Cartography at Ground Level Spectrality and Streets in Jeremy Wood’s Meridians and My Ghost

To explore the shifting status of the street in contemporary mapping culture, this chapter attends to two map-based walking performances by US-born artist Jeremy Wood, who uses Global Positioning Systems to transform grounded mobility into a means of cartographic inscription. Whereas Michel de Certeau describes cartography as an elevated visuality, regimenting urban practice from above, my argument stresses how Wood’s mappings conflate lived mobility and synoptic cartography. Extending mapping to the street, his practice exemplifies digital mapping’s expansion beyond institutional domains. To close, however, I show how Wood’s art also exposes slippages and pretentions of existential security in digital mapping’s worldview of securely calculated locations, which are recast as ghostly projections in a universe without essential orientation.