up a new map of possibilities in the nexus of trajectories and becomings which it lays out. The work of art becomes an invitation to join in the proliferation of mappings that extend new pathways internal to the work itself.

This sense of a conceptual and physical movement internal to the work of art, of an intensity that moves in conjunction with the influx of a radically other “outside,” is what I describe as the feeling of immersion particular to an immersive cartography. To be immersed is to find a (new) way even as you lose track of where you are and what you are doing. This means that those who become immersed in the cartography also alter the warp and weave of its sensorial fabric, drawing out and modifying the virtual potentials of the work by undertaking particular trajectories of feeling, movement, and thought. For Deleuze, the work of art becomes “hodological” rather than “monumental”:

It is as if the real path were intertwined with virtual paths that give it new courses or trajectories. A map of virtualities, drawn up by art, is superimposed onto the real map, whose distances [parcours] it transforms . . . in each case, the choice of a particular path can determine the variable position of the work in space. Every work is made up of a plurality of trajectories that coexist and are readable only on a map, and that change direction depending on the trajectories that are retained. (Deleuze, 1997, p. 67)

Deleuze argues that there is “something unique” in how works of cartography-art draw up a map of virtualities in the tangled paths of extensive trajectories and intensive becomings. Examples of this can be found in the work of environmental artists who harness the intensive qualities and extensive dimensions of space, time, movement, light, sound, and color as “elemental media” for creating new milieus of sensation (McCormack, 2018). The environmental artist Robert Irwin (1985), for instance, describes his works as conditional to a confrontation of forces and intensities which “calls attentions to the pure potential of our circumstances as the whole piece” (p. 77). His installations often deploy the surfaces of permeable screens to produce highly nuanced shifts in the aesthetic conditions of environmental experience, inducing an awareness of the eventfulness of perception itself (Massumi, 2011), or what Irwin (1985) terms the “perception of perception” (p. 92). By including the “perception of perception” as a constitutive element in how the work works, Irwin’s sculptural installations draw out virtual pathways that are conditional to the environmentality of the site and the potentials for extensive and intensive movement. This approach is exemplified in Irwin’s (1985) permanent installation Two Running Violet V Forms at the University of California in San Diego, consisting of a fine steel mesh that cuts transversally through a grove of eucalyptus trees in the heart of the university campus (see Figure 1). The aesthetic qualities of the mesh shift dynamically depending on the elemental conditions of the day, season, and year, at times providing a stark intervention into the grove of trees, while other times becoming only barely perceptible. Extensive movements around, alongside, under, and through the “V-Forms” are constitutive elements of the work, as are the intensive movements of microperceptual awareness as recalibrated by the suspension of the scrim. The work becomes a distributed cartography of trajectories and becomings, traversed by a map of virtualities that reconditions the potentials for environmental awareness through pathways internal to the extension of the work.

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Figure 1.

Robert Irwin, Two Running Violet V-forms (1983), University of California in San Diego.

A different trajectory in the cartographic arts can be found in the turn to digital-environmental milieus through the integration of mapping technologies associated with mobile and wireless communication, context-aware biosensors, GPS (global positioning system) navigation and tracking, and cloud-based datascapes (O’Rourke, 2013). The work of artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko exemplifies this use of digital technologies to remap the potentials for environmental health and multispecies co-existence through new media ecologies. In a work titled Amphibious Architectures (2009-2016), Jeremijenko designed an installation of floating glass tubes in sites along Manhattan’s East and Bronx Rivers with the aim of “mapping a new ecology of people, marine life, buildings, and public space.” The tubes contained a range of sensors, transmitters, and lights that actively monitored the chemical composition and quality of the water, the distribution patterns of fish, as well as human interest and participation in the river’s ecosystem. The network of tubes generated feedback loops of interaction between the fish inhabiting the river systems, human inhabitants of Manhattan, and their shared social environments and interpenetrating milieus. A mobile application enabled people to send chromatically encoded messages to the fish through a matrix of flashing lights, as well as receive real-time updates on fish movements, swarms, and dispersals within the local river environments. By designing affective interfaces for interspecies sensibility across aquatic and terrestrial ecologies, Jeremijenko’s Amphibious Architectures harnesses the power of the digital in overlaying a new map of virtualities in concert with the intensive and extensive movements of the city.

