Michael Tauschinger-Dempsey, April 23, 2012
The Great Ziggurat of Ur and Google’s quest for the Book of Sand
This project consists of five digital prints (17’ x 32” each) that show screenshots of
Google Earth satellite and street views. The selected sites are overlaid with multiple
Panoramio popup windows. Panoramio, an online image sharing application, is a
publically accessible (within the Google Earth interface) user-generated database of geotagged digital snapshots. The project includes two prints of the World Trade Center site
in New York City, U.S.A., another two are of the ancient city Ur in what was
Mesopotamia, now Iraq; the last print pictures the Al-Rahman mosque in Bagdhad, Iraq.
This work creates a critical relationship between iconic ancient and modern sites and
several of Deleuze and Guattari’s core concepts from Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1987). Of particular interest is the connection between capital, terror
and military violence—between the competing ideological frameworks of religion and
capitalism. The work highlights diverging notions of (self-) righteousness, truth and
knowledge as understood by governmental and other capitalist organizations. In these
five prints, I subvert the claim to objective truth and accurate information promoted by
Google and so-called altruistically driven governmental interests by deliberately
‘hacking’ and exchanging datasets of images and texts. My goal is to illustrate that
precisely the way in which such information is disseminated, i.e. via Google (or other
popular search engines) and similarly ‘unbiased’ information-based government
agencies, reveals their underlying purpose: to fool the naïve and unsuspecting public into
unquestioningly accepting and spreading said information, which in turn cleanly and
without a hint of negative intention, subverts non-politico-marketist information and
creates an essentially uniform collective consciousness/value system (Deleuze and
Guattari’s informational smooth space) . Part of the modern mantra this piece seeks to
undermine is: Google is truth; Google is a search engine, not a piece of the commercial
and/or political machinery.
By deliberately gathering, manipulating and exchanging certain popup windows between
different geolocations, I visually argue that all information and knowledge obtained via
today’s virtual pathways have been subjected to extreme manipulation and abstraction.
Nothing can substitute the albeit unavoidably subjective truth-value of real world cultural
experience and on-site, direct (not translated and culturally relativized) communication in
working toward developing a worthwhile and dare I say, fair understanding of life’s
complexities. The larger problems if our very sloppy and very culturally mediated
international connections, quick world-wide communications, visits, and variously
published views into others’ realities are thrown into painful relief by the dangerous
exchange of such poorly or very partially-substantiated information to justify wars based
essentially on cultural differences between people and nations and importantly, profit, the
most true and efficient of our claims to internationalism.
Both Iraq wars, the invasion of Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan have shown how
dangerous this objectification of propaganda as solid information can be, and yet,
statistics and tales of suffering, death and destruction aside, it is perhaps one of the sad
markers of our times that complex ground conditions are repeatedly, guiltlessly reduced
to PowerPoint presentations and keyword internet searches. Sociologists, anthropologists
and artists have a lot to offer in this regard, for they all have the ability to bridge cultural
chasms and gain a genuinely useful and productive understanding of differences within
human and non-human frameworks.
Indeed, if information and collective knowledge are the key commodities that drive postindustrial capitalism, then a publically traded corporation like Google must be considered
the most successful and advanced organization, for at its core, business derives from
gathering, indexing, mapping and exchanging information and knowledge. This process
of information and knowledge culling cum capital accumulation has been so ingeniously
automated that computers are assigned the task of selecting and curating bespoke
information and knowledge. The engineers who develop the algorithms that direct
computers as to exactly what and how to process such information have neither contact
with nor an understanding of the actual information and knowledge they are indirectly
manipulating. For them, information and knowledge are quintessentially (and certainly,
personally) irrelevant beyond their interest in the abstract archival and storage processes.
Quite literally, Google is creating the ‘infinite book’ as explored by Borges in the The
Book of Sand (Borges, 1977). For Borges such ‘a book of books’ would render all
knowledge obsolete and worthless simply by virtue of its incredible quantity—literal
information overload. Google’s quest to digitize all available books on the planet is but
one step in this direction and is so far surpassed only by their overall desire to gather and
keyword catalogue all human information and knowledge. Lest the driving force behind
this monumental undertaken be forgotten, Google’s business model monetizes on this
inhumanly vast amount of data only by automatically limiting and curating, which is
driven by the end-user’s browsing behavior. It is a commercial enterprise like most others
in our world. Indeed, Google is de-facto doing quite the opposite of what they are selling
their growing and mesmerized public, i.e. providing instantaneous access to almost
infinite information and knowledge.
