SubMap at DOX, Prague

Our SubMap project was invited for the exhibition 'Cartographies Of Hope: Change Narratives' at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague.

"In the last few years we have witnessed how the corrosion of the three main modes of social imaginary that defined modernity – the market economy, the public sphere, and the self-government of citizens – has reached a critical point. As a result, the increasing number of people in different fields, social scientists, artists, public intellectuals, and activists are calling for rethinking and reinventing social change. Such voices, however, are too often fragmented in their respective boundaries, and, consequently, they have not yet been able to articulate a compelling alternative metanarrative that the public would identify with and which would thus result in a major positive change.

The project Cartographies of Hope: Change Narratives was born out of the sense of urgency and the effort to address this situation. It seeks to bring attention to this condition and to call for joint effort to identify alternatives we can agree. The premise of the project is that narratives of social imaginary play a key role in generating positive changes. Social change is always seen as a certain story, which then becomes an important driver of the change itself. This double function of reflection and agency constitutes a methodological core of the project. "

As the creators project formerly wrote on SubMap: "The saying goes that the map is not the territory, but that’s usually because the terrain represented is rugged hillscapes, woodland, deserts, cities and the many other landscapes and places that go to make up the area being depicted. And a map is also usually static, or at the very best interactive, not something that morphs and changes with a dynamic data input, meaning that it’s usually at least somewhat inaccurate. But a project called SubMap from Dániel Feles, Krisztián Gergely, Attila Bujdosó, and Gáspár Hajdu, members of new media research lab Kitchen Budapest, aims to create maps that challenge both those concepts. Rather than being objectively produced from public data, these maps subjectively recreate the places the map represents based on online and offline activity and personal preferences."

The exhibition at DOX goes on from 22 November 2012 until 21 February 2013 and is curated by Jaroslav Anděl.