The Map is the Territory

Artist and activist Burak Arikan enters into discussion with professor Jussi Parikka on collaborative mapping and the use of visual knowledge as situated activist practice.

The discussion will relate to Arikan’s two day Graph Commons workshop at transmediale 2016, but also more widely to artistic methods of producing a politically important commons through diagrams, graphs, and more. Arikan’s art projects and design methods will be approached in relation to contemporary issues in the politics of (in)security, and to Graph Commons’ potentials for investigative journalism, data research, civic activism, organizational analysis, exploring archives, and art curation. The workshop will also be drawn upon as a location-specific way of mapping the links and nodes, territories, and issues that can emerge in collective settings.