If corporations like Google and government agency alike do business by obfuscating
information and knowledge, then a Google application might serve well as case study.
For instance, Google Earth allows users to ‘travel’ any place on Earth with little more
than a few mouse clicks; information can seemingly freely be located, clicked on and
instantaneously retrieved. What users get are completely arbitrary and somewhat
meaningless fragments of all available and above all (Google-) meaningful data, for the
search results are ordered and sifted in or out according to Google’s preference and
relevance algorithms. The expected and gloriously appreciated prize is that users believe
they have just learned a great deal about something very remote without ever having
travelled there in person or painstakingly—actively researched it themselves (beyond
productive Google keywords and a few clicks).
Maps supposedly record, document and historicize places. Seafaring sovereign nations of
the past used maps to lay claim to foreign territories; the representation of place as
unclaimed space did not match actual geo-facts but rather reflected a certain worldview,
centered on the nation’s sovereign power and increasingly global hegemony. Today, we
balk at such quaintly and blatantly politicized (and inaccurate) geo-representations, which
barely presaged the subtle prowess of modern corporate machine mediated geo and other
information, though the distance traveled from then to now is not so great as we would
like to think. What have changed are the concepts of mutability, accessibility and scale
with regards to space, place, mapping and the understanding it creates. The leaders in
shaping the modern concept are indisputably Google, who have populated and indeed,
monopolized the internet, mapping (geographical, navigational, personal/taste),
Smartphone and internet telecommunications, and soon, driverless cars.
Through Google, the world is, so the saying goes, at one’s fingertips. And thanks to
Google Earth, the world is infinitely scalable: the scrolling of the mouse can reduce it to
the size of a grain of sand in the Mesopotamian desert or enlarge (zoom) it so much that
said desert can be appreciated nearly sandgrain by sandgrain. There are no longer any
obstacles to representing or producing on different scales, no matter how small or large;
size and distance are no object. With the exception of a few very remote spots, anyone
with internet access can virtually visit almost any place on Earth or even, spy on a distant
neighbor or coworker—small change for us nowadays but unimaginable to people even
two to three generations back. Google searches and growing catalogues of personal
information have made us all easily researchable and the mystery of Earth’s far extremes
are likewise no longer shrouded in a mystique of intangibility, inaccessibility and
incomprehensibility, though this has not actually changed. What has changed is our
perception—our ungrateful and immodest presumption of superior knowledge and
international localness. Indeed, the modern notion of space and time has been compressed
such that one can no longer easily grasp the true nature of things, unless one confronts
reality by way of one’s own body, which we are increasingly wont to do.
Not unlike the gluttonous citizens and governing body of ancient Ur, a more detailed
discussion of which follows, the first “modern” city, modern-day citizens and governing
bodies exist remotely from the physical and actual, living human world around them,
despite all of our travel and communications technologies and enlarged worldview. Put
another way, Google maps are digitally retrieved images compiled automatically via
sophisticated algorithms and mapped onto a virtual sphere in order to (one day not so far
in the future) represent the totality of Earth’s geographical space. As representations, they
express the ideology of new corporate empires and the dawn of a digital age. The
superficial quality of such mapped representations tries to overcome the shortcoming of
informational depth by adding tags, linked snapshots and dictionary information that
gives users the illusion of having rapidly and easily stumbled upon and assimilated a
good, basic (and essentially sufficient) understanding of geographical and cultural sites in
having made the visit via Google. After closer examination, it becomes clear that Google,
like any other corporate/capitalist entity is driven towards capital’s prime objective:
profit.
Google promotes a veneer of truth that obscures a tried and true business model based on
profit maximization. Indeed, governments have utilized this technique for centuries and
turned into a winner of a Business School model decades ago. To throw out a particularly
obvious and easy example, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by U.S. military forces and the
following 10-year occupation was justified by a series of lies and half-truths, yet the
public was made believe in the truthfulness and trustworthiness of so-called intelligence.
