STUDIO OVERVIEW

Studio focuses on critically experimenting with what spatial media (can) do as aesthetic, narrative, and rhetorical instruments. Studio work revolves around a creative, iterative, and self-reflexive process. This process is grounded in constructive, critical feedback to work-in-progress offered during in-class “crits”.

In addition to guidelines for specific studio sessions, we will post primers on various theoretical and historical approaches to a selected disciplinary techniques and genres of spatial media. The first two primers on collage + bricolage and systems diagrams are now available, as are tutorials on photoshop (Parts I and II) and Google Earth Engine.

STUDIO PRIMER A: COLLAGE + BRICOLAGE

This first entry for studio precedents presents a genealogical primer on the core practices and aesthetics of collage and bricolage: assemblage, juxtaposition, and layering.

Overview

For our first studio module we will be exploring digital techniques for collage using Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop, notably, adapts a set of tools and processes drawn from photographic image making, from initial exposure of light-sensitive film to chemical development and manual post-processing. While the basic tenets of collage (mixing and assembling heterogenous media, cutting and pasting) predate photography, this primer will focus on the emergence of collage as a formal aesthetic technique through the collision (bricolage) of photographic images and other media of “mechanical realism” layered with the figurative and abstract realms of other visual arts (painting, drawing, etc).

In this sense, working with Photoshop intersects in a historically important way with the technical lineage of collage while incorporating new possibilities for engaging the transformation of “mechanical realism” into what we might call our contemporary “digital realism.” This transformation is not without friction; geospatial and other kinds of data complicate the mimetic (i.e., imitative or representational) function of photography in powerful ways. 

Thinking across mechanical and digital modes of collage opens up important compositional questions:

• How might collage open up aesthetic strategies for exploring contemporary spaces of the unmapped and unmappable through assembling and remixing representational (e.g., photographic) and non-representational (e.g., data) spatial media?
  
  
• Rather than a new form of mapping (or even “counter-mapping”), might we consider collage a kind of unmapping that affirms alternative, non-cartographic ways of knowing space, place, and the bodies and relations stitching them together?
  

Mechanical (sur)realism at war: Histories of post-war collage, part 1

Within the scope of modern art practice, collage appears on the artistic scene in Paris and Berlin around the end of the 19th century. Avant-garde artists like Max Ernst (Here Everything Is Still Floating (Hier ist noch alles in der Schwebe), 1920, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), below] take up collage as way to critically engage, work out, and experiment with the increasing mechanization of social life, from the factory floor to mass-produced experience like film. 

This is particularly important with respect to World War I, the first fully “industrialized” war in which bodies of soldiers, machines, and the earth were increasingly enmeshed in and mangled by the mechanical operations and machinic model of warfare — a thematic motif that recurs throughout the (overwhelmingly male) practitioners of early post-war collage work. The resultant collaged assemblages bring into relief the unfamiliar and uncanny relations between bodies, materials, landscapes, and an ever-expanding range of temporal and spatial scales.

Different visual elements drawn from disparate source materials could be remade into an apparently seamless but troubling whole (see Ernst, Water below); or those elements could be more obviously juxtaposed and layered to emphasize explicit discontinuity and dissimilitude.


In both cases, the radical (and often forced) recontextualization of images through reference to each other generated spaces of tension and difference, fraught with non-linear scalar and historical relations.

For many of these artists, collage offered a way to turn the tools of mechanical realism against itself, revealing the deep contradictions and violent histories through which European rationalism so quickly transformed its “civilized” world into the crucible of unprecedented and unrivaled barbarism. For artists like Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, and others in Dadaist/Surrealist circles, the jarring, often grotesque juxtapositions of imagery drawn from apparent avatars of “civilization” and “barbarism” — the very threshold of difference justifying white supremacist cultures of racial colonialism emanating out from Europe, England, and the United States and Canada — showed a more complicated entanglement of socio-psychic relations transgressing those oversimplified boundaries. Höch, working athwart the masculinist focii of her peers, marshalled transcultural imagery of women (an early Italian film star, a Cameroonian dance mask) to trace a generalized subaltern status across different geographic and historical contexts, finding another domain of internal contradiction and “boundary struggle” (Fraser 2014). We should note here that these critiques were still made at the expense of a racialized and gendered Other — here, black women, outside the frame, rendered only partially as a function of another subject.


