MAPS ON THE INSIDE
Shortly after finishing my MFA in studio art at Arizona State University, I decided to get a dumbphone. I had been yoked to email and social media for 3 years. I was eager to step back from
digital immediacy and phone addiction and back into my hometown life in Tucson, Arizona.
I had finished my thesis exhibition several months prior and spent the two years before
researching and making work about water, large water infrastructures in the American West,
and my relationship to digital technologies. My guiding question was: how does all this come
back to the body? My unproven but fundamental belief beneath this question was that the
body’s scale, its messiness, its friction, is necessary to make sense of this disorienting
technological present.
I grew up in Tucson, and I remember when the Central Arizona Project was completed in the
90s. Often, on the news, anchors and talking heads would admonish the flagrant use of our
diminishing groundwater on golf courses and pools: we were draining our watersheds too
quickly. CAP was a multi-billion-dollar solution: a canal, a tenuous hydrological arm of the
Colorado River now extended to Southern Arizona. As a child, I dug up rocks and built forts in
the typically dry wash behind my house. But one day shortly after the canal was built, I was
surprised to find it running like a river, even though there had been no rain yet that season. I put
on my watershoes and traced the flow upstream to locate its source. A main pipe had burst and
water was lusciously pooling and flowing out of it to the wash. I was scandalized to see it
burbling out from the pipe, fresh and clear and abundant. Colorado River water had a different
chemical makeup than our groundwater. It stripped, scoured, and burst our pipes forcing Tucson
to remediate and replace its aging infrastructure years after CAP was completed.
My thesis show was a multimedia installation, made up of a large 20’x20’ black box built with
wood 2”x2”s and wrapped in black construction screen. The walls were sort of translucent, such
that, you could see the internal 2”x2” framing and, occasionally, video. I projected video from the
inside, depicting the outer surfaces of data centers. The 8’ tall box took up so much gallery
space that just a narrow corridor remained around its perimeter for an audience to walk around
it. At the back of the gallery, the corridors opened out to an installation of over 40 suspended
iPhones. They hung like a chandelier or a waterfall in front of a small yonic opening, inside of
which a stoneware fountain fabricated by one of my classmates trickled quietly.
Artists are often trying to make things visible. I was asking my audience to experience, by
walking, dark, narrow corridors, a hardly visible video screen, and peek into a vaginal hole so
they could barely see some running water. This navigation, this walking, mirrored my walking
the summer before, as I traced and searched the outer public easements of places like Hoover
Dam, the Prineville data center, and Hetch Hetchy–San Francisco’s water supply, one of the
purest in the world. Visitors are restricted from touching the waters held within, or to see the
innards of data infrastructures.
wood 2”x2”s and wrapped in black construction screen. The walls were sort of translucent, such
that, you could see the internal 2”x2” framing and, occasionally, video. I projected video from the
inside, depicting the outer surfaces of data centers. The 8’ tall box took up so much gallery
space that just a narrow corridor remained around its perimeter for an audience to walk around
it. At the back of the gallery, the corridors opened out to an installation of over 40 suspended
iPhones. They hung like a chandelier or a waterfall in front of a small yonic opening, inside of
which a stoneware fountain fabricated by one of my classmates trickled quietly.
Artists are often trying to make things visible. I was asking my audience to experience, by
walking, dark, narrow corridors, a hardly visible video screen, and peek into a vaginal hole so
they could barely see some running water. This navigation, this walking, mirrored my walking
the summer before, as I traced and searched the outer public easements of places like Hoover
Dam, the Prineville data center, and Hetch Hetchy–San Francisco’s water supply, one of the
purest in the world. Visitors are restricted from touching the waters held within, or to see the
innards of data infrastructures.
Part of my research trip also included visiting the San Francisco Bay-Delta Model in Sausalito.
The Bay Model is a massive functioning hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay, at 1/1000th
scale. The Army Corps of Engineers built it in the 1950s to help stakeholders determine how to
manage developmental and environmental impacts in the region. It is a massive facility, almost
2 acres, and runs 24-hour tides in 15 minutes. I spent an entire day there, listening to the tour
guides, tracing the water into and out of the bay, and looking for places I had visited in the city
for my research in this oversized miniature.
In a way, part of the purpose of the trip was to prove that hydrologically significant
infrastructures and data centers were inverse monuments of each other. Some of these sites
permitted a pilgrimage of sorts: touch, entry, contemplation of the sublime,and time spent, like
Hoover Dam, while others had almost no public-facing component despite holding some of our
most personal data. The Bay Model served as a kind of intermediary for the data centers and
the dams. In a way, I began to understand it as a proto-data center, where models simulated
real-world data that could be integrated into public discourse and civic practices. What does it
mean to have, or not have, bodily, sensory proximity to these different sites?
