Jon Ippolito
Spring 1996
"Postmodern hyperspace--has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment...can itself stand as the symbol of...the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects."
--Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August 1984).
Just over a decade after Jameson wrote these words, his call for cognitive maps has given rise to innumerable footnotes in academic journals--but very few maps. The reason may be that until now so few people have had the hardware necessary to trace out global telecommunications networks. Thanks to the personal computer and modem, however, millions can now begin to triangulate their positions in the postmodern hyperspace we call the World Wide Web.
CyberAtlas, a compendium of charts of cyberspace made at different times from different perspectives, is designed to help. The focus of The Electric Sky, the first map in the CyberAtlas series, is art on the World Wide Web. The sites charted here range from projects by world-renowned artists to works by artists unknown outside of the community of online cognoscenti.
Apart from its aim of showcasing the most interesting art sites available at the time, this map also serves to reveal the academic and cultural liaisons across the globe that spurred the growth of such sites. At the time this map was drawn, the heavenly firmament of cyberspace had not been entirely detached from its terrestrial moorings. While most museums, galleries, and other repositories for art remained firmly implanted in the soil, a few of the more adventurous institutions established footholds on the Internet, usually by collaborating with a university or commercial server. Few institutions had bothered to register their own domain names; most Web addresses were nested aggregates like "http://www.razorfish.com/pace," which made it easy to discern the collaborations among institutions with physical anchor points (like Pace Gallery) and those with purely virtual status (like Razorfish).
This map depicts such collaborative networks as constellations, with the primary hub of the network in red. Solid blue lines indicate direct collaborations, while dotted lines indicate indirect links. If a nation's identity derives from the area enclosed by its borders, a network's identity derives from the links connected to its nodes.
As the nighttime sky offered ancient mariners a readymade navigational chart, so The Electric Sky pictured here offers modern-day voyagers a map with which to steer their way across the World Wide Web.
Map conceived and designed by Jon Ippolito, executed with the assistance of Mia Hurley and Dani Piderman. A print version of this map originally appeared in Guggenheim magazine (Summer 1996).