You Are Here: Museu, Experiment with the Drift in GPS Data Quality

Via Nicolas. In the fall of 1995 (early days of the operational GPS), at the MACBA, Laura Kurgan Design installed, “You Are Here: Museu“, a real-time feed of GPS satellite positioning data, from an antenna located on the roof of the gallery. The data where displayed, together with the record of mapping data, in light boxes. The idea is the represent the interferences between the digital and built space. Due to this drift, it is impossible to align the map the museum building with the electronic space engaged in mapping it. Therefore, the GPS information refers to but does not simply represent the space it maps: it exceeds, transforms, and re-organizes that space into another space. It does not only represent a space, but becomes a space by itself.

The idea behind this artistic setting is to give a critical eye to mapping technologies:

At a time when these digital technologies seem to offer great leaps in our ability to locate ourselves, and when not only frightened urbanites but some of our most radical social critics are worried about failures in cognitive mapping, a critical analysis of new mapping technologies seems imperative.

in response to the hype (arleady in 1995, and still know) that is created around location technologies:

“We need to know for certain where we are,” says a man holding a map titled Los Angeles Fires and Civil Unrest in a brochure for real-time GPS mapping software. The open reference of the statement summarizes the promise and the dream of GPS: accurate positions instantaneously and continuously. One newspaper report on GPS in passenger cars was headlined: “In Japan, they may never ask for directions again.” Not simply for pilots and engineers and ambulances, but for everyone, anyone, facing a location crisis. “With today’s integrated circuit technology,” suggests one manufacturer’s handbook, “GPS receivers are fast becoming small enough and cheap enough to be carried by just about anyone. That means that everyone will have the ability to know exactly where they are, all the time. Finally, one of man’s basic needs will be fulfilled. … Knowing where you are is so basic to life, GPS could become the next utility.”

Laura Kurgan Design is also being the Million Dollar Blocks project in 2005.

Relation to my thesis: An artistic setting that is related to my research focus on spatial uncertainty.The idea of defining the mapped space as a new space on it own. It is similar to the censored space mentioned in Managing Multiple Spaces.