Technique and Technicity

The works discussed briefly here offer two possible “poles” for a cartography-art, ranging from the minimalistic adjustment of environmental conditions (Irwin) to a biomediated networking of techno-ecological interfaces (Jeremijenko, n.d.). While Irwin’s work involves minor recalibrations of the perceptual manifold that conditions the potentials for environmental sensibility, Jeremijenko creates complex infrastructures that extend new nodes of cartographic relation among previously disparate ecological communities. Each artist thus tells a very different story about what a cartography-art might entail, with Irwin tending toward barely perceptible environmental attunements and Jeremijenko foregrounding the potentials of a technically mediated proxemics. Both artists, however, can be seen to work cartographically to the extent that each extension of the work is accompanied by a variation in intensity, and each intensification is coupled with an extension of the body’s capacity to sense, think, and act. As Deleuze (1997, p. 67) suggests, extensive trajectories of movement are inseparable from intensive processes of becoming-other, and the purpose of a cartography-art is to render the “mutual presence” of these trajectories and becomings through techniques of making visible, audible, sensible, or otherwise palpable. Both of these artists work by inventing techniques that remap the possibilities for a body to move through, and with, the mixed milieus of a more-than-human ecology and sensorium.

Immersive cartography repositions these techniques of cartography-art as potentially catalytic in relation to the various ontological, posthumanist, postqualitative, and new materialist turns in educational and social research. In doing so, it seeks to extend the artful invention of technique that characterizes the environmental and relational arts into a cartographic process of social inquiry that reroutes the movements of concepts and sensations across space and time. As taken up in this key, a cartography-art is not posed as the solution to a problem in/with the methodologies of the social sciences (Rousell, 2019). Rather, it is posed as an affirmative experimentation with the empirical conditions of the real that “overflows into and makes possible new kinds of [social] science” (Grosz, 2017, p. 125). Immersive cartography thus addresses the question of how cartography-art might come to transform the very conditions of social inquiry, and in return, how social inquiry might work to follow and extend the intensive and extensive trajectories opened up by works of cartographic art.

In this respect, immersive cartography can be considered an approach to research-creation that rejects the constrictions of qualitative method while affirming a speculative pragmatics of experimentation with artful techniques and technicities of social re-imagining. Manning (2015) argues that predetermined methods arrest or deaden the potentials of research-creation by

cutting into the process before it has a chance to fully engage with the complex relational fields the process calls forth . . . this renders experience still-born, for an event accounted for outside its own evolution is an event that has been taken out of its liveness and organised within the bounds of existing forms of knowledge. (p. 62)

Where methods attempt to predetermine and delimit what a practice might become, technique “comes out of practice as much as it is what goes into practice” (Manning, 2013, p. 33). This notion of technique is intimately linked to the affectivity of bodily capacities in relation to more-than-human milieus, in a manner that acknowledges an ecology of technics well beyond the anthropocentric reductions of human invention and use-value:

There are techniques for hoeing, for standing at a bus stop, for reading a philosophical text, for taking a seat at a restaurant, for being in line at a grocery store . . . there are of course techniques in a seed’s germination, in the shift of the Earth’s axis toward the Sun, and in the process of photosynthesis. And there are techniques that build on techniques—techniques for painting include implicit modes of seeing as well as techniques for manipulating light and texture; techniques for dance include implicit understandings of equilibrium as well as techniques for locating and moving rhythm and extension. (Manning, 2013, p. 33)

From this more-than-human perspective, every technique is intricately entangled with other techniques both human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. Moreover, technique is defined as a mode and manner of creative activity that gives expression to a field of virtual potentials (Whitehead, 1967a). The field of affective resonance and potentiality that surrounds a given technique is what Manning (2013, p. 34) refers to as its technicity, drawing on the work of philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon. “Technicity is the associated milieu of technique . . . [it] is never given in advance, never conditioned before a process is underway” (Manning, 2013, pp. 34–35). For Simondon (1958/2017), technicity refers to a virtual phase space or reservoir of potentiality that inheres to the individuation of technique in space and time. A body, in this sense, exists as much in its potential technicity as it does in its demonstrable presence or “ability” to act, thus troubling any clear boundary between passive and active techniques (Massumi, 2015). This has significant implications for how technique is understood in immersive cartography, to the extent that “a creative art or design practice launches concepts in-the-making . . . [that] are mobile at the level of the techniques they continue to invent” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 89). This makes an immersive cartography inseparable from the techniques that it brings to life within events, and the concepts it “launches” into the mixed milieus of the social.

Techniques for an Immersive Cartography

Our investigations only start when we create . . . our creations must become alive. (Zepke, 2005, p. 5)

The invention of technique is central to immersive cartography as an approach to research-creation that implicates art in recalibrating the very conditions of social inquiry. Immersive cartography involves an investment in a living process of speculative experimentation with technique that takes on its own particular character through the propositions that it sets into motion. This approach is both speculative and pragmatic in Massumi’s (2011, p.12) sense, where the speculative relates to “the character of potential native to the world’s activity” and the pragmatic attends to “the taking-definite-shape of potential in a singular becoming” through the co-composition of a social ecology of experience. As a speculative-pragmatic investment in the not yet of the social, immersive cartography has accrued a life history of techniques that are steeped in the particular places and times of my doctoral project States and Territories.

