You Are Here - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 22

FRONTS
In 1993, the Storefront was given a new “front,” a permeable membrane of pivot -
ing doors aimed at blurring the distinction between the street and the gallery. The
architect says: “this project has two extremes; totally closed, and totally open ....
If it is closed, it is a wall with lines on it. When it is open, the outside is inside and
the inside is outside.” 4 In its symmetry, this position leaves room for a very limited
interpretation of both outside and inside. Like the opposition between open and
closed, the distinction between inside and outside stays firmly in place—the wall
with lines on it remains itself a line. But can we imagine an inside that remains
pure, that resists the intrusion of everything else, secured by the frontier of a line?
Storefront is a node, defined and redefined only by its changing position in differ -
ent networks, and try as we might, we could never be simply inside or outside the
space. One cannot choose to open or close oneself to the outside, as one chooses
to open a door or a wall. But without these reliable boundaries, at the Storefront or
anywhere, disorientation becomes less a problem to be solved than an irreducible
condition of possibility for our movements in space and time.
In March and April 1994, You Are Here: Information Drift closed the doors of
this new façade in order to open it onto and inscribe it into a usually invisible
network, an orbital or digital front. Turned into a satellite receiver, the Storefront
became both the subject of and the surface on which to register and display the
flow of digital mapping with GPS.