You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 14

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LETTERS

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 pin down the
point or identify 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
MACBA, 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.