Doomsday Cartography

Videogame: voice recording, field recording, web-based, 2021

In political spaces and imaginaries, a sense of doom can catalyze cooperative acts of refusal and survival. But a sense of doom is not exclusive to fugitive communities and undercommons – doom is also an inspiration for systems of control that perpetuate its conditions. This is exhibited by speculative scenarios devised by United States military strategists: from their “Counter-Zombie Dominance” plan to cinematic descriptions of a future of crime and need in “Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity”, doom becomes a plot device to elaborate counterinsurgency operations.

Doomsday Cartography responds to these doomsday scenarios by drawing out their potential for new beginnings. It maps a world envisioned by speculators of counter-insurgency, appropriating fragments of their language about “adversaries” and imagery of reclaimed urban infrastructures. Instead of replicating their fear of growing mobs, underground passageways, and complexity, the map highlights opportunities that specific doomsday scenarios give us for new means of association and perception. Densely layered and vertiginous, the cartography subverts a militaristic view of doomsday with the perspective of a persona innovating to navigate it. To support accessibility, I developed a custom interface that enables cycling through elements of the map, which are described in text and alt-text, alongside voiced narration and sound.

The project is available here and an interview about it here