The starting point of this article is the famous Borges forgery style story “On Exactitude in Science” about the Empire’s map at scale 1:1. In How to Travel with a Salmon and other essays, Umberto Eco discusses this text in an hilarious way. Pretending to take Borges seriously, Eco considers all possible and even most astonishing solutions. He demonstrates : 1) that there is not any practical way to set up a map at scale 1:1 and 2) that a map at scale 1:1 is theoretically impossible.Umberto Eco main argument addresses the radical impossibility to get a perfect representation of the world. Any representation process has to deal with loss of reality. The representation requires that a distance remains between who is representing and what is represented.
As a matter of fact, neither Borges or Eco could take into account the fact that the problem changes drastically when we consider a 1:1 digital map. Most of Eco’s arguments about the practical possibility of the 1:1 scale map are ruined by the new geospatial technology. But Google Earth and Virtual Earth can be read as a sign of this incredible project of the maps at 1:1 scale, that Borges and Eco thought as a theoretical apory, a strange and troubling dream.
I attempt to address in this topic some social, politic and scientific questions about this race to the perfect representation of the world.
