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Murmuration

2019, Society & Space

AI-generated Abstract

This essay explores the evolving relationship between territorial sovereignty and the representations of space through visual campaigns by Japan and China. Analyzing the implications of maps and emerging technologies, it argues that traditional cartography is becoming obsolete as new human-machine assemblages redefine sovereignty, leading to a geopolitical landscape where the human element increasingly fades in significance. The dynamic concept of murmuration exemplifies the complexity and transformation of territorial control in the context of advanced computational technologies.

Chinaʼs new "vertical map"

This inclusion of sea-space in Chinese and Japanese representations suggest an incipient move towards cartographic extensions of the nationʼs body to non-terrestrial volumetric spaces. These new visualizations speak to statesʼ technological capacity to colonize spaces that until recently were http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/09/murmuration/# beyond effective political control. In becoming colonizable and exploitable, maritime territory, airspace, and the subterranean have now become representable and relatable. But in addition to their primary function as territorial claims, these maps also seek to foster affective attachment to these more-than-human geographies. The national outline (or "logomap"), naturalized through socialization and formal education as well as constant reiterative visual practices, has been a powerful tool for modern states (Anderson 1991). As the primary visual representation of the nation-state, it has also been especially effective to impart an affective orientation toward a bodily sense of national belonging (see Billé 2014).

Just as the logomap is visually arresting but ultimately a political fiction, the nation-state as a clearly defined and delineated volume is also a convenient oversimplification. The ground, the maritime, the subterranean, and the aerial are deeply intermeshed rather than discrete worlds. They are also spaces of flux. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the air is a geography of atmospheric flows (Zee 2017), while the oceanic is a threedimensional space characterized by turbulent materiality (Steinberg and Peters 2015: 247-248). Even the subterranean, generally assumed to be the realm of the inorganic and the immobile is in fact, on its own timescale, restless and forever in motion. On account of this very materiality, the assemblages that are constituted in and athwart these spaces display a level of complexity and dynamism that makes them difficult to conceptualize visually. A pertinent example of this transscalar multimateriality is the so-called "great Pacific garbage patch"-a plastic vortex of flotsam and jetsam whose contents and boundaries defy both spatial definition and visibility.

In recognition of these planetary realities, military objectives have increasingly been to find new ways to address state security beyond human geographies and through technologies that would extend, indeed supersede, human capabilities. In many ways, these are not recent developments: as Packer and Reeves show (2017: 262), as early as the 1890s new forms of technical media, such as photography for instance, were already being mobilized to finetune the capacities of artillery and create superior weapons. In its ever-evolving search for technological superiority, the U.S. military is adopting modes of information, communication, and mobility that gradually require less and less human input.

Organizational models based on biological architectures are increasingly being explored-in particular models such as swarms that give precedence to autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning. Comparing favorably with human cognitive intelligence, the swarm requires no planning, central representation, or traditional modeling. As media theorist Jussi Parikka explains, swarms are organizations that are continuously both on the verge of materialization and dissolution, both radically heterogeneous and consistent (Parikka 2010: 59). The swarm, a technological-entomological amalgam in which human modeling takes second place, continually learns and refines its performance:

The microdrones began to flock and swarm, mutually aware and clocked to such high frequencies that even the most sudden moves, the most aggressive pitch and yaw, were stretched out into a slow steadiness that yielded impossibly complex and graceful murmurations. Their autonomy became precise, their agency social and explicit (Arkenberg 2016). http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/09/murmuration/# Flight of the Starlings: Watch This Eerie but Beautiful Phenomenon | Sh… © National Geographic, a film by Jan van Ijken Initially, some guidance was required to steer the flocks of drones, but the system soon became sophisticated enough to require only minimal instructions. The microdrones were now able to "activate, take flight, flock and murmurate towards the objective, often staying autonomous for days, resting on rooftops and power lines for solar recharge" (Arkenberg 2016).

Increasingly, it is in more-than-human geographies that battles for territorial sovereignty are being waged. Political appropriation of the maritime, aerial, and subterranean realms demands cutting-edge and ever more sophisticated human-machine assemblages, and this finetuning is gradually leading to assemblages skewed in favor of the nonhuman. Unmanned aircrafts are lighter, can stay in the air for up to fifty hours at a time, and can "partake in high-altitude and high-speed missions that are impossible for human pilots to safely endure" (Packer and Reeves 2017: 270). In assemblages where technology initially was a prosthetic extension, the human component now constitutes the weakest node, increasingly superfluous and obsolete.

The widening breach between human experience and the new realities of territorial management and sovereignty has a direct incidence on the relationship between cartographic representations and the territory. The promissory role of cartography, so crucial in earlier colonial forays where the map routinely preceded the territory, has now lost much of its force. Static portrayals of the nation-state such as the logomap are poorly suited to reflect territorial realities, and indeed seem increasingly irrelevant in a (near) future dominated by AI where decisions will be made in a fraction of the time, computing thousands of variables. Rather than reframing the spatial parameters of the nation-state, then, what the Chinese and Japanese maps do is index a territorial imagination resolutely lagging behind new techniques of territorial control.

The spatial complexity and mesmerizing beauty of murmurationcontinually morphing, dissolving, and recomposing-cogently illustrate the limits of human comprehension when it comes to emerging forms of territorial control. Yet it is these novel and volumetric geographies-and particularly the planetary-scale computation which Benjamin Bratton terms "the Stack" (2015)-that are set to have the most dramatic impact on our geopolitical realities. As computations distort and deform modern political geographies, they produce new territories in their own image, ushering in new models of geopolitical architecture in their wake.

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