You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 20

MUSEU
What happens to the museum in an age of digital mapping, of real-time data flows
and virtual realities? The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona opened its
doors in November 1995, but the building itself is designed to open permanently to
the outside, flooded as it is by the natural light that enters through the glass of the
roof and the façade. “It's the Mediterranean light that makes this building unique,”
says the architect, and the light symbolizes a more general openness: “Today a
museum is more than a container for works of art,” he says, “it's a place where
people come together, a social place as well as a place for contemplation.” 3 But
what is a “social place,” now that information moves through buildings and places
at the speed of some other, unnatural light? New public spaces and new modali -
ties of being together or at odds emerge in the vectors of data flows, in the media
and online, places invisible to the eye of the rational-critical thinker. And what
becomes of the aura of the building and of the artwork contained and contem -
plated in it, now that uniqueness flickers in the light of the monitor, fiber optics,
and satellite relays? Could we ever really imagine an inside that remains pure, a
space of consolidation and identity that resists the intrusion of everything foreign,
secured by the frontier of a line? The barriers between public and private, outside
and inside, always questionable, have long since been eroded and transformed by
so many complications, of which digital flows are only one figure. The museum is a
node, fixed and unfixed by its changing position in different networks, and try as
we might, we can never simply be inside or outside its space. Without these reli -
able boundaries, at the museum or anywhere, disorientation becomes less a prob -
lem to be solved than an irreducible condition of possibility of our movements in
space and time.
In the fall of 1995, MACBA became both the subject of and the surface on which
to register the flows and displays of a GPS digital mapping network. You Are Here:
Museu installed a real-time feed of GPS satellite positioning data from an antenna
located on the roof of the gallery and displayed in it, together with the record of
mapping data collected in September, in light boxes and inscribed on the walls and
floors of the gallery. These interferences between the digital and built space are
experienced as drift: the map as the impossible alignment of the museum building
with the electronic space engaged in mapping it.