You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 1

1 You Are Here

Actually to inhabit an information system

New York, 2012— The Global Positioning System, the U.S. military's network of
location satellites, was developed just in time to become fully operational at the
onset of the first Gulf War as the American armed forces and a global coalition
of allies went to war in and around and over Kuwait and Iraq. GPS-guided weap -
ons flew through the air of the battlefield and across our television screens. And
the GPS signals were everywhere—it was just a matter of finding a receiver, not
so easy then, that could tune them in. The military and civilian versions of the
technology appeared simultaneously, captivating experts and the public with the
promise of the next utility—we would never be lost again. And yet very few peo -
ple understood GPS. The You Are Here installations charted some of the territory
opened up by—and in—this new and unfamiliar mapping system.
When I finally obtained a GPS receiver and its separate mushroom-shaped
antenna, a loan from the manufacturer, Trimble, they came together in a small suit-
case. The receiver itself was the size of a shoebox. Separate software, donated by
Geolink, allowed the data to be displayed on a computer monitor in real time.
I was interested in the mutability of digitized information. Data sets are subject
to a series of presentational choices, and points in space can be described in dif -
ferent ways: numeric, linguistic, or symbolic. They can appear as singular points or
be connected into lines. In You Are Here , I chose to keep the points as points and
to represent them as crosshairs, rather than as dots. The AutoCad crosshair became
the navigational insignia of this research.
This project afforded the opportunity actually to inhabit an information sys -
tem: to find that the totalizing system of the network itself is scattered, even in its
principal architectures—to discover at the heart of the ideology of precision not a
space of certainty, but one of confusion.