Cartography has always been the domain for manifestations and negotiations of physical, political and symbolic properties and hierarchies of reality. Despite the obvious formal differences, each era claims their maps represent the world in the most adequate way. We are now witnessing the dawn of a new cartographic standard: real-scale and real-time augmented maps such as Google Earth. Yet no matter how hi-tech and accurate the map-making technology, it still produces glitches and mistakes, resulting in a distorted and noisy reality. Intentional manipulations are blended with the random, leveling the politically significant blur of a ‘hidden’ military base and an accidental ‘broken’ highway to an equivalent visual effect and interpretation. The emerging chaotic grid creates a multidimensional almost Escher- and Dali-like reality, where tangible concepts and virtual things occupy the same time and space. It is a world with pixelated censored terrains, half-humans, vertical tennis courts, ocean chessboards, inadvertent surveillance, color glitches, ghost ships and perspectives that defy the laws of gravity. As everything is simultaneously realistic and camouflaged, the skill needed to navigate the space meaningfully is to be fluent in image editing effects.

September 2009, Utopian Grids exhibition at de Verdieping, Amsterdam