Not only did both wars pull a faltering U.S. economy out of a long economic slump, they
also gave rise to a new, highly productive (via destruction) branch of the militaryindustrial sector, viz. the infamous private security companies, as they call themselves.
21st-century mercenaries fill in where government agencies are likely to burn their
political fingers and in return, reap an incredibly large and constant cash flow.
To really understand the complexity of our world and to start devising a feasible project
of liberation from such capitalist malpractices, we must first make sure to obtain
information that is not mediated by the agendas of profit and politics. The five prints of
this art project are an example of reconstructing a rhizomatic network of ideas and
knowledge in order to obtain a more objective and critical stance towards information
made public on the network of all networks, the Internet. To explain this in greater detail
and with Deleuze and Guattari in mind, the ancient civilization of Ur is the geo-political
starting point for this project:
What is so intriguing about the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur (located in modern day
Iraq) is that it was the first city on earth deserving the designation ‘Megapolis’. It was
once home to a population of over a million people, but today, more than 4000 years
later, all that remains of what Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus described as the
Urstaat, are shallow mounds of rubble and sand where once stood massively fortified
enclosing walls, a fertile paradise of a grand city, and the Great Ziggurat of Ur – its
ancient terraced, pyramid-shaped temple and administrative center. Ziggurat, literally, a
‘house whose foundation creates terror’, which is ironic given that the supposedly
greatest nation of modern times – the U.S.A. – has repeatedly come to wage war on this
remote geographical site justified by alleged terror emanating from within the nation
states territory, Iraq. Another fact that makes the historic site of Ur relevant with regards
to terror and global military conflicts is that it was also the birthplace of Abraham
(Ibrahim in Islam), which makes Ur the birthplace of the most important religious and
cultural bifurcations of our day.
Indeed, not unlike modern megacities such as New York City, Ur fed and was ultimately
focused around such a strong and gluttonous economic enterprise that it caused its own
untimely demise by growing too large and exploiting its hunger for ever more resources
to the complete and utter destruction of its surrounding environment, which thousands of
years later, remains a wasteland. In our own times, we have found ways around such a
rapid downfall, though we are on the same road on a worldwide scale, by evolving from
what might be called the primitive state form of ancient Mesopotamia to the autocratic,
feudal and bureaucratic state forms that have most recently given way to the indisputable
and seemingly infinitely resilient sovereign of modern times: capital. If we can justly
claim that the towering Great Ziggurat of Ur stood as an epic symbol of power and might
of Ur’s ruling class, then we can safely posit that the New York City’s Twin Towers
served an analogous function for the rule of money and the capitalist system. This
highlights a remarkable conceptual and architectural continuity between the first great
city/substantial urban economic force and a modern-day financial and urban capital city,
both of which have seen monuments to their power and wealth destroyed, but not without
sending out significant shouts and murmurs about what was and what will be. In the case
of New York City, of course, the memorialization of this recent past and the destruction
of its highly symbolic architecture carry the torch still further.
Not only does the National September 11 Memorial act as a material and affective record
and commemoration of events passed—human lives lost and the destruction of an
expensive piece of real estate—it also serves as an ideological vector by reaffirming—
indeed, championing a ‘winning’ economic model and by projecting a disciplinary
diagram (Foucault, 1977) for (financial) success and power meant to resonate the world
over. Not only will the World Trade Center be rebuilt on almost the same spot, it will be
rebuilt in far greater splendor and in a way that is technologically far safer in order to
avoid the potential for a repeat catastrophe owing to possible future attacks. It embodies
New York’s post-9/11 slogan, “never again”. Each in its own way, the Ziggurat, the Twin
Towers and this latest (U.S.) national memorial are loud manifestations of discrete
cognitive maps (Jameson, 1991) that communicate political projects, values, core
concepts and beliefs to a spectatorship.
