Jameson 2.0. Cognitive mapping in contemporary art

数字图像是基于一种双重的表现危机：一方面，数字数据的存在方式主要不是视觉的；图形表示不是它们的必要表现形式。另一方面，在数据驱动的世界中，人类观察者似乎不可能洞察或概述决定当今世界的数据生成和处理方式。尽管或恰恰是因为越来越多的视觉媒体和它们产生的数据，主体越来越无法掌握围绕着它的算法整体。自18世纪以来，统计图表承诺使信息“一目了然”，但这不再适用于今天的数字环境。但是，该项目并没有用更大的计算能力来应对再现性的危机，而是依赖于艺术和视觉文化的示范程序，通过数据结构、信息生成和解释来发展再现和体验的替代形式。这些人包括Mark Lombardi（模拟）历史先驱，Trevor Paglen， Eyal Weizmann和Forensic Architecture， Tactical Tech Collective, Lawrence Abu Hamdan， Walid Raad或Ingrid Burrington。这些作品和实践将在认知映射的概念下概念化。詹姆逊在其颇具影响力的著作《后现代主义或晚期资本主义的文化逻辑》（1991年）中发表了这一概念，其基础是对全球化文化中迷失方向的诊断，个人经验与决定个人经验的全球（经济）结构之间的裂痕，这种裂痕已变得无形和不可表述。詹姆逊提出重新获得经验的维度和代理的视角，对他来说，这包括认知映射的理论和实践。如果詹姆逊仍然可以在历史上被看作是在日益抽象的时代失去经验的诊断，作为现代性的关键主题，那么当前的数字“技术条件”（Hörl 2011），其数据和信息之间的任意性和构成性的“数字图像的不可判定性”（Rubinstein, Sluis 2013）代表了艺术作品反应的不同起点。该项目希望探究艺术家如何介入数据作为信息的不同表现形式。在此基础上，提出了一种新的数字化条件下认知映射的艺术理论。

Digital images are based on a double crisis of representation: On the one hand, the mode of existence of digital data is not primarily a visual one; pictorial representations are not their necessary manifestation. On the other hand, in a data-driven world it seems impossible for the human observer to gain an insight or overview into the way data are generated and processed that determine today's world. Despite or precisely because of a growing number of visual media and the data they generate, the subject is less and less able to grasp the algorithmic totality that surrounds it. Since the 18th century, statistical diagrams have promised to make information visible "at a glance", but this no longer applies to today's digital environments. But instead of countering the crisis of representability with ever greater computing capacities, the project relies on exemplary procedures from art and visual culture that develop alternative forms of representation and experience via data structuring, information generation and interpretation. These include Mark Lombardi as (analogue) historical precursor, Trevor Paglen, Eyal Weizmann and Forensic Architecture, Tactical Tech Collective, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walid Raad or Ingrid Burrington. These works and practices are to be conceptualized under the concept of cognitive mapping. This concept - published by Jameson in his influential book Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) - is based on the diagnosis of a loss of orientation in globalized cultures, a rift between individual experience and the global (economic) structures that determine it, which have become invisible and unrepresentable. Jameson proposed to regain a dimension of experience and a perspective for agency that for him consisted in the theory and practice of cognitive mapping. If Jameson could still be seen in a historical line with the diagnosis of a loss of experience in times of increasing abstraction as a critical topos of modernity, the current, digital "technological condition" (Hörl 2011) with its arbitrariness between data and information and a constitutive "undecidability of digital images" (Rubinstein, Sluis 2013) represents a different starting point to which the artistic works react. The project wants to investigate how artists intervene in different manifestations of data as information. It wants to demonstrate a dimension of agency in dealing with digital images, and based on this research, develop an updated art theory of cognitive mapping under the condition of digitality.