This short
essay discusses the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in locative
media practice, with reference to the works of Hamilton and Southern
and the geo-philosophical writings of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly
their notions of smooth and striated space1. In an earlier text
by Annie Gerin on Hamilton and Southern, a textile technological
model for their work (Distance Made Good) is introduced. In writing
on the smooth and striated, Deleuze and Guattari had already described
textile fabrics by way of illustration, first of a striated space,
produced through the apparatus of weaving and then in contrast to
this with the production of felt, as a smooth space without separation
of threads only an entanglement of fibres, in principle open and
unlimited in every direction.
The apparatus that Hamilton and Southern use for their
investigations from urban spaces to coastlines is the GPS device:
both state apparatus and war machine. The GPS as a state instrument,
a part of the military apparatus is a surveillance device, a device
used in military operations. The GPS as a state apparatus is one
that produces a striation, a homogenisation of the space over which
the state reigns. It does this by controlling and containing migrations,
in its capture of flows, by imposing restrictions on speed and direction,
and in its measurement and capture of movements. But, to complicate
things, the GPS device is also used in the work of Hamilton and
Southern as a war machine of a different kind, in that it offers
a creative resistance to the control and striation of space –
it is used for other purposes. The GPS in locative media practice
is a machine best characterised by movements across space rather
than the grid that allows this movement to be plotted, reintroducing
smooth elements that resist containment or evade spatial routine
through simple acts such as walking to work through the city, putting
out the lobster pots in a boat, or flying a kite on the beach.
This apparatus, this device, has association with
drawing machines (and this is one of the things Hamilton and Southern
use it for), with surveying machines and with a general expansion
of perception through the use of technical devices. More interestingly
it also has association with a projective geometry - one that opens
multiple perspectives and subjectivities through a mobilisation
of geometries of points of view.
... what makes me = me is a point of view on the world...
through a mobilization of points of view... it's not points of view
that are explained by the subjects, it’s the opposite, subjects
that are explained by points of view.2
The GPS comes with sets of conditions that are useful
in the description of a 'striated' or otherwise metric space –
it is a triangulation machine for measuring and registering the
location of points of practice in a particular locale. This triangulation
machine is part of a technological assemblage – an interconnected
network of technologies which include actual linkages and other
associations (mobile phones, PDAs, computers, the wireless internet,
radio signals, traffic monitoring, road maps, the ordnance survey,
the history of maritime navigational technology, dependency on electromagnetism,
the accuracy of atomic clocks, and so on). Considering the GPS as
an assemblage this also includes the 24 satellites in orbit around
the earth, as well as the mathematics that resolve location through
the temporal measurement of radio transmissions and through the
processes of triangulation or trilateration. A further association
that can be made lies within the problem for triangulation this
poses - where all points to be measured are in motion, not as fixed
or static points but vectors – we can speculate that this
might require the generation and computation of some intermediary
constructions based on, lets say, intersecting circles or the surfaces
of volumes - very much in the same way that Bernard Cache has described
Philibert de L'Orme's 'trompes' being resolved through a generalised
system of two intersecting conical shapes composed of parallel rays
with vertices at vanishing points, or in the invention of stereotomy
and other developments of perspective technologies. This begins
to move the GPS, positioning locative media practice, as an architectural
practice, somewhere between 1550 and 1872 AD, precisely where Cache
locates the future of Computer Aided Design that other descendent
of the perspective hinge in architecture.3
The collaborative and participatory locative media
work of Hamilton and Southern illustrates how the sets of conditions
that come with the GPS can limit the descriptions of space and can
render a journey into a two dimensional depiction - the drawn line.
Though their work is not as straightforward or limited as that -
it involves the drawing around a neighbourhood, a place, a site,
a locale, and the rendering of this space into a contour, a line.
It is this, the 'becoming-line' that it is to participate in this
process, that is useful; such lines can be used to draw maps full
of reciprocal interactions, influences and experiences, like drawing
around the buildings, roads, and public spaces to trace the figure-ground
but instead becoming an expression of pure movements, variations,
differentiations - becoming points of view described as vectors,
not points, or at least not only points. But, as well as points
of view, to participate is to be rendered as points on the Cartesian
grid of the GPS display. The work produces both representations
and a multiple perspectivism; it is this that helps the artists
delineate differences of spatial opinion differentials of speed,
delays and accelerations, changes in orientation, continuous variations...
4
The GPS as assemblage manages space, movement through
that space and conditions human behaviour in space - the GPS bends
space around itself and develops an isomorphism with other elements
across layers or strata. Through Hamilton and Southern's work we
can see the stratification of social space as a layering of agency;
the achieving of affects through exposed layerings or strata - language
and technology, content and expression that cannot be reduced to
a single plane, but instead become multiplicities of mutually determining
layers. The GPS as wielded by Hamilton and Southern merges layers
and re-introduces them as smoothing elements that cross and resist
the containment of spatial routine.
What one sees as a visitor - and in developing this
work Hamilton and Southern have been first-time visitors to their
respective home towns – what is experienced by one as an alien,
as one type of space, will alter slightly from how another sees
and experiences and knows from memory to be the one type of space
they frequently occupy, inhabit or traverse. Hamilton and Southern’s
practice and their work with communities of participants, can be
seen as processes of projective geometry, as a practice of resistance
or war machine in an urban and striated space. The 'becoming-line'
of participants via the apparatus of the GPS which describes, or
better still projects their points of view as rays and shadows:
onto the pavement; into the cracks between the paving stones; in
the fissures of the stones; through the gaps and into the surfaces
of the city or town. The GPS drawn line, as vectors in a field that
is simultaneously smooth and striated, is a nomadic line that continuously
smooths and makes malleable an always already striated space with
multiple orientations that pass between points, figures and contours:
it is positively motivated by the smooth space it draws.5 The machinic
aspect of the GPS as assemblage is in the habits and traits of participants
in Southern and Hamilton's work and how these reveal and express
the singularities of social space, the site and its becoming, those
aspects that give a site, give architecture, its intensity and that
actualise its virtuality.
1. Deleuze. G, Guattari.F, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
2. Deleuze lecture notes on Leibniz taken from Cours
Vincennes – 15/04/1980 www.webdeleuze.com
3. Cache, B, Towards an Associative Architecture,
in Leach. N, Turnbull. D, Digital Tectonics, 2004, Wiley Academy.
4. Deleuze lecture notes on Leibniz taken from Cours
Vincennes – 15/04/1980 www.webdeleuze.com