The States and Territories project began its life in my art studio in a small town in Northern NSW in 2013, and gradually took shape through a series of environmental artworks, digital interfaces, sensory walks, and pedagogical experiments that transformed the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University in the same region. The project pivoted on the co-creation of a “cartographic network” for re-imagining the learning ecologies of the university in response to the urgencies of climate change and the increasing digitization of educational life. Through an iterative series of experimental art installations and walking-based cartographies, the network’s infrastructure evolved into a series of 12 interactive cubes installed in carefully selected locations across the campus. The cubes were created by taking photographs from specific locations within the campus environment, printing the images on sheets of toughened glass, and then re-installing the images back into the original locations where they were captured. The return of the image back into its location of origin was designed to create a diffraction effect between the image, the refractive surface of the glass, and the milieu of the surrounding environment as it exists in a state of continuous variation and flux (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Details of four glass cubes permanently installed in learning environments as part of the States and Territories project.

This cartographic network of relational objects became the infrastructural basis for an ongoing series of extensive and intensive mappings, including the construction of analogue and digital interfaces that variously located the cubes in relation to particular socioecological milieus of the campus. Each installation constituted a technical and aesthetic rupture in the fabric of the learning environment, opening onto a series of geolocated digital portals on the States and Territories website that transformed each node of the cartography into an interface for conceptual experimentation, multisensory mapping, and digital archiving. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the 12 cubes across the university landscape, with each cube intervening in the varied conceptual and physical learning environments of the university, ranging from chemistry laboratories to visual art and media studios, teacher training classrooms, engineering labs, medicinal herb gardens, and rainforested pathways along ancient creek beds. In addition to these physical interventions into the campus environment, the cartography also re-imagined the conceptual landscape of the university by geolocating specific philosophical concepts in relation to each of the cubes. Each concept was selected to provoke responses to current challenges associated with the posthuman condition, including the rapid onset of climate change, biotechnological advances, the co-creation of alternative futures, and the need for a more sensitive and ecological engagement with the more-than-human world. The concepts were also related to the “ecology of practices” situated within various parts of the campus (Stengers, 2005). For instance, the concept of “becoming” was located adjacent to Gnibi College of Indigenous Studies; the concept of “materiality” was located directly below the Chemistry labs; the concept of “design” was located in the School of Engineering; and the concept of “imagining” was located between the Visual Art, Film, and Music studios.

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Figure 3.

Map showing the cartographic distribution of objects and concepts across the learning environments of the university campus.

Over a period of 4 years, this cartographic network grew rhizomatically across disciplinary territories as I undertook collaborative research with more than 200 students and 20 academic staff in diverse learning environments associated with the arts, humanities, and sciences. In many cases, the cartography intervened directly in events taking place within learning environments through guest seminars, pedagogical and curricular experiments, and collaborative research activities. These activities often crystallized around dynamic nodes of experimentation associated with particular concepts and locations on campus. For instance, I spent 6 months working with 40 undergraduate visual arts students exploring the creation of “cartographies of experience.” This node of experimentation completely rerouted the curricular and pedagogical structures of the existing studio arts program for these students, inviting them to become active contributors to the States and Territories project by creating their own creative inquiries within the larger cartographic network (see Figure 4). As participating students developed their “cartographies of experience,” I invited them to map the shifting developments of their material and conceptual practices using video, audio, photography, journaling, and other arts-based techniques of their own invention. This material was then curated and assembled into a multisensory digital archive linked to the “mapping” cube, enabling future students and the wider public to engage with the cartographic movements of the project as it unfolded over the course of that year (https://www.statesandterritories.org/mappings-cs0p). This collaborative process of actively creating—and thinking—with others is central to immersive cartography, as it enables the cartography to be collectively taken up, extended, and intensified along alternative trajectories of aesthetic encounter and becoming.

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Figure 4.

Details from a series of performance drawings created by one of the visual arts studies who participated in the “cartographies of experience” subproject.

In the final year of the project, I began to experiment with mixed reality technologies to open up additional ecologies of participation and cartographic data flows within the network (Rousell, 2019b). Using an augmented reality application called Aurasma, the surfaces of the cubes were embedded with overlays of digital images, soundscapes, or pedagogical cues that could be triggered as people walked the campus with a mobile device. This also led to the co-creation of a series of mixed reality tutorial walks across the campus, enabling lecturers and students to digitally resurface the cubes with their own PowerPoint slides, images, videos, animations, and texts (see Figure 5). Ongoing co-productions and iterations of these walks actively shifted the physical and conceptual trajectories of movement across the campus, as university students, staff, and the wider community came to pass seamlessly through areas previously bounded by disciplinary differences between the sciences, arts, and humanities.

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Figure 5.

Mixed reality overlays triggered on the surfaces of the cubes.

