Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
2 
Kuwait: Image Mapping
From within the spaces of the incriminated technologies themselves
New York, 2012— At about the same time that GPS was emerging, if not as a house -
hold word or appliance, at least as a topic of public discussion, something similar
was happening with digital maps. And it was because of the Gulf War—not only
the war as a military fact, as a matter of the deployment of lethal violence and
destruction, but the war as a public and a media event, as a matter of images.
I had seen an advertisement for Intergraph software just after the end of the
war in early 1991. It was selling digital cartography tools, and condensed into the
script was somehow the entire narrative of the war. A dispute about borders, a
spectacularly expensive project in total mapping by the sovereign of a small
authoritarian emirate, a destructive war that mobilized digital-spatial-imaging
weaponry (and the media) as never before, and an aftermath that was presented
as fundamentally continuous—in software terms—with what had preceded it. The
ad featured nothing less than a satellite image: an image of destruction, promising
reconstruction and signifying a database. “The Kuwaiti government used an Inter -
graph system to digitally map its country. The database now provides the founda -
tion for rebuilding Kuwait's infrastructure.” 10
I found it startling: on the one hand, the satellite images of burning oil fields
had become an icon of wanton destruction by the Iraqi state and offered an ex
post facto rationale for the war, but in combination with a GIS database that plot -
ted every tree, building, and other landmarks in Kuwait, it also became a preserva -
tion image. It was used to reconstruct the ruined postwar city.
At the time, it was said, space was being revolutionized by the technologies
of digital communication, imaging, and cartography. There was a break between
events that were occurring in space and their virtual descriptions, and this carried
into intellectual debates around the war. There were of course many enthusiasts.
Opponents of the war, too, took the claims about revolution seriously—or at least
 
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