On the one hand, then, collage operated as a mode of critique opening up onto an unplumbed collective unconscious unbound by rational modes of thought; on the other hand, it offered a way to explore the speculative possibilities of those new, surreal spaces of imagination, moving beyond the catastrophic failures of the capitalist-colonial “web of life.” Collage soon became a more formal exercise codified in the sort of holistic art education typified by the Bauhaus; collage began to represent not only a novel way to create relationally-rich images, but to liberate thought and experience from the rigid matrix of rationalism.


The limitations of that liberation were made plain by artists like Höch and, later, Romare Bearden. Insofar as collage approaches the body as a key site of boundary struggle, incessantly reconfigured by contradictory and overlapping historical contexts and material conditions, the particularity of those bodies and embodied experience matters. Bearden, working in the context of the Great Migration (1916–1970s) of Black flight from the Jim Crow South to northern cities, evinces a quasi-mystical figure of a “conjur woman” from torn and cut found imagery that mediates supernatural and natural spheres, an axis of deep power and, as Silvia Federici and others argue, perennial threat to a white, patriarchal order. That the racialized and gendered figure of the witch persists through collage across post-traumatic periods following the world wars suggests a importance in rendering a hidden historical continuity through aesthetic discontinuity. As guides for a heterodox historiography of the “hidden abode,” these collages do work that a conventional map cannot — and perhaps should not — do.




The Geo-politics of Collision: Histories of post-war collage, part 2

The radical and rapid transformations to the built environment following World War II — as a result of destruction of cities and landscapes during the war, rebuilding, and new development across the world — fomented a spatial imagination echoing with Dadaist and Surrealist tendencies from the first “post-war” period. The blasted social and physical landscape not only revealed forgotten historical geologic and urban strata but jumbled them together as so much bombed-out rubble. The confrontation between different spatial imaginations and their artifactual remains — namely the vernacular traditions of local and regional styles against the scientific universalism of modern architecture and urbanism — set the stage for what architectural theorist and historian Colin Rowe and his collaborator Fred Koetter called the “politics of ‘bricolage’.” Bricolage, borrowed from French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, referred to the verb bricoler, associated with a playful domain of activity: “ball games and billiards, hunting, shooting, and riding” (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Rowe and Koetter 102). More specifically, it referred to a creative potential in the moment of “extraneous movement” resulting from a collision, rebound, or reaction. The bricoleur — one who practices bricolage as a deliberate but aleatory (full of chance) activity —

is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of the craftsman… is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer…does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.

(Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Rowe and Koetter, 102–103)

Rowe and Koetter extrapolate this figure to describe the post-war urban condition as that of the accidental “collage city,” where the very production of space is a dialectical process moving back and forth between scientific, rationalist planning and creative bricolage. For them, to take up bricolage against the hegemony of rationalist planning constituted a political maneuver, developing a political aesthetics of spatial production to grapple with the non-linearity of time as a construct equally applicable to psychic experience, architecture, and urban geography.



Collage had, however, long been an architectural tool for rendering imaginary spaces. One of the major exponents of modern architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, used collage throughout his career. His collages did not necessarily share Rowe’s post-modern ambitions, but began to move from a photorealistic style (below top left) to bolder, more abstract, textural, and symbolically-complicated compositions (below top right and bottom row). Like Dadaist and Surrealist collages, the overlaying of disparate spatial and temporal scales alongside culturally heterogenous elements demanded an act of imagination from an undefined (though, in the case of art and architecture, predictable with respect to class, race, and gender) viewer. Collage does not simply represent imagined spaces to the viewer, but implicates the viewer in the production of space through an imagination variably activating both lived experience and cultural context.







The production of imaginary spaces through collage could also be put to work to reveal invisible histories and forces at work in and on the landscape. Hans Hollein, for example, began to compose stark, photorealistic collages for which landscape as such became the subject of transformation. His Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape (1964) at once critically comments on the ubiquitous yet occluded militarism of the Cold War period, the comparable scales of post-war artifacts of militarism and urbanism, and the lie of pastoral peace in a world where even agricultural production became entrained in global geopolitics.


Other architects developed more speculative, future-oriented visions: Ron Herron, a member of the London-based experimental architecture collective Archigram (1961–1974), generated a series of collages for a “Walking City” roaming across non-urban spaces, from forested mountains to the ocean. The Walking City proposal, fantastical as it is, must be read not only through Herron’s collages but in relation to more critical work by Hollein; its radical urban autonomy is in direct contrast to the inescapable overdetermination of landscapes by Cold War geopolitics. In a very different context, the libertarian Seasteading Institute has adopted Herron’s vision as an icon of a narrowly-defined economic freedom, becoming a model for the mobile tax haven increasingly capturing the imagination of tech billionaires new and old. Collages, by nature of bricolage, converse with each other across time, appropriating one collage as “raw material” for another, transforming contextual relations yet again.