Along with the Aurasma mixed reality platform, the cartographic network was expanded through the Soundtrail mobile application which geolocated environmental field recordings and spoken word narratives from Indigenous elders, university students, staff, and members of the wider community (see Figure 6). These location-based audio works were then assembled into a three-dimensional “soundfield” specific to each cube and its associated concept. A soundfield now “floats” around a 20 m radius of each cube, creating a sonic cartography that you can literally step into and explore the contours of. For instance, as you approach the “becoming” cube outside the Gnibi College of Indigenous Studies, the voice of Bundjalung elder Aunty Irene Harrington fills your ears with stories of her childhood adventures in that very location. As she speaks to you of Bundjalung Country and sings a childhood song in the Widjabul language, Aunty Irene connects Indigenous stories and cartographies of becoming with ecologies of experience that span multiple senses, bodies, cultures, spaces, temporalities, and modes of existence. The immersive cartography is extended and intensified beyond its mere appearance to inhabit a “map of virtualities” that continues to reshape the potentials for experience in and through the diverse milieus of the campus.

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Figure 6.

Media students prototyping the co-produced Soundtrail mobile application.

Data Cartographies

Building on Deleuze’s theorization of a cartography-art, this brief account of the States and Territories project has introduced immersive cartography as an approach to inquiry that is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions . . . detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). The project demonstrates how mapping techniques can proliferate wildly through an immersive cartography, seeding new trajectories for collective movement and altering the sensorial and affective fabrics of a complex and heterogeneous institution like the university. The force of the digital has also been described as accelerating and intensifying this process of proliferation and transformation, increasing the density and intensity of relational potentials, and enabling emplaced objects, such as the cubes, to become pivot points in an intricate network of data sensing, exchange, archiving, and mobilization. Over the course of 4 years, this cartographic network enabled an extraordinary range and quantity of data to be generated and archived through the cubes and associated digital interfaces, ranging from physical artworks, walks, and artifacts to digital films, photographs, sound works, web pages, texts, maps, syllabus, and assessment briefs. Yet, this accelerated proliferation of data also raised critical questions about the very nature of cartographic inquiry over the course of the project: How is data being sensed, metabolized, and operationalized in and through the cartographic process? What are the cartographic forces and potentials of this data? How might immersive cartography edge toward a nonanthropocentric “social science” of data ecologies and felt intensities?

These questions shift immersive cartography beyond the normative registers of artistic practice, which rarely follow the ongoing “data life” of a work of art through its public encounters. It is here that Whitehead’s speculative empiricism provides a valuable augmentation of the cartographic inquiry process outlined in the earlier sections of this article via Deleuze. Perhaps it is immersive cartography’s continued attention to the wildness of data, to its mutant proliferation through lively experimentation, that maintains its most overt connection with what might be termed a “social science.” Yet, whatever alliance immersive cartography has with the social sciences also involves a radical undoing of historically anthropocentric connotations of “the social,” as well as a posthumanist decoupling of the social production, circulation, and sensation of data from any privileged status of “the human.” In acknowledging the more-than-human sociality and potentiality of data, the second part of this article turns to Whitehead’s speculative empiricism as a necessary intervention into the cartographic inquiry process introduced via Deleuze. In many ways, this follows the arc of my thinking as immersive cartography grew and developed: while Deleuze’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) concept of “cartography” set States and Territories into flight, I eventually turned to Whitehead’s concept of “data” to develop an intuitive understanding of how the cartography was working, and what it was producing. Inevitably, this turn to Whitehead via data ended up revising the entire theoretical apparatus of immersive cartography, leaving no concept or technique untainted by its influence. Like Deleuze, Whitehead is interested in the dynamic interplay of felt relations in the formation of experiential assemblages and societies of all kinds. Whitehead’s project is distinct, however, in positing “data” as both a fact and a factor in the “feeling” of events ranging from the subatomic to the cosmic. It is this radically environmental conception of data that forms the focus of the remaining sections of this article, which elaborate on the conceptual figuration of the “data event” and reconnect this evental conception of data with the Deleuzian formulations of cartography introduced earlier.

Vectors of Feeling

Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction.” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 40)

