Visualizing Place

Abstract

Satellite technologies, specifically Global Postitioning System (GPS), are new tools for naming, orienting, locating and recording movement. As a terrestrial panopticon, GPS permits a mode of performance of ‘being within’ that merges the personal and political and questions contemporary/historical ideologies in defining place. In this paper, I explore these concerns through recent examples of collaborative artworks using GPS technologies. Gesture, memory and notational traces of place reveal a poetics within an absolute lattice of exact individual locality. The literal recording of the individual’s place is re-constructed through these projects as the visible communication of the movement of gesture. Instead of constricting language to a narrow navigational-numerical space, the expression/technology relationship becomes a new starting point for aesthetic and semantic creativity.