mirages
Exploring Nowhere: Mirages, Digital Maps, and the Historical Problem of Location
Sunday, February 23, 4pm
Admission Fee: $5
Location Services are ON! In this time of hyper-locatability via digital maps, what kinds of places and things might still remain lost? Marget Long and Carolyn Dinshaw look to the optical phenomenon of the mirage—a strange and elusive “nowhere” often perceived as water—to explore the broad concepts of location and locatability. The talk investigates the mirage’s visual and cultural history through a wide array of materials: medieval maps and legends of Paradise, early 20th-century Arctic exploration, and photographs and video works from Long’s project on mirages. Long and Dinshaw take a long view of the mirage– an illusion that prompts an irrational experience of time and space–in order finally to imagine how to work and play with current digital mapping technologies intended to work us. [continue reading…]
