You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 11

IMPLIED PLANE
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 the 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—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
[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 that 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 posi -
tion on that grid with a real-time address, a unique and singular geotemporal code.
They make up an “information” or “orbital front,” as Paul Virilio has called it, that
operates in a fourth dimension, an “exo-spheric” and strictly temporal dimension,
“that of the real time of ubiquity and instantaneity ...less physical than micro-
physical.” 2 Twenty thousand kilometers and six one-hundredths of a second over -
head, they are transmitting—now.