Inagural Architecture Exhibition at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Nov 1995-Feb 1996

In the fall of 1995, the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona became both the subject of, and the surface on which to register, the flows and displays of the GPS digital mapping network. "You Are Here: Museu" installed a real-time feed of GPS satellite positioning data, from an antenna located on the roof of the gallery and displayed in it, together with the record of mapping data collected in September, in light boxes and inscribed onto the walls of the gallery. A classic Meier building with its universal rational grid, here transformed; rotated and stretched and distorted, by the precise position machine, into definite and imprecise points on another universal grid.

Global Positioning

These days, orienting yourself is becoming increasingly disorienting. Now, in order to answer that old question about where you are, it seems one has to leave the ground and travel into space, and more exactly into the cyberspace of a global satellite network. It is said that satellite positioning technology offers a definitive solution to this question, which some claim has troubled us from our origin: where am I?

Where we are, these days, seems less a matter of fixed locations and stable reference points, and more a matter of networks, which is to say of displacements and transfers, of nodes defined only by their relative positions in a shifting field. Even standing still, we operate at once in a number of overlapping and incommensurable networks, and so in a number of places -- at once. Orienting oneself in this open and ongoing interaction appears all the more imperative, and all the more impossible. "Where am I" in what? Where am I, where? In the global market, in the universe, in the family, in a corporate database, in some collective history, in the city or the desert, in the Internet, on the information superhighway?

With the Global Positioning System, it is said, a definite answer can finally be provided, with a precision verging on one centimeter. "Every square meter of the earth's surface [will] have a unique address," as one user's guide to GPS puts it, and "everyone will have the ability to know exactly where they are, all the time." But the space or the architecture of the information system that wants to locate us once and for all in space has its own complexity, its own invisible relays and delays. The difficulty of charting the spaces that chart the spaces, of mapping the scaleless networks of the very system that promises finally to end our disorientation, demands redefining the points and lines and planes that build the map, and lingering in their strange spaces and times. "You Are Here: Information Drift" is an attempt to begin mapping this emerging space of information, using its own technologies. These are drawings with satellites, not to pinpoint a location but to experience the drift and disorientation at work in any map or any architecture --especially the architecture of information.