»Cartographies« - under this title, the 2002 spring issue of springerin brings together contributions in which the endeavour is made to place artistic approaches and cultural developments within the global set-up. Whereas in a conventional theoretical context »cartographies« are meant to help reveal the connection between symbolic and material practices, many more recent enterprises aim to draw up »mappings« of economic, and thus also cultural, interconnections on the global level. Only in this way can geopolitical configurations of power be disclosed and elucidated.
These disclosures range from putting a geographical spotlight on individual scenes that have been largely disregarded until now, to navigational aids for New Media worlds, to descriptions of the conditions of production and reception in global diasporic cinema. The dilemma of southern European identities between »neighbourly« difference and unbridled Westernisation comes under discussion, along with the specific promises of burgeoning (media) art scenes in Central Asia, Estonia or Australia. Concrete cartographical projects like those of the concept groups Bureau d'études and Multiplicity expose strategic power games both at a global and a European level, and devote themselves to the representability of collective political options, as do the exhibitions discussed here in detail: »First Story« and »Die Gewalt ist der Rand aller Dinge« (Violence Is at the Margin of All Things). Finally, many of the articles are intended to provide a »cartographic,« and thus emancipatory, record of both the symptoms and possible diagnoses of present conflict scenarios.