The article Examining Amsterdam RealTime: Blueprints, the Cartographic Imaginary and the Locative Uncanny by Ned Prutzer was published in InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture in October 2015.
“Amsterdam RealTime, though, occupies a unique historical position in the practice of mapping. It renders Amsterdam as a kind of performance—one which is encapsulated by the everyday practices of its inhabitants. At the same time, the project is a system of display, marked by forces beyond that of its presupposed focus and content. Furthermore, the project is a significant historical commentary upon mapping as a genre of display. Several of the mapping projects to which Amsterdam RealTime is juxtaposed in the broader exhibition space emphasize the failure and insufficiency of the cartographic imaginary.
Amsterdam RealTime also occupies a unique position in the emerging history of locative representation in the project’s early adoption of locative artistic techniques and its claim to an ever-present temporality that does not exist. The project, alongside other early locative projects, is now relegated to an uncanny presence. In part, this is due to the transparency of its fraught relationship in the public sphere over the discourses of surveillance prevalent in the digital age. Moreover, in assessing the position of Amsterdam RealTime within the study of locative representation, it is equally crucial to examine the affinities it shares with prior forms of representation and artistic display. Such a focus reveals a historicity behind locative representation, without reemphasizing the technological optimism and uniqueness often purported in the form.”