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Take a walk, even a short one, with a GPS receiver. A minute and a half on the roof of the building leaves a faint collection of points [Drift], about one every two seconds, the oddly scattered remainder of a meeting with five satellites. Correct them differentially and a line emerges. Moving is collecting points, which is to say, drawing. With a real-time display, you can watch yourself walking, charting, wandering ... on the roof? On the screen? The network is a machine for leaving traces, and so we can draw with satellites. The record of the interaction appears at the foot of each display: the identifying numbers of the NAVSTAR satellites, the time spent in contact with them, the number of data points collected by the receiver. What remains of that correspondence is something like a line, a sequence of points that registers the movement of the receiver across some physical space. But the line that results [Line], what is left over not exactly from a relation between given places but rather from the transmission of data, charts more than one drifting pathway ... across the roof, across a representation, across the screen. And in the network. GPS location data, always a series of points, require that both movement (line) and stasis (point) be registered as drift in the zone of information, and so the map-user operates in an oddly layered space, as if data and earth were at once utterly independent of and somehow transparent to one another. The ostensible elements of architecture -- points, lines, and surfaces -- all find themselves transformed and redefined in the interactions of this network. This scaleless information zone constitutes not simply the representation of a pre-existing space -- as if built or physical space had some priority -- but another space altogether. The possibilities of disorientation, not in the street or on the roof but precisely in the database that promises orientation, are of an entirely different order, and GPS offers the chance to begin mapping some of these other highways as well: drift in the space of information. NAVSTAR
Constellation: 23 28 31 15 |
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| DRIFT Mobile GPS receiver, moving roof of Museu across d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Data: 42 raw (uncorrected) position records. Acquired: 2 September 1995. 09:10:36 - 09:11:45 GPS time. 09:10:36 - 09:11:45 GPS time. 28, 31, 15, and 22, 23, 28, 15. |
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| LINE Mobile GPS receiver, moving across roof of Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, from within three to five meters of start point, 41º 22' 58.56" North, 2º 09' 59.15" East, to within three to five meters of endpoint, 41º 22' 59.10" North, 2º 09' 58.52" East. 42 position records, after differential correction by reference to Tortosa base station. | |||||||||
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