A similar pattern of bricolage is found in the work of Superstudio (Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Alessandro Poli, 1966–1978; Florence, Italy) and Rem Koolhaas, founder of OMA. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument project imagined a superstructural grid girdling the globe, with only slight variations to accommodate existing conditions. The monument inverted the typical relation between collaged objects and landscapes: rather than inserting a new object into a landscape, the “object” here became the frame for the landscape, performing a radical and simultaneous de- and recontextualization of everyday spaces and life. Following the traditions of collage, these were not only spatial transformations, but psychic ones as well, delving into the hidden abodes of the unconscious, then surfacing and recontextualizing what was found there (see bottom row, right).





Around the same time, Koolhaas appropriated the Superstudio grid (center image) to suggest that the superstructure was already in place: the mass sprawl of post-war suburbia. Superstudio’s emancipatory (if ironic) tone became a more cynical spatial gesture: denizens of the developed urban world were, to Koolhaas, “voluntary prisoners of architecture.”




Yet again, the question of the viewer returns through the collage: who exactly are the “voluntary prisoners” of architecture as envisioned by modern and post-modern architects? Reflecting on the post-slavery legacies of Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration, Amanda Williams, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, and other architects and artists affiliated with the Black Reconstruction Collective use collage as a vector of emancipatory expropriation to imagine spaces for Black futures too often excluded from the various visions of the “Collage City.” Collage becomes a medium for asking a question that runs through each of these legacies, but is transformed and radicalized by the position from which the question is posed: “How do we design free spaces?” Here is yet another power of the collage: to re-ask a question that has not been answered, or is unanswerable, without having first stepped into the hidden abode.




The last set of examples of contemporary collage involve a more direct confrontation with geography as a form of knowledge, representation, and power. Nowhere is this more apparent than the emergence and recurring collapse of the well-bounded, well-defined Westphalian nation-state. Building on critiques by radical spatial thinkers, particularly those drawing on anarchist traditions in geography, the nation-state is itself a violent form of geographic collage: the tearing of a figure from its background that recontextualizes the territory around it, often without reference to complex histories of kinship, migration, subsistence relations to land, or ecology. In this vein, collage became a key technique for Situationist artists and activists during the radical, student-led political movements leading up to and after 1968, challenging the hegemony of the state to define, organize, and administer space.

The border — whether between neighborhood, city/non-city, or nations — became an especially fraught figuration of state power and site of struggle to subvert it. Guy Debord and other situationists proposed the dérive — an experimental, undirected way of moving through the city— as a mode of unmapping state space while producing new “psychogeographies” of the city that could not be rendered by conventional cartographic means. Teddy Cruz, a Guatemalan architect and activist working in the San Diego/Tijuana region, remixes Debord’s diagram in his own research on the border. Cruz’s “conflict map” suggests that even as we recognize the border as a thickened space full of human and non-human forces and flows (see top row, right; bottom row), no single method of representation conveys the complex layerings of life through which the border itself becomes a living geographic protagonist, and a rich space for a reimagined “politics of bricolage.”




The border, finally, is a paradigmatic space of surveillance, a geography for which image-making is automated by drones, satellites, and cameras keeping watch for bodies out-of-place. Surveillance becomes a kind of anti-collage, putting everything in its place, and refusing any question that would require a recontextualization of the border. This suggests another iteration of the collage: using the surveillance apparatus itself as a medium, as in JR’s Gigantic Picnic project. The artist and collaborators staged a cross-border picnic, using a table set with a textile printed with the eyes of a “dreamer” (DACA recipient) looking back at the surveilling state. Here, collage becomes a medium of presentation, rather than representation — a showing up, surfacing, or presencing of a “hidden abode” of power rather than its mere depiction. The collage can become a physical technique of tactical geographic intervention, scaling itself to the landscape rather than to the image of the landscape, producing real and imaginary spaces in one and the same movement.

---

STUDIO 01.2: TUTORIAL PART I

This module covers the first steps for working with raster images, masks, layers, and blending in Adobe Photoshop.

