Orientation and Cartographic Imagination in the Age of the Digital Earth. Notes Toward an Aesthetics of Google Earth

My research aims at framing the epistemological transformations caused by the fast diffusion of the geo-media and their digital cartographic systems. Its concern is twofold: On the one hand, I plan to retrace the cartographic genealogy of the Digital Earth by outlining some of the points of emergence of the Earthly vision, a pictorial imagination characterized by the view of the Earth as a whole; on the other hand, I intend to examine how the formation of spatial environments connected with the Whole-Earth medialization has extended the performative capacities of our “cartographic imagination” toward interactive forms of orientation. As a theoretical framework, the article favours a genealogical account, considering maps as media in which our mythical geographies are incarnated, and, at the same time, as a source of a history of cultural representation that encodes subjects