Laura Kurgan will present her explorations of digital mapping technologies, the ethics and politics of mapping, and the art, science and visualisation of big and small data. These projects are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and others: digital spatial hardware, software and also data designed for such military and governmental and urban reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census and national security. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism and geography, her projects uncover the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up.
Laura Kurgan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where she directs the Visual Studies curriculum, the Spatial Information Design Lab and is Co-Director of the Advanced Data Visualization Project. She is the author of Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Zone Books, 2013).