You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 3

GLOBAL POSITIONING
New York and Barcelona, 1994-1995— 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 incom -
mensurable 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. “GPS really allows every
square meter of the earth's surface to have a unique address,” as Trimble's GPS:
A Guide to the Next Utility puts it. “Everyone will have the ability to know exactly
where they are, all the time.” 1
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 map -
ping 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 is an
attempt to begin mapping this emerging space of information using its own tech -
nologies. 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.