Whitehead’s speculative theorization of data hinges on his concept of prehension, as initially introduced in Science and the Modern World (1967b) and developed more thoroughly in Process and Reality (1978) and Adventures of Ideas (1967a). ¹ The concept of prehension is predicated on Whitehead’s systematic development of a relational schema of processual units of reality which he terms actual occasions. Every actual occasion constitutes a singular process of becoming which is determined by how a particular selection of data is felt, or “prehended.” This process of prehension is what links one “drop” or “pulse” of experience to another, composing events through the relational interplay between data and how it is grasped, metabolized, and expressed from one occasion of experience to the next. In this quantum account of events as dynamic multiplicities of actual occasions, Whitehead (1978) delineates a becoming of continuity that unfolds as each occasion appropriates data from previous occasions through a “historic route of inheritance” (p. 35). For Whitehead, “becoming is not continuous, because each occasion, each act of becoming, is unique,” as each encounter with data is a creative process which culminates in a “new form of ‘concrete togetherness,’ or concrescence” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 20, emphasis in original). Every datum is the potential catalyst for an affective encounter that is produced through the intersecting and mutually inclusive process of prehension, which finds its concrescence as a novel form of togetherness, a dynamic unity of disjunctive elements. Rather than being predetermined or simply given, data inject a new potentiality into each prehension and produce new contrasts and varieties of experience. Data are what cut, provoke, disrupt, mutate, differentiate, activate and transform a living process, rather than being limited to what is given in advance of the process. An event receives and folds a particular selection of data into its process of creative activity, and in doing so, produces a new “subjective form” which shapes the affective tonality and texture of the event as an occasion of experience. Rather than data being the “product” of a subject’s experience, it is the subject (or what Whitehead renames the “superject”) which is precipitated anew through the felt prehension of data.

This reciprocal and constructive quality of prehension is described by Whitehead (1978) as a “vector of feeling.” Like Deleuze’s cartography discussed earlier, each vector of feeling exhibits both an extensive and intensive pole, a “public” and a “private” dimension. Consider the occasion of looking up at the moon outside your window. This occasion involves an extensive trajectory of relation between you and the moon that is physiologically constituted and “publicly” measurable with respect to differentials in speed, proximity, and mass, the passage of photons into the retina, and so on. And yet Whitehead’s cosmology also includes an intensive, or “private” dimension of each vector that is strictly internal to the felt qualities of the occasion itself. Hence, the intensity of your encounter with the moon cannot be reduced to mere sense-perception of external data, nor can it be reduced to a measurable quantity such as distance between bodies or magnitude of light. Rather, it is the combination of these extensive factors with the intensive factors of affective attunement and feeling that “colour” the event with a particular quality of felt relationality. Shaviro (2014, p. 155) describes this as a process of aesthesis, in which bodies make “aesthetic contact at a distance,” achieving a proximity of mutual relation regardless of measurable distances in space and time.

A visual exemplification of this “vector-character” of prehension is shown in Figure 7. Vectors of prehension are mapped as lines extending between various actual entities within the data ecology inhabited by an art student who participated in the States and Territories project. Hand, eye, clay, face, body, screen, table, and camera can all be considered prehensions of one another, prehensions that may or may not be termed “conscious.” Within Whitehead’s (1978, p. 241) speculative scheme, “consciousness is an element of feeling” which arises in the relatively “high-grade” actual occasions that compose the lives of what he terms the “higher animals,” including humans. Thus, within a given ecology or society of occasions, “an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of its experience” (p. 53). The clay in Figure 7 might enjoy a relatively dense and contracted experience over time with little chance of becoming conscious in any anthropomorphic sense. Yet, the clay still prehends data such as atmospheric changes and the pressure of hands as data that are incomprehensible to humans. Similarly, the camera of one of the tablet screens is prehending the artist’s material process as data, while another tablet is simultaneously being prehended (as data) by the artist as the basis for her experimentations with clay.

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Figure 7.

An art student mapping her studio processes with vectors of prehension shown as lines of sight: Prehensions of prehensions.

This example demonstrates how prehension is always a process of mutual inclusion and reciprocal affectivity that constitutes a data ecology, or what Whitehead calls a “society,” of actual occasions. ² The hand prehends the clay, just as the clay prehends the hand; the screen prehends the artist, just as the artist prehends the screen. This is not simply an infrastructural “network” of extensive relations and information exchange because each prehension also contributes a private, aesthetic intensity to the exchange. Things don’t just “connect” and “relate” superficially within this society, because they mutually include and appropriate aspects of each other’s existence through their data. The concept of prehension undermines any attempt to draw a fast boundary between “quantitative” and “qualitative” data, because any datum whatsoever is defined by its capacity to shift the aesthetic tonality of the event of which it is a factor.

The concept of prehension also performs an ontological flattening of anthropocentric hierarchies that would otherwise position human consciousness as mentally superior, more important, or exceptional in relation to the nonhuman participants or “creatures” of a given society. Mentality, in Whitehead’s sense, is an aspect of all processes and events, and does not simply “emerge” from a sufficiently complex material order, as emergentist accounts of embodied cognition have suggested (Protevi, 2013). Rather, Whitehead (1967) suggests that experience arises through the prehension of data, and proliferates through the energetic transference of this prehension of data into the next occasion. As a precognitive intensity of feeling or “data-sense” (Hansen, 2014), prehension is not simply a different word for the phenomenological perception of a human subject who sees, hears, or touches an object that exists outside the self, nor is it simply a line of sight or extension which can be reduced to mere number or measurement. Even the most abstract articulation of number or measurement is considered to harbor a qualitative intensity in this speculative conception of data. Understanding data through Whitehead’s philosophy therefore necessitates a leap of the speculative imagination because, as Massumi (2011) writes,