Premise and Objectives

This studio tutorial is split into two parts, {S01.1} and {S01.2}. After working through the tutorial, you will have:

• Become familiar with the Photoshop user interface
• Learned the basics of adding, transforming, and masking raster images
• Learned basic selection methods using manual and automated techniques
• Explored compositional approaches to collage using a combination of masks, layers, and layer blending
• Develop a strategy for sourcing found materials

IMPORTANT NOTE ON WIP POSTS FOR STUDIO:

The work that you’re doing now is much more open-ended. Please post something that shows your contribution to your group’s work in progress. The write-up should simply tell us what it is that you’re trying to highlight, and any workflow issues you encountered. 


Good Sources and the Ethics of Image Manipulation


In the age of Google Image, Pinterest, AI-generated imagery, and other dubiously sourced image databases, it’s important that you use reputable sources equally appropriate for academic work and artistic practice. Collage necessarily entails using someone else’s artwork or other media, and it is essential that you properly cite them. This is particularly important given the history and context each image carries with it; you should choose an image precisely because it carries that history and context, not simply because it already looks like something you want to think you want to represent.

For the sample collage, we are using four sets of sources. This should guide how you create your own collages, maintaining the integrity of your source materials and ultimately enriching your composition.

1. Scholarly literature: We are drawing on well-sourced scholarly histories of the intersection of flood control techniques by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the use of unfree Black laborers for levee maintenance for the protection and productivity of Mississippi River-adjacent cotton plantations. These histories provide narrative evidence of the infrastructural genealogies of racial capitalism and the “Plantationocene.”  The primary article we’re using for this collage is John D. Davis’ “Levees, Slavery, and Maintenance,” published in Technology’s Stories, August 20, 2018 (https://doi.org/10.15763/jou.ts.2018.08.20.01). The thematic structure of the collage draws explicitly from Davis’ historical argument and sources, with additional materials from an online article citing Davis by Brian Holmes.
2. Archival texts: Many books and other texts are now in the public domain due to the lapse of copyright or no original copyright restrictions. You can find substantial collections at Archive.org and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. These can be fantastic resources for illustrated manuals, guidebooks, technical papers, and so on. For this lab, we’re using an 1887 history of cotton and the cotton trade, The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, by Henry Lee. The book gives us a glimpse into cultural and scientific knowledges around cotton during the post-emancipation period.
3. Archival Maps: There are many online sources for high-quality digital reproductions of archival maps, including the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Library of Congress Map Collection, the British Library Map Collection, and the David Rumsey map collection, now housed at Stanford University. Universities and colleges (including U Chicago) maintain their own collections, often with a more specific regional or thematic focus. Government agencies (for instance, the US Army Corps of Engineers) also often maintain historic map collections online (though you may need to know where to look, as the sites are often dated, poorly organized, and difficult to search). For this collage, we used an archival site for a famous set of 1944 geological surveys of the alluvial valley of the Lower Mississippi River by Harold Fisk.
4. Archival Photographs, Artwork, and other Media: While you may find photographs, artwork, and other media in the digital collections of art museums like MoMA (New York), the images are usually not in the public domain and are protected by copyright. We prefer to use sites like the Library of Congress photo, print, and drawing collection, which maintains almost 1 million images online. National libraries are good sources for these kinds of materials, depending on where your research takes you!

This brings up further questions around the ethics of image manipulation. You should think very, very carefully about the images you choose to manipulate, especially with respect to legacies of violence and oppression they may embody or represent. If you are working with images whose subjects are depicted in dehumanizing ways, or were the subjects of dehumanizing, violent, or otherwise oppressive practices, what are your responsibilities now for breaking those cycles? Will your collage inadvertently perpetuate the problematic history you critically engage? What are the implications of choosing to manipulate images of bodies and other subjects for which you have no embodied experience of your own? Will you, by manipulating those images, repeat oppressive forms of objectification? Collage must be a practice of care for the past and the potential of the future, so be diligent in that ethical task.


Set-Up

Launch Photoshop and choose New File. Set the file width to 2000 and height to 1300 Pixels (or any size that you consider good background for your composition). Click Create. Your blank Photoshop file will look like this:

Photoshop interface is similar to Illustrator’s (albeit designed specifically for working with images, not vector shapes): the main Tools panel is on the left, and all other customizable and movable panels containing a variety of controls are on the right. The basics of zooming and panning around are also the same as in Illustrator. (This tutorial assumes you are familiar with those basics. For more information on getting started with Photoshop, refer to this tutorial from Adobe.)

