Kuwait: Image Mapping - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 28

literally—and more or less inaugurated an entire genre of technocritical discourse
about war after the end of the Cold War. Jean Baudrillard argued in a series of
newspaper essays—published before, during, and after the fighting—that the
Gulf War would not take place, was not taking place, and had not taken place,
which is to say that the notions of space and place, and with them what it means
for something to happen, had undergone a profound and debilitating transforma -
tion. 11 In his topic on the Gulf War, Paul Virilio suggested that real-time television
had rendered democracy obsolete. 12 Neil Smith claimed that “GIS and related tech-
nologies” had contributed to the loss of some two hundred thousand lives in “the
killing fields of the Iraqi desert.” 13
Ordering a series of Landsat images and reproducing them along with images
from the Kuwaiti Municipal Database in Documents Magazine was an attempt to
engage some of these overlapping spatial and political questions, and to do it from
within the spaces of the incriminated technologies themselves. Military inven -
tions will always be designed to interpret and conquer space in new ways. The
challenge, I felt, was to harness these devices for other ends, all the while under -
lining just these military origins.