A couple of months after the thesis project, I finally switched to the new dumb phone. It was a
rough adjustment. My texting was slower and clumsier, but I found workarounds for the many
apps embedded in my former iPhone. I asked for paper menus, Venmoed people later, and
because of a glitch with my texts, relied heavily on my partner to relay group messages that I
had missed in the switch.
My favorite and most challenging adjustment was navigation. Google Maps is why I initially got
a smartphone. Before a big trip in 2012, I had finally decided that the navigational tool would
ease my travels. It helped immensely with getting around new cities and initially emboldened me
to travel more. Over time, however, my sense of expansion began to atrophy. I regularly used
my smartphone to drive across my own hometown and remind myself how to get to places I had
been many times but had forgotten exactly the best route. The dumb phone had navigation, but
it was slow, sometimes clunky, black and white, and drained the battery quickly. So my strategy
was this: pull up an address, study the map, and wing it.
I got lost a lot. I was still living in Phoenix, where I had gone to school for 3 years, and found
myself testing the typically predictable urban sprawl. Known for its car-centered grid, Phoenix
surprised me. I’d follow a street expecting a straight line, only to find that it curved, stopped, or
redirected entirely. Over and over again, I was losing my way.
I did begin to notice something, though. I started seeing the world around me with a different
kind of agency, sometimes a desperation. I looked for address numbers on buildings, noting the
side streets that flipped by. I became more keenly aware of where I was in relation to farther-off
landmarks, like the surrounding mountains and the airport. My ability to do this or not mattered,
because it would save me time and frustration. I started to feel like I was part of the places I was
driving through. My dependency on wayfinding was no longer centered in the car, in the phone
in my lap, but in the world. And conversely, my favorite development was a new confidence in
my ability to get around. I started to call this feeling “maps on the inside”, an interior knowledge
that I had gleaned from the city. When I had used Google Maps to navigate, I plugged in the
same location over and over again, rarely memorizing it. Now, I was holding places inside me.
The world was less a smooth surface to slip off of and more like somewhere I had a stake in,
however desperate. My interior world now held an inner structure of its own.
This feeling, in light of the data centers and water infrastructures I visited, has sparked
questions for me. Where does knowledge live and how is it different from data? What happens
to our bodies and experience of the world when we conflate the two? What are the costs of
being further alienated to the outer perimeters of that knowledge and data, alienated from
touching and experiencing them beyond their smooth outer surfaces? I do think that many of
these answers lie in the land and in the body, in their messiness and complexity. Perhaps one
may lead us back to the other as we navigate the remaining easements and corridors of the
monuments of our time.
a smartphone. Before a big trip in 2012, I had finally decided that the navigational tool would
ease my travels. It helped immensely with getting around new cities and initially emboldened me
to travel more. Over time, however, my sense of expansion began to atrophy. I regularly used
my smartphone to drive across my own hometown and remind myself how to get to places I had
been many times but had forgotten exactly the best route. The dumb phone had navigation, but
it was slow, sometimes clunky, black and white, and drained the battery quickly. So my strategy
was this: pull up an address, study the map, and wing it.
I got lost a lot. I was still living in Phoenix, where I had gone to school for 3 years, and found
myself testing the typically predictable urban sprawl. Known for its car-centered grid, Phoenix
surprised me. I’d follow a street expecting a straight line, only to find that it curved, stopped, or
redirected entirely. Over and over again, I was losing my way.
I did begin to notice something, though. I started seeing the world around me with a different
kind of agency, sometimes a desperation. I looked for address numbers on buildings, noting the
side streets that flipped by. I became more keenly aware of where I was in relation to farther-off
landmarks, like the surrounding mountains and the airport. My ability to do this or not mattered,
because it would save me time and frustration. I started to feel like I was part of the places I was
driving through. My dependency on wayfinding was no longer centered in the car, in the phone
in my lap, but in the world. And conversely, my favorite development was a new confidence in
my ability to get around. I started to call this feeling “maps on the inside”, an interior knowledge
that I had gleaned from the city. When I had used Google Maps to navigate, I plugged in the
same location over and over again, rarely memorizing it. Now, I was holding places inside me.
The world was less a smooth surface to slip off of and more like somewhere I had a stake in,
however desperate. My interior world now held an inner structure of its own.
This feeling, in light of the data centers and water infrastructures I visited, has sparked
questions for me. Where does knowledge live and how is it different from data? What happens
to our bodies and experience of the world when we conflate the two? What are the costs of
being further alienated to the outer perimeters of that knowledge and data, alienated from
touching and experiencing them beyond their smooth outer surfaces? I do think that many of
these answers lie in the land and in the body, in their messiness and complexity. Perhaps one
may lead us back to the other as we navigate the remaining easements and corridors of the
monuments of our time.