2001
HUMAN WORLD.
A Demographic Atlas of Politics of Culture.
Year: 2001
Project Type: Research Project
Exhibited at:
- XI Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, Athens, 2003.
- Empowerment. Cantiere Italia, Museo Villa Croce, Genova, Italy, 2004.
- Galleria Contemporaneo, Antonio Scarponi, solo Exhibition, 2007
Publications:
- Marco Scotini (ed.), Empowerment. Cantiere Italia, exhibition catalogue, Musei di Genova, 2004
- Grahame Shane and Brian McGrath (eds.), Sensing the 21st Century City: Close-up and Remote, - Architectural Design (AD), Vol. 76, No. 3, Wiley, 2005, p. 48
- Scarponi, A., [exhibition catalogue], Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre, 2007
Referenced in:
- Martin Dodge, Understanding Cyberspace Cartographies, PhD thesis, UCL, pp. 239–245
- Università di Pavia, Biblioteca condivisa
- Grahame Shane, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory, Wiley, West Sussex, 2005, pp. 300-3001
- Andrea Branzi, Modernità Debole e Diffusa, Skira, Milano, 2006, pp. 32–33
- Gurung, A., McGrath, B., Zha, J., China and India: Shifting Perspective on Urbanization and Globalization, India and China Institute, New York, 2009 (cover image)
Author: Antonio Scarponi
Related Projects:
This project renders legible the epistemic actions articulated as DEMA in Epistemic Design.
Human World (2001–ongoing) aims to display the world’s political and cultural information on a population basis. The project raises the question of understanding the politics of culture as a demographic challenge.
In these cartograms, each country is scaled proportionally to its population: 1 pixel equals 1,000 people. Territorial continuity is replaced by demographic weight, allowing political and cultural information to be read through population rather than geography. Political space is no longer understood as geographic surface but as distributed population.
The project refers to Alighiero Boetti’s work, reversing the association between flag and territory into a relationship between flag and population.
Human World depicts the demographic scenario of a world in which everyone is technically connected through the internet and social media. The first map of this ongoing project, Internet Users World Map (2001), was developed in reaction to the repression of the G8 protests in Genoa in 2001. Conceived at a moment when global connectivity was expanding while political violence remained territorially grounded, the project marks a decisive shift in how political space can be understood.
The series includes the following cartograms:
– Internet Users World Map, 2001
– Death Penalty Enforcement in World Countries, 2006
– Population Represented by Female Head of State, 2006
– Population in Free Countries, 2006
Although developed prior to the formal articulation of DEMA, Human World anticipates the epistemic structure later formalized as Epistemic Design, establishing a demographic field in which political space is understood as relational rather than territorial.
Displace — The project displaces political and cultural representation from territorial space to demographic scale, replacing geographic proportion with population-based visualization.
Expose — By rendering demographic data spatially visible, Human World exposes population as a primary political and cultural parameter, often obscured by territorial representation.
Mediate — Human World mediates complex political and cultural information through cartographic translation, allowing abstract data to be read as spatial relationships between populations rather than borders.
Activate — By converting demographic data into spatial form, the project renders political conditions legible within a globally interconnected field.