Medialogy

To date, the connection between cinema and emerging forms of mapping has not been explored in any depth through either cinematic or new media discourses. Nevertheless, there is an expansive theoretical and structural relationship found in emerging mapping practices and contemporary cinema art, particularly in terms of their engagement with spatial environments through screen-based mediators. I would argue that a shared logic of hypermediation—that is, mediated fragmentation and multiplicity—exists in both cinema art and new mapping practices, as well as a common engagement with the mediation of space.

The logic of hypermediacy and the hypermediation of space are found in mapping practices and cinema art through the presence of multiplicity, the act of fragmentation, and a constant reference to the presence of a mediator. Simply compared, new forms of mapping and modern works of cinema art utilize objects of mediation to frame disparate datasets of symbols and signs from divergent spaces. In doing so, they elicit the mental formation of navigable space in the viewer/user—a hybrid space created somewhere in-between exterior points of reference and the self-center of the viewer. They mediate and organize divergent datasets to integrate them into a cohesive space of multiplicity—a mercurial location where connections and possibilities may emerge that could not otherwise do so in the ontological rigidity of a finite, determined, single space. Essentially, these practices communicate the presence of space through the aforementioned characteristics of fragmentation, multiplicity, and reference to the medium. In such a way, both contemporary cinematic art and emerging practices of mapping engage in the rupturing of homogenous space and the multiplication of heterogeneous environments, affecting a hypermediation of diverse spatiality that redefines what attributes demarcate a unified space.
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