. . . you have to be open to the possibility of rethinking the world as literally made of feelings, or prehensive events . . . That could be mystical. But then again, it could be a question of technique. (p. 85, emphasis in original)

The Data Event

In this section and the following, I return to the technicity of the cubes with the aim of integrating some of the implications of Whitehead’s speculative-empirical account of data within the context of immersive cartography. Whitehead’s theory of prehension suggests that any encounter whatsoever involves a datum that operates as a propositional “lure” for this or that occasion of experience to be felt (Whitehead, 1978, p. 25). The lure of the datum is propositional insofar as it offers the potential for feeling, and this agency of the datum places the dynamic play of prehension in continuous and intimate contact with the actuality of any event. Yet, the question remains as to how an object can also become the subject of its own immediacy without a human consciousness or mind as the mediating or discerning factor. This problem has particular relevance for an immersive cartography that activates objects, such as the cubes, as lures for intensive and extensive movement. Whitehead offers an explanation using the example of Cleopatra’s Needle, an ancient Egyptian monument that has resided on London’s Victorian Embankment since the 19th century. To this day, the Needle appears as a seemingly motionless and inert object that has also accrued a substantive history since being sculpted from a single chunk of granite in approximately 1450 BCE. For Whitehead, however, the Needle is much more than simply an inert object to which things have historically “happened.” Rather, the Needle is actively “happening” at each moment as a series of actual occasions that are actively renewed and perpetuated through the prehension of data (Whitehead, 1978, p. 279).

It is on this very point that Deleuze (1993) offers one of his most overt and substantive engagements with Whitehead in his book The Fold. “The Great Pyramid is an event,” Deleuze (pp. 76–78) writes. “At any given moment the pyramid prehends Napoleon’s soldiers (forty centuries of history are contemplating us).” The Great Pyramid is not simply an object to which history has happened, but an event that contributes 40 centuries of stratigraphic history to the ontological weight and texture of any encounter with it. Drawing on the work of Bernard Cache, Deleuze (1993, p. 19) re-imagines such enduring objects as objectiles, combining the terms “object” and “projectile” to invoke “the sense in which objects are not fixed points in a spatial location, but rather spatio-temporal processes over time” (Bryant, 2009, p. 1). Instead of conforming to a hylomorphic “spatial mold” which imposes form onto matter, the objectile exists in a state of continuous modulation and variation with respect to duration, matter, technicity, and form (Deleuze, 1993, p. 19). It is in this sense that the objectile is attributed with a virtual dimension beyond its physical form, such that the sounds, colors and textures that inhere to an object become “flexible and taken in modulation” (p. 19). This can be demonstrated empirically simply by turning the lights off and watching the colors of surrounding objects shift as your eyes adjust to the darkness. The objects endure, but their qualitative consistency changes in response to the prehension of elemental conditions such as light, shadow, color, and hue. ³ This qualitative shift in the appearance of objects can be understood as part of their ongoing existence, in the sense that the objects themselves are inseparable from the intensive vectors of prehension which they also afford. The act of turning off the lights and noticing the shift in the affective tonality of the room is a relatively simple example of what I am calling a “data event.”

In the States and Territories project, the cubes can be seen to operate as lures for the ongoing unfolding of such “data events” across the university landscape. As an objectile, each cube becomes “the attractor for an event . . . a missile for experience that inflects a given spacetime with a spirit of experimentation” (Manning, 2013, p. 92). Rather than existing as fixed objects in space and time, the cubes “extend beyond their objectness to become ecologies for complex environments that propose dynamic constellations of space, time and movement” (p. 92, emphasis added). At any given moment, the concrete existence of the cube renews its identity as an object that endures through the passage of time. The cube is never the same actual object, because with each passing moment it has lost and gained electrons, it has been rubbed, washed, or tarnished by other bodies, dust particles have collected on its faces (Whitehead, 1964, p. 167). In this way, each cube is at once a singularity continuously taking shape as a unique and enduring object, and a multiplicity that is sustained by the ever-changing manifold of data that populate its relational field of encounter. Considered as an objectile, each cube becomes the attractor for a data event in the making (see Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Shifting data mappings produced by taking photographs of the cubes’ surfaces under constantly changing light, weather, and seasonal conditions.

In theorizing the concept of data event, I am treating the prehensive activity or “becoming” of the cube as a technicity and a sensibility which operates outside of human agency. The cube provides a working example of this because of its unique technical properties and capacities. The physical appearance of the cube is constantly changing due to the rippling flows of diffracted imagery across its manifold surfaces. Even the most subtle adjustment in the physical body of the observer also produces dynamic shifts in the cube’s sensible qualities. Different images are produced every time one of the cubes is photographed, depending on weather patterns and the atmospheric play of photons across its surfaces. Digital augmentations enable any number of images, artifacts, or activities to be encoded into its surfaces and triggered as lures for feeling. Rather than being passive or inert, the cube is actively happening with each passing moment through the techniques of existence it makes possible: “a renewal, a novelty, a fresh creation” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 18). We could say that each cube prehends its surrounding environment through the data which register on its surfaces, and the bodies that make aesthetic contact with its “associated milieu” of technicity (Simondon, 1958/2017).

