How to Map Nothing

Scientists couldn’t look directly at nothing to see something; they had to look and listen around the void, deploying techniques similar to image compositing and echolocation. We might apply these lessons, these techniques, to our own attempts to comprehend the pandemic’s pause, which has its own experiential event horizon. We have to look and list... See more

We have plenty of maps and data visualizations that trace the macro-scale public health and political-economic forces that precipitated the “Great Pause”; but we have relatively few that show all those under-appreciated agents that are making it possible — all the something anchoring and abetting that nothing, all the pulsing activity powering the ... See more

the pandemic has merely accelerated a years-long descent into negation and sensory deprivation, a “desire for nothingness” that embodies the exhaustion of optimism and the embrace of nihilism.

But while an unmarked terrain might cultivate disorientation and unease, “emptiness” can also be marshaled as a political tool, as with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. If it’s empty, why not take it?

The multidisciplinary collective BlackSpace has drafted a manifesto calling for designers and planners to “reckon with the past as a means of healing … and deepening understanding”; to center Black joy and lived experience; to take the time to build trust and deconstruct hierarchies; to ensure that designers act as “humble learners” who “walk with ... See more

Consider some of those dispatches from the Great Pause: What if we took each sourdough selfie, each Zoom class, each Peloton ride, each Netflix binge and mapped the ecology of resources and services that have made it possible for some of us? And at the same time impossible for others? Our Everlane austerity, lo-fi authenticity, and seamless connect... See more

The pursuit of spiritual retreat and technological disconnection has, of course, a long history in various religious traditions and cultural movements: the Zen Buddhists, the Luddites, the Transcendentalists, the Amish, the countercultural communes of the 1960s, the digital detoxers of today.

It might seem that anyone who could disregard all this labor and expertise and affective engagement and see nothingness is alarmingly self-absorbed and willfully oblivious, but we have to admit that essential systems — our public infrastructures and networks of care — are often designed to fade into the background.

Medieval and Renaissance mapmakers famously demarcated the edges of the discovered world with mythical sea creatures that embodied the limits of exploration and knowledge. As historian Chet Van Duzer argues, those monsters represented a variety of epistemological orientations. They served as “interfaces between the known and unknown,” possible port... See more

embodied mapping can offer insight into “desire lines,” all those paths people carve through the city that might not align with official transit routes and pedestrian conduits.