The void left by the destroyed towers needed to be both formally and conceptually filled
with a memorial to the eternal and abstract flow of money. This flow is represented
theatrically by a cascading water fountain of youth and ideologically by demonstrating a
renewed commitment to capitalism’s populist objective: to lead all people toward a
brighter future, a promised land of prosperity, equal opportunity and guaranteed
freedoms. The memorial is a pledge of allegiance of sorts, but not to a nation, which is
becoming an antiquated construct, e.g. the despotic state form of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Rather, the modern monument qua pledge is to an economic model that need not be
bounded by physical or political borders and that demands the sacrifice and commitment
of all members of its (increasingly international) member society to guarantee its
survival. The restoration of the Ziggurat under Hussein’s rule in Iraq might have had a
similar purpose by evoking and linking past grandeur with a contemporary political
project. Of note is the inverse formal similarity between the National September 11
Memorial and the Great Ziggurat of Ur: the former is a terraced negative pyramid that
drops off into an abyss; the latter is also a terraced pyramid, towering high over the
surrounding planes. In other words, they are essentially negative imprints of each other.
Though most likely involuntary, the relationship between these two monuments seems
unquestionable and uncanny if we take into consideration recent history and the
unfolding of multiple wars involving the two nations.
Moreover, the monuments, memorials and (Google) maps that appear in these five prints
have far more in common than it might at first seem. For instance, in comparing the Arc
of Triumph, also known as The Hands of Victory monument in Baghdad, Iraq, and the
National September 11 Memorial in New York City, U.S.A. with several Google Earth
screenshots of the sites, one finds several curious parallels. The Arc of Triumph is located
in downtown Baghdad, Iraq, consists of two pairs of gigantic metal hands crossing
enormous swords, forming “arcs” over a vast public space, known as the Great
Celebration Square, in commemoration of the Iran-Iraq war. Narrative architectural
symbols of this sort serve the hegemonic despot’s desire to triumphantly express his
vision of the nation’s glorious historic past while simultaneously making a public
warning statement via a visually imposing sculpture to potential future enemies (literally
saber rattling). Both the American and the Iraqi monument are material and affective
articulations of an ideology and politics of fear, vengeance, and self-righteousness. The
Arc of Triumph might appear to us Westerners to be somewhat infantile and self-evident
in comparison to the concept-laden September 11 Memorial, but its message is clear and
most likely made a lasting impression on the psyche of the people of Iraq who probably
share as much nostalgia about past glories after the turbulent and violent occupation by
the U.S. military forces as do Americans about their triumphs over the British and French
occupation, its role in WWII liberations in Europe, etc. Both monument and memorial
highlight the sad truth that neither nation is ready to move on to a peaceful future of
mutually understanding singularities.
Nonetheless, it is notable that Hussein’s rather pompous and arguably over-the-top
declamatory monument is, at least, rooted in the actual living mythology of human (not
corporate) culture and made a strong statement about boundaries and culturally-stamped
place. By contrast, the Twin Towers and the 9/11 Memorial like the Ziggurat of Ur are
monuments to greatness and a system that is fundamentally embedded in capital, in a
socio-economic system that is designed to and lauded for being able to run by itself,
accumulate and take what is needed and carry on without regard for the surrounding
“real” world—human, plant or animal. The desertification of Ur, from which it never
recovered presages what is so far a much more devastating and widespread cultural and
environmental desertification of our modern world—a tragic and frightening process that
has not only become automated and widely accepted (and lauded), but that is also touted
by corporations, like Google, the governments they are coming to dominate and control,
and the cultural manual they are slowly rewriting, as precisely the opposite: a sort of
Edenification of our world. Modernity has made the world smaller, and technology has
made our capacity to understand and appreciate each other greater; it is only a matter of
time before all will join in singing “We are the World” because, says the trickily
obscured small print, we will all be transparent slaves. Appearances have come to rule the
day, and the myth of a facile world based on a simple but “fair” model, everything has its
price, are eroding the Deleuze and Guattari archetypical model of the state form into
something far more nefarious, if not entirely new. What is the value of such ‘free’
information and ‘free’ marketing? Where is the democracy in an operating system that is
divorced from its people?
Bibliography
Borges, J. L. (1977). The Book of Sand. New York: Dutton.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press.