Once you’re familiar with these essential functions, open all five source layers in Photoshop by clicking through File > Open… or by dragging them from the Finder window to the Photoshop application icon (Mac OS). They should appear as five separate tabs:



Understanding Layers and Layer Masks

Working with multiple Layers in Photoshop can be understood as working with a deck of cards: the layer on top (if visible) will conceal the layer(s) below. A random image opened in Photoshop usually takes a single layer, named Background, or “Layer 1.” To make a locked Background layer editable, double-click on it and then choose OK, or duplicate it by clicking Cmd + J (Mac) or Ctrl + J (Win). Make sure all your source layers are editable.


Layer Masks are greyscale images applied to individual layers to control their transparency. Unlike layer opacity, which controls the transparency of the entire layer, a layer mask gives you precise control over specific areas. They are a useful tool for making collages, image composites, and modifying image backgrounds.

To add a layer mask, select a layer in the Layers panel and click the Add Mask button at the bottom of the panel. A white layer thumbnail will appear next to the layer name. To view a layer mask, click the layer mask while holding Alt (Win) or Option (on Mac). To switch back to the standard visual mode, press Alt/Option+Click again.


By default, every layer mask is 100% white, which means that the layer is 100% visible. If it were colored black, the layer would be 0% visible. Remember that white reveals and black conceals when it comes to layer masks. To add white, black, or any shade of grey to the Layer Mask, one of the most useful tools is the Brush tool (B). Select suitable brush size, set the brush (Foreground) color to black, make sure the layer mask is selected (click on it), and paint the areas you don’t want to be visible with black:



Pro tip: to adjust the size and hardness of the brush quickly, click Ctrl + Option + drag left/right/up/down (Mac), or Alt + right mouse button + drag left/right/up/down (Win).

To delete or temporarily disable a layer mask, right-click on the mask thumbnail and choose Delete Layer Mask or Disable Layer Mask.

Another useful tool for quickly adding a layer mask is using one of the Lasso tools (L). The Polygonal Lasso tool creates straight lines between each click of your mouse. Click on a starting point somewhere in your canvas, drag your cursor to another point along the area you want to mask, click again to create a second anchor point, etc. Double-click to close the selected area and click on Add Layer Mask:



Select and Mask Workspace

Select and mask… functionality is a dedicated workspace that helps you make precise selections and masks, ideal for making an initial rough selection, and then refining it until you’re happy with the selection area.

To begin, do one on the following:

• Make a rough selection of the area/subject you want to mask using the Lasso tool and click Select and mask…, or
• In case your image contains a clearly discernible subject you wish to mask, choose Select > Select and mask… and click Select Subject
• Click OK and add a layer mask from the selection you just made

To change or refine the selection, open the Select and Mask workspace again and use any combination of the available tools from the toolbar on the left: Quick Selection Tool, Refine Edge Brush Tool, Brush Tool, Object Selection Tool, and Lasso Tool.

For example, Polygonal Lasso Tool is great for adding or removing areas that have hard edges:


Refine Edge Brush Tool is great for dissolving or restoring areas that have soft edges:


Important: Layer Masks are non-destructive, allowing you to continuously tweak and refine the visibility of a layer throughout an edit. You can always go back to Select and Mask workspace and pick up right where you left off.

On your own: select and mask the remaining source layers you wish to collage. Save your Photoshop project(s).


Bricolage Composition

When you’re ready to arrange your (masked) source layers into a final composition, copy them into the initial (empty white) Photoshop file you created:

• Click V to select the Move tool
• With the source layer selected, drag it over to the tab of the main composition file (or any other source file you want to use as a background for your image).
• Use the Cmd + T (Mac) or Ctrl + T (Win) to resize, reshape or rotate layer selections within a document. Click Enter or Return to exit the Transform tool

Note of workflow: you may find it easier to combine all the original unmasked source layers immediately into a single composition and do all masking in a single Photoshop file.

Finally, experiment with Layer Opacity and Blending Modes. You should already be familiar with Blending Modes from working with geospatial data layers in QGIS. They function similarly here: defining how a given layer blends with the layer(s) below it.



Tip: Duplicate layers (Cmd + J / Ctrl + J) to combine multiple different blending modes and opacity settings.

When satisfied with your final composition, save your Photoshop project and navigate to File > Export As… to export your digital bricolage in the desired image format.

