Virtual Reality and the Cartographic Imagination

Abstract

Virtual Reality and the Cartographic Imagination Alison Griffiths (bio) The eye carries men to different parts of the world. —Leonardo da Vinci1 While virtual reality (VR) scholars have not been blind to its aesthetic and spectatorial affinities across large-scale painting, panoramas, dioramas, stereoscopy, globes, cinema, IMAX, and 3D video, less attention has been paid to the influence of cartographic techniques from the medieval and early modern era of geographic exploration.2 Without denying the obvious phenomenological differences between VR and cartography, cartographic techniques may be considered part of the long dureé of recombinant media that bring the world into visibility, practices of imaginary projection and reconciliation that serve as containers for civilizing and humanitarian discourses. Through the deployment of high-definition 3D cameras to record the world and optical technologies and data systems to reassemble it for users, VR draws meaning and is haunted by much earlier cartographic practices that interpellate users into subject positions that resonate in uncanny ways with medieval cartography. As liminal, multilayered, and disjunctive artifacts of the real and the imagination, medieval maps and humanitarian VR are discursive allies, trafficking in forms of embodied seeing, virtuality, and presence that [End Page 167] allow access to reified worlds from a safe distance. This essay probes some of these correspondences, arguing that while technologies of virtual projection are effective in generating wonder and curiosity about the human condition, this comes at the cost of a deeper intellectual engagement. Medieval maps were resplendently visual and included vignettes of Indigenous peoples, wildlife, cities, and religious figures; as cartographic scholar John Block Friedman explains, a map was more a "visual work of art and expression of contemporary cosmology and theology than it was an object of utility"—which is to say, a way of imagining the world through a particular mode of humanist and Christological thought.3 Both medieval maps and VR invite viewers to picture themselves moving through the world, along visual pathways that could be traced with a finger or eye, projecting their bodies into virtual spaces that draw authority as much if not more from the imagination as from cartography or geography. No world map did this better than the mappa mundi, a world map that functioned as a metaphoric storage device for all manner of cosmological, religious, and geographical knowledge. Mappae mundi represented Latin Christianity as forging inexorably westward from Paradise in the east, to the Apocalypse in the west, a journey through time itself. Densely packed with encyclopedic knowledge and hearsay about what lay at the edges of the world, mappae mundi regularized vision, triggering a measure of interactivity through an invitation to touch or—depending on the method of display—walk around or over the map. Medieval map makers exploited the idea of maps as sensual objects for imaginative projection and immersion centuries before VR pioneers envisioned them as a navigable geospatial technology.4 Similar tropes of reification are deployed in each form: people transformed into pictograms or emblematic images that viewers cannot help but stare at and that invite bodily identification in relation to movement, travel, space, and difference.5 Portolan charts, mariners' guides identifying coastal ports that also contained information about what lay inland—such as topographic features, tribal leaders, Indigenous people, and wildlife (both real and imagined)—also leveraged meaning from art as well as science. Geographic reality coexisted [End Page 168] with the imagination in mappae mundi and portolans; both they and VR invite bodily intervention, whether that be walking around a medieval portolan chart spread out on a ship's map table—in order to read the toponyms and see the world the right side up—or reaching out for a phantom object in the space of VR; and in both we detect a tension between seeing as a source of knowledge and power versus seeing as a locus of disquiet or discombobulation. In VR, for example, the user's ability to absorb geographical information from a unitary subject position is threatened by an anxiety about being swallowed up by the world, while in the case of medieval maps, the user has a sense of dread about what lies at the edge of the map where human oddities...