Mapping as the mediator of place experience in post-human assemblages

Date

2025-3-06

Author

Sakçak, Şafak

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This research aims to think, discuss, and explore how mapping can become a mediator as a performance in the process of collaboration and communication between human and AI actants in a more-than-human experience of place. The field of more-than-representational theories provides a suitable field of inquiry in understanding and explaining the concept of post-human place. The definition of place through process-based, relational views reveals the agency of non-human actants involved in its becoming. This perspective also offers the possibility of including embodied, intangible, ephemeral, pre-cognitive, and everyday elements of place experience, which cannot be reduced to representation and cannot be transformed into data. Within the scope of this study, GPT and GAN, as popularly accessed generative AI models, were preferred among the participants. Their potential to operate in interactive, multi-modal, error-prone, ambiguous iterative processes implies a repetition of difference that can suggest a line of flight to escape from the limits of instrumentalist views or structuralist representations. Mapping as a performance, with its capacity to engage critically, creatively, and projectively from within the place, has been suggested as a promising mediator to explore the unrepresented, invisible components of such a place experience. Hence, this dissertation is also a mapping of research process into text. The researcher's subjectivity, the study's affective atmosphere, the participants' experiences, and a multitude of other heterogeneous encounters emerged as an assemblage, together with a nomadic material-discursive framework that evolves throughout the process.

Subject Keywords

Mapping, More-than-human place, More-than-representational theories, Generative-AI, Relational agency

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114098

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis