Around Ground Zero - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 92

For instance, today, the fence announces a “Wall of Heroes,” but who is defin -
ing whom as heroes? The apparently automatic patriotism of that wall of names
seems inappropriate. Most of the names there are not heroes in the strict sense,
but simply people who died doing a very ordinary thing: going to work one day.
It does a disservice to the heroes to declare that everyone's a hero. The new
fence is somehow at once watered-down and inoffensive and terribly didactic—
not only telling you what is there, but also what to think about it. If we are fram -
ing a view of that site, we should be very careful with every word and image that
is put there. In my opinion, there should be no words on that fence.
AT: I think that one of the ways in which your work differs from memorializing
efforts, such as the “Wall of Heroes,” for example, is due to your interest in data-
driven work that is not melodramatic and not nostalgic. How does this mapping
project relate to your other work and to other maps?
LK: I do a lot of work with mapping, but it is usually at the high-tech end of the
spectrum, using Global Positioning System devices and high-resolution satellite
imagery. Most of the other maps I have done have been consciously about disori -
entation: about how impossible it is to orient yourself in the new spaces of elec -
tronic technologies and also how important it is to use these new technologies for
good ends, rather than the militaristic ones for which they were invented.
Although the Ground Zero project is not directly linked to my other work
about maps and digital technologies of mapping—it is the most low-tech project I
have done and the least disorientating—there are thematic links. A lot of my work
has been about the major political events of the last decade—particularly mili -
tary ones—and about reclaiming images of war as images of memory. Specifically,
I have constructed what I like to call “digital memorials” with images generated by
satellites. These images are snapshots in space and time, and I have tried to watch
places such as Kosovo and the war crimes tribunal in The Hague to understand
what difference new technologies can make for memory. 47
Around Ground Zero is different, too, from the FAMA Sarajevo map, the main
function of which was a one-time memorial. This project is time based. It is sup -
posed to be a document of what was there at a given time—the temporary struc -
tures, the graffiti, the spontaneous memorials, and the shifting access routes—the
things that would be erased in short order. You're right about the resistance to
melodrama and nostalgia: my projects do have a tendency to be about scenes of
destruction and yet to insist that there's no reversing the process. No map is going
to undo what happened to the villagers in Izbica (Kosovo). There is something
sober about simply marking where they were killed and buried and where the peo -
ple who killed them came back to get rid of the evidence. In a way, I aim to emulate