Week 7: Artist as Surveyor – Re-measuring Space, Power and Representation in the Post-Digital Era

Although I was not present during the seminar session, the readings and materials shared under the theme Artist as Surveyor have opened up significant questions in relation to my research. They explore what it means to map, measure, and define space, especially in a post-digital context where surveillance, spatial control and representation intersect with race, history and design.

This blog reflects on the core texts, especially Jorge Luis Borges' On Exactitude in Science (2004) and the exhibition publication For Want of (not) Measuring (Kennedy, 2024), to explore how measuring practices shape social, emotional and cultural landscapes, and how artists and designers, particularly those working from marginalised perspectives, might respond.

The Myth of the Perfect Map

Borges’ one-paragraph story describes an empire where the map becomes so precise it eventually covers the entire territory. In the end, it is useless. This parable critiques the obsession with exactitude, the idea that the world can be fully known, documented, and reduced to data.

This mindset continues today in urban planning, architecture and data-driven design. From postcode algorithms to biometric entry systems, the built environment is increasingly mediated by technological systems of measurement. But as Umberto Eco (1994) argues, these systems often erase the complexity of lived experience. Exactitude leaves no room for contradiction, fluidity, or nuance.

For ethnic minority communities in the UK, particularly Black communities, these systems often result in over-surveillance, displacement and underrepresentation. Digital technologies do not necessarily liberate. In some cases, they extend colonial logic by measuring and mapping bodies, movements and access in ways that feel dehumanising (Eubanks, 2018).

Noise, Sound and the Limits of the Grid

For Want of (not) Measuring (Kennedy, 2024) critiques the dominance of the visual as a mode of understanding space. Instead, it invites us to engage with the sonic, affective, and relational. The publication describes space not as static geometry but as something dynamic and lived. Sound, unlike vision, refuses to be neatly measured or fixed. It exists across thresholds, vibrating in ways that escape the grid.

This resonated with my interest in designing for emotional and cultural presence, particularly in spaces used by Black and diasporic communities. The text’s reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “smooth and striated space” is crucial here. Smooth space is open, relational and free-flowing. Striated space is ordered, fixed, and controlled. Most urban environments are heavily striated, divided by property lines, security zones and aesthetic rules.

As a designer, I am interested in how to make “smooth” interventions within these striated structures, creating pockets of belonging, memory, and visibility. This involves not only disrupting the grid, but reclaiming alternative modes of measurement, through storytelling, sound, ritual and lived experience.

Mapping Power and the Politics of Perspective

The lecture materials asked us to reflect on what it means to survey. Artists such as Patrick Adam Jones and Jim Hobbs use unique cameras, sonic devices, and handmade tools to explore space in non-traditional ways (Artist as Surveyor, 2025). Their work challenges the idea that measurement is objective. Instead, they show that every act of mapping is a claim of perspective.

This connects to wider debates around how space is racialised. Leslie Kern’s Feminist City (2020) and Rasheed Araeen’s writings on post-colonial urbanism both emphasise that the ways cities are planned and recorded often reinforce white, male, heteronormative structures. To “survey” from a different lens, especially as a Black woman, is to resist the historical invisibility placed on our bodies and communities.

I would argue that in a post-digital design era, where algorithms increasingly inform planning and development, the need for critical, human-centred surveying practices is urgent. We cannot allow ourselves to be merely measured. We must co-create the systems that define us.

Post-Digital Architecture and the Minority Landscape

In my own work, I explore how external and internal architectural elements influence identity and inclusion. Post-digital design tools, like parametric modelling or responsive environments, promise flexibility, but they are often developed without culturally specific input. This can result in high-tech environments that feel emotionally sterile or alienating for ethnic minority users.

Furthermore, the data that feeds these tools is often biased. As Ruha Benjamin (2019) warns in Race After Technology, systems that appear neutral often perpetuate existing inequalities. Whether through facial recognition that fails to detect darker skin tones, or urban regeneration projects that displace Black communities, measurement without context becomes harm.

Artists like Julie Mehretu and Lawrence Abu Hamdan offer valuable frameworks here. Mehretu’s layered, abstract cartographies reflect how histories overlap and collide in physical space. Abu Hamdan uses sound to question borders, echoing the sonic resistance seen in For Want of (not) Measuring.

Conclusion: Towards a Relational Practice

This week’s theme reminded me that surveying is never neutral. Whether with a pencil, a drone, or a data set, the act of measuring creates boundaries. But it can also create possibilities. As a designer working across architecture and art, I am interested in how we reclaim the act of surveying, not to control, but to listen, to locate, and to connect.

By engaging with alternative modes of mapping, those that account for emotion, culture, and memory, I believe we can reimagine both the process and purpose of spatial design. Not as control, but as care.

References

Artist as Surveyor (2025) Lecture slides and session brief. MA Digital Arts, University of Greenwich.

Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Borges, J. L. (2004) ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in Collected Fictions. Translated by A. Hurley. London: Penguin.

Campt, T. (2017) Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Eco, U. (1994) How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays. London: Harcourt.

Eubanks, V. (2018) Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Kennedy, S. (2024) For Want of (not) Measuring. London: Stephen Lawrence Gallery.

Kern, L. (2020) Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso.

Mehretu, J. (2021) Julie Mehretu. Whitney Museum of American Art. Available at: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/julie-mehretu (Accessed: February 2025).