The image in Figure 9 demonstrates how the cubes’ surfaces are constantly prehending changes in weather patterns, seasons, times of day, the movements of human and nonhuman bodies, and the play of color, light, and shadow, among many other data. These surfacings defy any attempt at a coherent documentation of the cubes as static or inert objects. They refuse to become intelligible through linguistic interpretation, or measurable through numeric calculation. Instead, they attain a degree of aesthetic abstraction in which the boundaries between image, surface, technique, sensation, data, and milieu become diffracted, entangled, indiscernible. Each cube comes to operate as an “abstract machine” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that continuously produces new contrasts of aesthetic sensation regardless of human interpretation or intentionality. These contrasts generate aesthetic patterns of feelings between different things in a world: prehensions of prehensions, techniques and technicities, each folded into the surface of a “data event” in the making (Rousell, 2018).

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Figure 9.

Detail image of the surface of the cube as it blends images of the lake with other perceptual elements of its environmental manifold.

An Influx of Otherness

A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; . . . it retains the impress of what it might have been, but is not. (Whitehead, 1978, pp. 226–227)

Every encounter with the cube offers potentials for feeling the data of the actual world differently: a lure for feeling. What I’m calling the data event is a commingling of such lures and associated prehensions in which data are felt through a plurality of techniques and technicities. And yet the data event will always exceed its perceptible actualizations. No matter how advanced the techniques at our disposal, some data are always left out, remaining unseen, unexhausted, spectral, negatively prehended (Whitehead, 1978, p. 226). A data event “never fully actualises” because there are always elements of the event that remain imperceptible, subsisting as an unexhausted aesthetic remainder or virtual surplus of value (Manning, 2013, p. 25). In this way, the data event is continuously haunted by data that remain outside of its frame of reference and perceptibility (Blackman, 2019).

Each of the data events in States and Territories occupies multiple spacings, bodyings and timings, each has textures and folds with interior and exterior surfaces, and significantly, each has elements which are imperceptible, left out, negatively prehended. This is exemplified in an artwork called Always a Hole, produced by one of the undergraduate art students who participated in the “Cartographies of Experience” node of the States and Territories project. In a video dialogue that forms part of the mapping archive on the project website, the artist describes how learning to play the guitar served as an entry point for a creative recomposition of her parents’ relationship as local musicians in the 1970s. She develops a cartography by painting images onto record sleeves using old photographs of her parents to construct an imagined history. “There’s always a piece missing,” she says. In each of her paintings, the hole of the record sleeve provides a formal device that cuts out certain elements of the images, disrupting the viewer’s perception of what lies inside and outside of the frame (see Figure 10):

I’ll never be able to go back and see what they were really like, and I’ll never even be able to get the whole story of what their music sounded like. But I can see just enough to get a glimpse backwards. I guess it has been like mapping the past in that way, trying to get back things that you can’t ever actually map.

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Figure 10.

Painting installation produced by a participating art student as part of the mapping data event.

The data event is a relational composition of bodyings, spacings, and timings which yet remains incomplete. The hole in the record allows it to play on the turntable. The hole in the guitar allows sound to resonate through its body. The pieces that are left out are still prehended, only negatively. “This whole history of these people that I have no idea what they were like,” she continues. “Somehow half the circle’s been cut out. Even though I can’t connect with the past any more than I have, the work creates all these new connections.” The records as cartographies of what her parents lives might have been. The guitar as an objectile that fields possible prehensions, allowing data to be felt in new ways. The hauntings of unrealized potentials are affirmed like a negative of the image, as a contributory element of the “map of virtualities” that eludes, and yet produces, the actual.

While Always a Hole may appear to focus on human experience, Manning (2015) argues that the relational field activated by such works “touches on an ecology that is more than human. The work participates in a worlding that potentially redefines the limits of existence” (p. 60). Always a Hole reminds us that nothing is given in the datum but a pure potential to become the raw material for the next cartography, that the old is always required to produce the new. “Newness always depends on something prior . . . like the way a DJ creates new music by sampling and remixing already-existing tracks” (Shaviro, 2014, p. 101). This “something prior” is the datum as an influx of otherness (Whitehead, 1967) or “dark precursor” of experience (Deleuze, 1990, p. 119). The datum always precedes and exceeds the human because it is given only in the virtuality of a radically environmental outside, in the interstices or vacuoles of potential where data events lurk and play. ⁴

