You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 9

LINE
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. Cor -
rect them differentially, and a line emerges [ CORRECTION]. 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 identify -
ing 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 correspon-
dence 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] 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 preexisting 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.