A Map You Can Walk Into: Immersive Cartography and the Speculative Potentials of Data

Abstract

This article offers an induction into “immersive cartography,” an emerging approach to inquiry that incorporates the environmental arts, philosophy, and social sciences. Drawing together Deleuze’s propositions for a cartography-art with elements of Whitehead’s speculative empiricism, the author elaborates on the co-creation of a “cartographic network” that can be entered, activated, and extended along a multiplicity of trajectories, opening the inquiry process to more-than-human ecologies of participation. The second part of the article grapples with the complex proliferation of data that immersive cartography sets into motion, developing the concept of the “data event” through an engagement with Whitehead’s theory of prehension.