Cartographies in the Afterward

This article has offered an introduction to immersive cartography through a series of movements across a selection of artful examples, theoretical problematics, aesthetic techniques, and technicities. It has focused throughout on the construction of an alternative image of cartographic inquiry predicated on an aesthetic logic of feeling. I began by outlining the contours of a “cartography-art” as elaborated by Deleuze (1997), focusing on the dynamic interplay between extensive and intensive mapping practices in selected works of environmental art. This led to a discussion of technique and technicity as pivotal components of an immersive cartography, drawing on the speculative pragmatics of Manning and Massumi (2014) to situate this approach within the matrix of research-creation. Specific examples of cartographic techniques were then introduced through the States and Territories project, including the creation of a cartographic network of relational objects and digital interfaces capable of re-orientating intensive and extensive movement across a university campus. In the final sections of the article, I turned to the problem of data generated by an immersive cartography, drawing on Whitehead’s (1978) speculative empiricism to propose the “data event” as a conceptual figuration that attends to the more-than-human potentials and potencies of data. In reconsidering the status of objects as objectiles with their own data events and associated milieus, I suggest that immersive cartography offers a distinctive alternative to existing arts-based, posthumanist, and postqualitative approaches in the social sciences and humanities. The particular qualities of this approach include its refusal to reduce cartographic inquiry to human discourse, representation, metaphor, or measurement, along with an ethico-aesthetic commitment to enact palpable cuts in the infrastructural and atmospheric conditions of the environments in which it operates.

As discussed in the passages above, the States and Territories project has demonstrated how immersive cartography can transform everyday public spaces and learning environments into creative laboratories for experimenting with alternative materialities, ontologies, concepts, and techniques. This transformative orientation is both a challenge and a promise of immersive cartography, as an approach that attempts to mobilize a renewed speculative empiricism through artful and ecologically sensitive instantiations and interventions in the public domain. However, one of the lingering questions that haunts immersive cartography is the extent to which it can survive the States and Territories project. What does immersive cartography do in the methodological “afterward” (Lather, 2013) of its own exhaustion? Does another approach need to be formulated, in-the-making, every time we begin a new project? I believe the answer is both yes and no. While immersive cartography is inherently anti-paradigmatic and nonformulaic, it does build new conceptual, practical, and analytic techniques that can endure beyond the life of a given project. Immersive technology lives through the techniques and technicities it continues to bring to life.

After completing the States and Territories project I relocated to Manchester, UK, to join what is now the Manifold Laboratory for biosocial studies across the arts, humanities, and sciences (www.biosocialresearchlab.com). The Local Alternatives project emerged from the Lab in 2017, and has evolved through an ongoing series of collaborations with young people exploring new ways of sensing and imagining their local environments through artistic experimentation (see www.localalternatives.org). This collaborative project has brought some of the elements of immersive cartography into the community art centers, neighborhoods, galleries, and museums of Greater Manchester, and our project team is continuing to expand this cartography into other cities across Europe and Australia. ⁵

The Local Alternatives project continues to engage with many of the founding gestures of immersive cartography: inventing new techniques of inquiry; making maps you can walk into; diagramming data events; following the pedagogical movements of concepts; mapping vectors of feeling and intensity. New technologies are also shifting these cartographies into different registers and trajectories, generating alternative possibilities for multisensory immersion and environmental reconditioning through mixed realities, sensory technologies, and walking-based interventions in public space. Specifically, we have been experimenting with the creative potentials of biosensing technologies, such as electro-dermal skin sensors, in mapping the circulation of affective intensities as bodies move and interact with different environments in the city (de Freitas & Rousell, 2018; Rousell et al., 2018). By creating environments where the sympathetic data of the affective body can be made publicly sensible (see Figure 11), we are cultivating alternative theorizations and cartographic implementations of these technologies as elemental or “atmospheric” media (de Freitas, 2018; de Freitas et al., 2019).

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Figure 11.

Detail from an installation created as part of the “superpositions” exhibition at Birley Art Gallery, by David Rousell, Elizabeth de Freitas, and the Z-artists (ages 5–14).

Our work in the Local Alternatives project shows how immersive cartography can have a life in the afterward. It is an approach that continues to feel its way along new trajectories, cobbling together a collective inquiry as it moves, extending and intensifying the cartography into a future that participates in the present. In Whitehead’s (1978, p. 45) terms, this future-making capacity inheres to the “subjective form” through which a cartography achieves both a dynamic concrescence and a perpetual perishing. Immersive cartography only endures for as long as bodies continue to think it, perform it, reinvent, and renew its techniques. The cartography survives through the techniques that it helps bring into being, as a particular inflection on events that will always have been just as they came to pass. We might think of this as the immortality of things thought, said, and written; of activity engaged to varying and unknowable effect; of feelings that are felt and continue to resonate; and of cartographies that make a difference in the unfolding of an actual world.