Over our heads, not like a canopy or a roof but more like a panoply, the twenty-one active satellites and the three spares of the NAVSTAR constellation construct a strange space, in space. Guided by five ground stations scattered around the globe, near the Equator, their signals blanket the earth, and their movements allow us to chart ours, at any time. Or rather, their incessant motion allows us to stabilize ours, because their motion is not only that of objects traveling in space but that of constant broadcast, transmission, flow in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Any GPS position reading implies the interaction of at least three satellites (and the addition of a fourth allows an altitude calculation), and thus inscribes the active interface with an information network. [Constellation] Frozen in the second that defines a point's registration, the satellites constitute or imply a network of planes [Network]-- not the planes that enclose a volume or a shelter, but the planes of a transmission, of the relay or passage of information at the speed of light, and of information that amounts to nothing more than the record of their own positions. [Implied Planes] They move in a fourth dimension: they transmit a "pseudo-random code" for timing purposes, based on data from on-board atomic clocks, along with a message about their exact orbital location and the status of the system, in a few hundredths of a second. Their orbital paths define the movements which link them as a network, a series of nodes defined only in relation to one another, but the pathways followed by their radio transmissions are as much temporal as spatial. Constant real-time transmission grants them a certain ubiquity: invisible in their motion, they render everything visible. Without watching or listening, without the eyes and ears with which we figure surveillance, they nevertheless lay a grid over the totality of the earth's surface, they define it as a totality, and mark every position on that grid with a real-time address, a unique and singular geo-temporal code. They make up an "information" or "orbital front," as Virilio has called it, which operates in a fourth dimension, an "exo-spheric" and strictly temporal dimension, "that of the real time of ubiquity and instantaneity, ... less physical than microphysical." 20,000 kilometers and 6/100ths of a second overhead, they are transmitting -- now.

Constellation NAVSTAR satellites 23, 28, 21, 15, and 04, 07, 14, 28 over Barcelona, 2 Sept 1995, 09:10:36 GPS time, and 1 September 1995, 15:28:37 GPS time.

X,Y axis (azimuth): position of satellite away from north. Z axis (altitude): position of satellite above horizon.

Pathways NAVSTAR satellites 15, 28, 21, 01, over Barcelona, 2 September 1995, 10:09:51 - 10:19:52 GPS time.

Movement increment of planes: two minutes.