edges in a bitmapped image)» (Lev Manovich) [12] , or rather «infra-dating»: extracting data from within the image or the sound file. This allows for the administration of bitmapped data objects which are non-linearly related among themselves, while at the same time being parts of an arbitrarily complex network of transcribed information. [13] Between the classical text-image dichotomy we discover the bitmapped token.

Dynamic operativity

The essential feature of networked computing is its dynamic operativity. Michel de Certeau already separates maps and tours; [14] space then is an intersection of mobile elements, whereas tours are literally discursive series of operations. In electronic, digital media, mapping means dynamic movement «in flight» as a new quality. Classical maps are neither interactive nor time-critical (feedback). The spatial, that is archival, order might thus be accompanied by «mapping time,» i.e. mapping temporal, dynamic, processual operations, which distinguish traditional from electronic works of art. Static maps differ from

dynamic maps in virtual space, since dynamic maps can be automatically updated (truly «dated» maps). Trace routers are not spatial, but temporal scouts. [15] Mapping time though is not mapping at all, but sequentializing, time-critical as is a/synchronous communication online; every spatial representation of this process can only be metaphorical—or is it able to show a temporal sequence at one glance?

Whatever is linked to images—to visuality as the privileged channel of information since antiquity—privileges spatial perception, as far as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was right when in his 1766 «Laokoon or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry» he media-semiotically declared that visual arts belong to spatial perception, whereas linear arts belong to temporal perception. In his reply to René Magritte («This is not a pipe»), Michel Foucault insisted as well on separating the visual from the readable. Buci-Glucksmann interprets maps as readable and visible at the same time, as an «image-index»—a hybrid? [16] The very term territory, which serves as a referent for any map, privileges spatial rather than dynamic perception (though the Latin term «imperium»