Experimental geography as art

To look at it another way, experimental geography is a broad and varied science. Experimental geography was an important part of a recent performance of "Waiting for Godot," in the ruins of the Lower Ninth Ward, in New Orleans; it was also one of the central principles of Paglen's recent book, "Blank Spots on a Map," which explored the landscape and iconography of America's secret military prisons and airstrips. And then there was the piece created by the artist kanarinka, who jogged Boston's entire evacuation route.

With the help of a handful of gadgets, kanarinka measured the exact number of breaths – over 26 runs and a hundred-plus miles – that it took her to get out of the city. (Answer: 154,000.) She mapped her progress on a personal website, eventually emerging with a multidimensional map – one that measured both physical geography and her emotional response to the prospect of another terrorist attack on US soil.

At heart, Thompson has written, experimental geography is rooted in the idea that "we make the world, and in turn, the world makes us. This insight brings into relief an intimate relationship between what we consider culture and the spaces around us." As Thompson goes on to acknowledge, experimental geography has its basis in the work of the Situationists, who believed that our interactions with the landscape are vital to the way in which we see ourselves.

But experimental geography is especially influenced by the rise in social networking and widespread – and cheap – mapping capability, from Google Maps to the Global Positioning System. "You've got all these new tools out there," says Jeffrey Kastner, a longtime arts journalist and a contributor to "Experimental Geography." "There's all this spreading and melting going on – people thinking about political space, physical space, and social space. Something as simple as being on the Web helps test the boundaries we used to take for granted, and … question these longstanding notions of how the world is divided up."

This last concept – the ephemeral nature of today's digitalized landscape – is being explored in a new study and exhibit called "The Geography of Buzz," now showing at Studio-X, an arts space affiliated with Columbia University. The authors, Elizabeth Currid and Sarah Williams, are both academics; Ms. Currid is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and Ms. Williams is the director of Columbia's Spatial Information Design Lab. Three years ago, the two began to dig through photographs of Los Angeles and New York compiled by Getty Images, the stock photography service.

They were looking to "ground" the concept of "buzz," that all-important barometer of which areas of a city are cool and which aren't. Although Currid and Williams don't explicitly identify themselves as experimental geographers, their project bears much in common with the work featured in iCI's traveling show – it seeks to aestheticize a large quantity of data and to draw connections between humans and their environs. In this case, a series of maps chart hot spots in Los Angeles and New York City over a three-year period. The maps are black; the "buzz" is realized in splashes of bright color.

"To be able to expose an issue, and relate it back to physical space – that resonates with people," says Williams. "Just like putting data on a map makes things more real to people. I think we'll see a lot more of these explorations between art and sociological or political projects." Adds Currid: "A sense of place has always been fundamental to everything that happens in the world. And all this new technology only highlights that idea: geography is basic to the way we live."

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