---

STUDIO PRIMER B: ANNOTATING SPATIAL SYSTEMS, FROM FLOW CHARTS TO SYSTEMS DIAGRAMS

This second primer sketches a genealogy of different approaches to representing spatial systems, process, movement, and difference. Here we explore the use of symbolic annotation to elucidate an underlying spatial grammar, focusing on various iterations of the “systems diagram.” 

Overview

Annotation of geographic process and spatial systems has a surprisingly creative history. This brief primer on annotational diagrams of system and process should give you a sense of how you might deploy the techniques shown below in your own work using relatively simple workflows between QGIS and Illustrator from the previous labs. The real work is in composition, and thinking carefully, critically, and creatively about how you classify the elements of a system, how you draw a boundary around it, and how you connect those elements within and beyond the system.

We’ll begin by exploring the diagrammatic work of systems ecologist H.T. Odum (and his collaborators), viz., the modern systems diagram. Systems diagrams are a subgenre of the more widely-recognized “flow” or “process chart.” How we understand flow and process — and the physical analogues and metaphors we use to model them — is crucial for how we understand what constitutes a “system,” geographic or otherwise. This apparent in the stylistic changes of Odum’s diagrams over time: he moved from a more mimetic style of diagram (in which flows of energy appear sinuous and fluid, like a river and its tributaries)…



…to a more technical energy systems “language” mirroring contemporaneous computing circuit diagrams, in which different symbols represent different functions and entities in the system.



The key point here is that as a genre of spatial media, the resulting systems diagram and its operational “grammar” allowed for a generalized application of the diagram beyond ecology as long as the object of representation could be portrayed as a system.

By that logic, entire countries could be represented as systems of energetic inputs, outputs, and socio-metabolic processes. It was not long until these diagrammatic representations were rescaled to the world system and planetary socio-metabolism. In the case of Jay Forrester’s work at MIT on a series of “world models,” the diagrams also represented the logical circuitry of computer programs built to simulate different outcomes based on various resource allocation, energy production and consumption, rates of population growth, and other key sociometabolic variables.


While energy systems diagrams date from the early post-war period (during Odum’s) involvement with U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its nuclear weapons testing program), they borrow heavily from at least four earlier lineages: i) geographic diagrams of movement (especially of people, exemplified by Gemelli’s 1704 Aztec migration map and the works of Charles Joseph Minard)…




ii) control engineering for thermodynamic systems (exemplified by Irish engineer Matthew Riall Sankey’s diagrams first published in 1898)…



iii) early-20th century industrial and supply-chain standardization (exemplified by Lillian and Frank Gilbreth’s “process charts”)…





…and iv) the design of analog electronic computing circuits during the build-up to World War II (exemplified by mathematician John von Neumann’s development of electronic computing apparatus for the U.S. military), which were closely associated with early “cybernetic” efforts to represent the brain as a computer and model neuronal pathways as circuits (exemplified by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ “logical calculus” of neuronal activity).



This abbreviated genealogy suggests a close affinity between the diagram styles (and they way they represent systems, process, and flow) and dominant theoretical systems, political economic concerns, and the science and technology of the time. Alternative, critical projects emerged to counter-map those very systems: the work of Marc Lombardi, for instance, who painstakingly mapped financial networks by hand during the rise of deregulated, neoliberal markets from the 1970s onward; or the quasi-paranoid “world-systems” maps of power by French anarchist art collective Bureau d’Etudes in the years after 9/11.





We can see all these legacies at work in contemporary attempts to diagram how systems work across increasingly indistinguishable social and natural spaces, like Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI project.




This “anatomy” takes the form of a systems diagram of intricate detail and idiosyncratic uses of diagrammatic convention from across the examples above. For instance, they develop their own symbolic grammar to represent elements of the labor process from a Marxian perspective (labor power, products/commodities, the means of production, and waste).





They deploy different drawing styles (realistic wireframes, maps, cross-sections, a periodic table, geometric diagrams) to capture the heterogeneity of the parts of the system while using a variety of linework styles and widths to represent different kinds of connections between those parts. Finally, they organize it compositionally such that reading from left to right follows an expanded “lifecycle” of the particular artifact they’re interested in mapping, the Amazon Echo Dot, from mineral extraction and logistical distribution to internet infrastructure through to abandonment and disposal. In each of these last three examples, we see a mode of tracing and annotating systems not as maps of energy, information, population, or material flows, but of power and its operations.

---