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| Drawing with satellites ... from points to lines, the GPS network defines physical space -- whether the roof of a building, the public space of a city plaza, or the wide open sea -- as a surface for inscription. Not just for the data that pins down the point or identifies the place with an "address" precise enough to call for help or to direct a cruise missile, but for writing in the narrow, everyday, sense. Take a walk with a receiver, pace out the steps in the form of letters, and watch the display unfold on the computer screen: writing with data points. Lines make letters and letters join into words: information of another order, a word written -- and read -- not from above, not even seen in any conventional sense, but traced on a purely digital surface. Walking, under the satellite sky, is writing, somewhere else. On the roof of the museum, the carefully rational grid that frames the skylights marks out the space of a virtual word, in Catalan: M U S E U. The structure of the word is built into the building, like the characters latent in the LED display of a digital clock: the points await their configuration into any number of signifying combinations. Dot by dot, the GPS data points are transformed into the word that names the building and the institution. Now, at once fleetingly and forever, the roof reads "museu," museum ... a machine for collecting and preserving, for inscribing, the traces of a culture. Two styles or spaces of inscription cross with each other, two conventions of description or interpretation: the precise coordinates, in longitude, latitude, and altitude, of the building, and the letters of the name, both common and incipiently proper, of the institution which, as such, sets off and demarcates that space as a zone of preservation and display. Two information networks, two virtual spaces, condensed into a map of this museu ... and exposed.
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