You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 15

MAP
How to compile a map with GPS? You Are Here maps the spaces of a building, the
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, and then installs that map in and on the
building itself: not in the name of self-reference, but rather of superimposition, of
the overlay of asymmetrical spaces. Build up a series of successive point and line
measurements over two days in September: I stood ten minutes apiece for five
points [FIVE POINTS], walked two lines on the roof [ALIGNMENT, FACADE], and
constructed a set of five letters. The data and drawings—on the wall, on the moni-
tors, on the building, and on these pages—are the traces of an interaction with the
satellite network, and the physical space is layered over and folded with the imma -
terial remnants of this encounter. The passage of data through the electromagnetic
spectrum and cyberspace leaves its mark on the site of reception—not with the
destructive force of an explosion, but with the silent insistence of images, light,
and writing.
The composite map is a series of layers, corrected and averaged points traced
over one another in the memory of a computer. The layered data are correlated by
reference to a quasi-arbitrary point: the so-called 0/0 reference point enables the
digitized data to be coordinated with the space of their reference. On the compos -
ite map [BUILDING], not all the points recorded by the GPS receiver—even the
averaged points—fit into the space defined by the walls of the museum. And even
with the most accurate receiver available on the market and the most precise cor -
rections possible, the point is always divisible into a series of points somewhere in
the zone of an expected point. The GPS information refers to, but does not simply
represent, the space it maps: it exceeds, transforms, and reorganizes that space
into another space. Not a representation of a space, but a space itself ...or rather,
spacing itself, passage and inscription, light and motion, transmission and inter -
face. GPS can locate a target to within a few meters, measure the movement of a
mountain after an earthquake, keep an airplane on course, direct a 911 response
team to your doorstep—and this active intervention obliges us to take these
maps and readouts seriously, obliges us to think of these computerized maps as
real spaces, at least as real as anything else (the building, for example). Perhaps
there is more than one dominant definition of this, or any, space. The composite
map, in its compilation and complication, charts a digital ground, a space of digital
points—a space in which we think and act and move, every day.