Claire Reddleman teaches digital humanities and art history at the University of Manchester. Her recent book chapter addresses cartographic depictions of the former penal colonies on heritage signage in French Guiana and New Caledonia. Her monograph Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (2018) theorises abstract modes of viewing with artworks and maps. Claire’s work has appeared in Humanities, GeoHumanities, Socialism and Democracy, Living Maps Review, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (forthcoming). Her book Pennine Street: A Cartographic Fiction is forthcoming, and combines creative writing with original artwork to critique capitalist abstraction. Tweets @reddlemap

In the area of cultural geography, maps have long been acknowledged as powerful instruments for forming, rather than passively reflecting, social and political reality[1]. An encounter with a contemporary mode of cartographic presentation provides an opportunity to reflect on the understandings we are able to produce through consuming maps. On board a flight from Paris to Cayenne, French Guiana, I was struck by the very dominant presence of the seat-back screens.  

Having not flown for a while, I considered that my expectations may be out of date and this had become the norm for all flights nowadays – while seat-back entertainment systems are now extremely common[2], later flights I took suggested that the screens on board this particular plane were unusually large. They showed a variety of content, including games, and tourist information about destinations served by this airline. But the content that particularly caught my eye was the location map featuring a large icon of a plane to indicate our current location, paired with the views of the outside made available through cameras on the nose and the undercarriage of the plane. Other passengers’ screens were visible at all times, creating a distracting array of moving images and, often, cartographic depictions of the journey. The map content of the onboard infotainment system is known as ‘geotainment’, and it may now start to become less common as these viewing experiences are shifted onto passengers’ own devices as onboard wifi services improve[3].

The reason for the journey was to visit sites associated with the penal colony which France operated in Guyane from 1853-1952, as part of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Postcards from the bagne’[4]. My role in this project has been primarily as a photographer and visually-minded researcher, documenting and trying to find new ways to represent the bagne. I had not initially considered the array of in-seat screens as part of what I was setting out to document. However, they now seem to me to enable a sort of ‘anticipatory’ or ‘remote’ viewing. I have written elsewhere[5] about how remote viewing is an important capacity that cartographic imagery offers us – the ability to conceptualise, and to construct knowledge about, places that we have not encountered in person. This capacity is extended through the everyday and intimate relationships we have with networked screens, which enable us to view and to gain knowledge about other places (and of course, people, cultures, politics, ideas…) in particular through photographs and video. In the viewing experience that was offered by the array of onboard screens, I think there was a curious collapsing of the non-perspectival mode of viewing that is usually used by maps, and the perspectival mode of viewing that camera-based viewing offers.

Image 3: Two seat-back screens show views down from the plane to the rainforest canopy, French Guiana

While the familiar cartographic God’s eye view continued to offer a coherent sense of the plane’s position as it progressed across the Atlantic and arrived safely at Cayenne, the rotating views facing forwards and straight down offered a shifting sense of coherence through the journey. The beautiful, featureless ocean gave way to a surprisingly regular ‘surface’ of the rainforest – what Miranda Frances Spieler has described as “the encircling vastness of the forest” (2012, p.2), a feature of French Guiana that historically provided a site of forced labour, a source of timber exports, and a space of refuge as well as danger and starvation for escaping bagnards.

The video-view of the forest acts as both a familiar and unfamiliar sight, and one which offers knowledge of actual appearances while still retaining a kind of non-knowledge, in the sense that to apprehend the forest as an undulating surface is to know almost nothing about how it functions, its history, its politics, its light, ecosystems, modes of reproduction, soundscape, temperature, scent. Spieler has noted that upon apprehending French Guiana, it “strikes the newcomer for the scarceness of traces indicating a history of human settlement” (2012, p.1) and that “looking out from a plane, you would see an expanse of green mounds of the same altitude and shape that give the impression of undulating green velour. And you might conclude that not much has changed there since the French arrived in the seventeenth century” (ibid).

The view that suggests this understanding is quite problematic, as I think it supports a colonial conceptualisation of land as unused and uninhabited, available to the colonist to occupy and to exploit. In European imaginaries of the globe and its inhabitants, the tropics have often been conceived and “been represented as something to be seen – a view to be had or a vision to be experienced” (Driver and Martins, 2005, p.5). Felix Driver and Luciana Martins have suggested that when images or concepts for dealing with otherness become widely used, such as ‘orientalism’ or ‘tropicality’, then we can tend to conceive of the subjects of those concepts as excessively ‘coherent’ and ‘consistent’ (ibid), and overlook the particularities of local people’s conceptions, politics and social worlds. The view from above (without powerful zoom options) is not generally useful for trying to see detail and particularity, with its tendency to produce views as shapes and colours without information. This effect can be seen in the onboard screen array, reinforcing the idea that “the cultural and natural worlds of […] the tropics, are represented as homogenous screens on which these images of difference are depicted” (ibid). The view of the forest as undifferentiated space is a political view that is enabled by the combined viewing apparatus of the plane, its cameras, and the screen array.

The forest also appeared doubly, apparently simultaneously on neighbouring screens, but which actually displayed a time lag so that the screens were not synchronised. This disjuncture made clear that the apparently live feed was not quite live, that the viewing offered by the screens was perhaps less to do with information and more about the screen-array as entertainment. It seemed to act as the expression of an excess of visualising technologies, offering views that don’t add very much to the passenger experience beyond distraction, occupying the attention.

Image 4: The seat-back screen shows the video view as the plane approaches the runway in Cayenne, French Guiana. Clusters of buildings and a crossroads are visible among the trees

Without labels, the aerial photograph is not able to provide the information-function that a map is able to offer, and so in the absence of local knowledge of what the functions of particular buildings might be, or which number road is being pictured, for example, for me these aerial views function as simply ‘excess’. Upon touching down on the runway, the forward- and downward-video views culminate in a close-up of the runway surface and its painted line, reaffirming from a different angle the knowledge already offered by the view from the window.

Image 5: The seat-back screen shows a view of the runway, looking forwards, after the plane has landed at Cayenne, French Guiana, along with the view from the window

References

Spieler, M.F. (2012) Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana, Harvard University Press

Driver, F. and Martins, L. eds. (2005) Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, University of Chicago Press


[1] See for example John Pickles (2006) A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-coded World, Routledge.

[2] See Scott McCartney, ‘The Middle Seat: The Airplane Flight Map Gets Aggressive’, Wall Street Journal, US edition, 18 April 2019.

[3] Ibid.

[4] This project is led by Dr Sophie Fuggle and can be explored further at www.cartespostalesdubagne.com.

[5] See Cartographic Abstraction in Contemporary Art: Seeing with Maps (2018) Routledge. This book examines a variety of experiences of seeing that are made possible by contemporary artworks, and builds from them to propose that cartographic imagery works, in part, through constructing viewpoints into which we are positioned as viewers and readers of maps. These viewpoints are the means by which we formulate knowledge through using maps, and this idea embraces the distortions and deficiencies of knowledge-formation as well as its usefulness and meaningfulness to us as social beings.