Maps In/Out Of Place. Charting alternative ways of looking and experimenting with cartography and GIS

Nowadays, new speculative and experimental ferments on analog and digital mapping are variously infusing both “insiders” (geographers, cartographers, urban planners, GIS scientists) and “outsiders” (Art historians and creative practitioners)’ work. To properly evidence and discuss the excitement of mapping that is emerging through a wide range of visual and aesthetical contributions, it is important to contextualize and compare such unconventional practices of map-making in terms of reflexivity and transitivity of geographic knowledge production. This means respectively to distinguish different roles assumed by geographers, cartographers and GIS scientists in the interpretation and application of new theories and practices of mapping, but also to take seriously into consideration the creative mapping culture which is becoming visible outside of their discipline, for example in the artistic domain. In this report, I focus on the “reflexive” stance, by giving a personal, thus not exhaustive, overview of the creative trajectories on mapping currently explored in carto/geography. After emplacing the theory and experimentation on maps and geospatial data within the context of academic geographic production, I discuss three projects where geographers and GISscientists are at the forefront of the concurrent rethinking of the map as a deforming and multidimensional tool for spatial analysis.