On Exactitude in Science: Surface Play
. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars;in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes,
Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 (Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 1946)
In the above text, the great storyteller of modernity Jorge Luis Borges presents what Jean Baudrillard later described as “the most beautiful allegory of simulation.” In the guise of a historical fragment, Borges tells the story of an empire so exceedingly precise that it maps itself to a 1:1 ratio, rendering the navigation device useless, but leaving the image, the document of the state, as an inhabitable relic. As Baudrillard continued in 1981, “this fable
has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.”1 Through the notion of the simulacra, the media theorist proposed the hyperreal, in which “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” The state of the hyperreal is the image without the referent, the map without the empire. If Baudrillard detected the onset of the hyperreal in the still-prevailingly analog world of the early 1980s, today we find ourselves comfortably embedded in that state. In the digital age, images are no longer physically tethered directly to the real, no longer imprints of light and shadow, but rather hinged to pixels and code. Yet they comprise a virtual universe that is immersive and impactful to our daily existence, from our social worlds to financial currency. In an image-based post-Internet reality, we are indeed surrounded by an “ocean of images.”2 And so, in this era of the hyperreal, Borges’s parable takes on a new urgency. Now, it is the potential of the 1:1 ratio capture as a material form and process that holds our interest and the depths of our imaginations. There is an archaic but also revolutionary aspect to the idea of a direct correlation between an image and a place through scale. Moving one step further, this model of mapping prompts a return to what one would call a true index—by which a subject or surface is reproduced through the physical and concrete means of a trace or impression. There is an implied slow-down and focus in this mode of mark-making, where touch and materiality become the defining conditions of rendering. A deliberately paced, haptic form of vision emerges as an mode of perception in an increasingly manic and virtual world. In her recent collection of essays on architecture, film, and art, titled “Surface,” architectural and film historian Giuliana Bruno argues for “a shift in our focus away from the optic and towards a haptic materiality.”3 Bruno considers the surface, the outer layer of an object or building, as the true site of contact with the world. It is there where the“image” lies and where architecture operates through a series of variations in transparency, texture, and weight.