Report on Entangled Cartographies: Mapping the Unmappable in a Digital Age Reported by Kymbat Altybay, class of 2028
On November 6-7, 2025, the IB Lecture Hall at Duke Kunshan hosted the international conference “Entangled Cartographies.” For two days, a unique group of thinkers gathered to solve an urgent question: how do we chart digital, ecological, and social territories that are in constant change?
The conference opened with a keynote from Boris Debackere of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media. He introduced V2_ not just as an organization, but as an interdisciplinary center for artists who work at the precipice of art and technology. He showed us projects where the art itself was evolving and had an interactive message to the audience. Watching artists use technology to create such responsive systems, I immediately recognized my own research on nomadic intelligence and distributed systems.
The next day, Victoria Szabo’s keynote pulled us into the world of XR and AR that map complex historical and fictional places. She drew us all in by introducing her project, “Visualizing Lovecraft’s Providence,” a collaboration with an architectural engineer at the University of Padua. During the private discussion, I asked her what a Lovecraftian AI chatbot might be like. She described a vision where it wouldn’t just answer questions, but would use AI-generated sound or a real voice to give immersive descriptions of places. It was an interesting idea where maps are not seen but felt and heard.
The panel sessions were where these grand ideas had human touch. My fellow DKU student, Daniela Torres Medina spoke about memory and her experience of visiting a museum in Shanghai and seeing the actual passports and historical documents of refugees. She described
that these objects were not just paper but “holders of memories across generations.” This personal connection to physical history was a great reminder that all data is ultimately human.
Later, fellow DKU student Zhiyuan Ma and collaborators presented their project on Bacheng. Zhiyuan shared their own poem and showed us a website that connects together maps, photos of locals, and their stories. They even included a visual art piece made from bamboo in the presentation. I loved how they literally used the material of the place to create a new kind of map.
The afternoon keynote by Ionat Zurr, researcher artist from University of Western Australia was very memorable. She introduced us to the world of bio-art by showing her projects that challenged the very definition of life and creation. She spoke about artificial wombs and the work of groups like GEAIR and Kaiwa Technology. She presented a cartography not of land, but of life itself.
This theme of mapping the body and land culminated in the final track. Qianying (Yelena) Ye from NYU Shanghai presented on the concept of cuerpo-territorio. For me, this idea was entirely new. Yelena connected the struggle over the female body to the struggle over land. She framed it as a form of counter-cartography. She pointed to the central paradox of green energy, which promises sustainability yet often relies on colonial logics of extraction. Her conclusion was stunning: resistance, in this context, is both a vast political act and a deeply intimate one, a rethinking of how bodies, lands, and knowledge can exist on their own terms.
My own presentation, “Nomadic Intelligence as Distributed Sentience in Central Asia,” became my personal experiment in this act of counter-mapping. I argued that the true cartography of the steppes isn’t found on any official map, but is a living intelligence distributed across the herds, animal partners, and the oral histories carried by elders. To be honest, after hearing about bio-art and digital Lovecraftian, I felt the huge paradox of my task: to use the structured, academic language of a university to talk about a knowledge system that inherently resists it. It was a reminder that some of the most sophisticated maps are those that are felt, lived, and constantly remade, rather than simply drawn. Even now, the goal is not to just build smart environments, but wise ones that are designed for dialogue with the environment .
We left the conference without a single, definitive map. And that was the point. Instead, we left with a deeper set of questions and a belief that the most important territories are those that can only be understood when many different eyes are looking at them, all at once.
