floating points: locative media, space and the iss

quiet...does not mean inactive...

2008-04-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

been working on a lot of the concepts and functionalites of the project.....have not posted here in a while......seeing other projects and research beginning to merge into the concepts here....which is exciting....

also looking forward to feedback when the project is mentioned soon in a magazine article about my work in a computer magazine...

my collaborator alexander is now at nasa eames so looking forward to more input from those folks as we progress....

seeing more and more how the google earth hack aspect will come to play as well as the flighpath triggered data and 3d visualization of communication

on a side note....making a lot of progress on a new non euclidian geometry based topological modelling of event time.......will lecture about this soon as a keynote speaker in Russia......also developing the linkage of this to floating points....very interesting indeed...

floating points progress....collaborations

2007-06-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

Gathering team support now. Looking more into what cities will likely lie within the flightpath and what the teams will be to help build the works at these cluster areas of latitude and longitude positions and the signals and semiotics of each area to begin from. It is interesting how cities have "faces" in a sense as far as how they are perceived as an accumulative nexus and how this seems to differ city by city...This might be interesting to work with.

can now tell the whole story about the project

2006-10-16T01:04:00.000-07:00

Have had to wait quite a while to let it be known that this is not an "experiment" or hypothetical theory.

The project has been in early development since long before I was in the Cultural Utilization of Space Exploration conference many months ago now. I had to wait until the report to the european space agency was made public to talk of the project itself.

The project may well be one of the most ambitious artworks ever attempted as well as pushing into newer territory on a couple of fronts. The artwork will essentially span the earth in a circle of cities of spaces beneath the international space station's orbit as well as on the iss itself and in museum kiosks in different parts of the world.

It will be quite a task but also what my work to this point has built to.

would love any comments but the world of blogs tends to be one of reading......would be nice though...

FLOATING POINTS PROJECT SHORTLISTED FOR POTENTIAL WORK WITH EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY

2006-10-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

A CULTURAL POLICY FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION
The Arts Catalyst's Report to the European Space Agency

http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/space/ISS.html

In 2005, the European Space Agency (ESA) awarded the The
Arts Catalyst in London a contract to carry out a study into
possible future cultural utilisation of the International
Space Station.

The study set out to investigate and focus the interest of
the cultural world in the International Space Station, to
generate a policy for involving cultural users in the
International Space Station programme in the longer term and
to develop a representative set of ready-to-implement
demonstrator projects in arts, culture and media. Under the
lead of the Arts Catalyst (GB), the study team also
comprises Association Leonardo- Olats (F) and Delta Utec
(NL), with the MIR network.

The Arts Catalyst submitted its report to the European Space
Agency in early 2006. It is still to be approved by ESA,
however permission has been given to makes its contents public

floating points.....narrative archaeology and my aunt passing away

2006-09-30T02:50:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned on my other blog, my aunt died recently after 6 weeks of being day to day terminal with cancer. We buried her a few days ago. She was my close friend , my first mentor, an amazing person and strong to the end. It has been really hard. We talked many times about the ideas around my work and she inspired me and always will.

Looking at the different facets of "floating points". It feels a lot like how it felt as I wrote "narrative archaeology" and worked on 34 north 118 west. That was different as it was all a rush at once in the most amazing epiphany in my life one day standing outside the downtown library with a hand full of photocopies of turn of the last century newspapers. The light was exceptionally bright.....one of those days where high ice crystal clouds make a prism effect on the sun and it feels heightened already ........it almost felt like my body briefly got lighter as did the light as it hit me. Now it is a more long term build but the scope feels similar, the applications, the excitement about the ideas, tools, applications and project(s). It can really deepen the content, flux and interactivity of locative narrative, of reading of spaces, of sound and visual work dealing with scope and space in many contexts, in a more internal ai functionality of data engine and a cohesion in change with increment, applications in seeing the invisible ( flight paths, previous flight paths, previous paths of storms, of protests....

Looking for people along the way to join the team. The final work is extremely ambitious and shall be a group of locative works triggering in cities and between spaces around the world as one unified work of art, narrative, and navigation.

The 3d grid of gps changing with position and elevation will allow greater depth, change and reading of movement and perspective in many ways....this is exciting as it expands on the current modes of locative media and on all I have done to this point.

I miss my aunt but know she will be with me always in memory and inspiration and my love for her and her wise words since I was a boy drive me on even now as I feel the weight of the last few days.

floating points, trajectory and narrative

2006-09-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

May have the tool needed for development. Now it is time to begin building the team deeper to design the proper device. The projects are split in three and will expand upon my current theory into applications. Seeing a lot more narrative potential in many variations of scale and scaling beyond just elevation. there is a sort of data raster/vector scan/ rendering capability that can adjust on many scaling levels not in visual but in data and variation, a sort of information engine in a 3d space. Interesting possibilities here.

Have been studying trajectories and readings and see a clear way to present them graphically that shifts with distance and holds not only position points as spires on the line , but also of embedded data .

floating points discussed at isea....now phase 2

2006-08-13T23:00:00.001-07:00

Remote speaker presentation to ISEA went well on friday. It was a lot of fun and got some solid feedback. Now the emphasis branches into a few directions

1. research and development of a hand held that will "read" spaces from above as well as from the ground and places above ground level (moving to the 10th floor of a building and out on the ledge , a hilltop...etc) shifting data and inherent narrative therin with increments of elevation/altitude.

2. research and development of handheld that will "read" trajectories of previous flights both in terms of locative and graphically with a 3d depth of movement and interaction as one moves both horizontally and vertically. This will be a tool for artworks as well as pragmatic applications in data visualization as is the part of the project above.

3. work on experiment for space station and its 3 core sections

4. work on essays that lay out these concepts and their many applications.

The Project: depth of field and gps, moving positions

2006-07-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

The experiment/proposal "floating points" lays out a new type of artwork, reading of spaces, and of seeing gps signal and live mapping as 3 dimensional. The use of gps coordinates on the ground has led to a prevailing cartography of the flat plane that is the general earth surface and of its streets, deserts, etc. There are projects looking at shapes and spaces beyond this but in a way of generally fixed position and surface of location as data point.
The gps signal is a net shape laid across thousands of feet of points to map. These points can be at streetlevel, at the tenth story of a building, the 50th story of another, of a hill top observation tower, of a low flying helicopter, a ship moving at sea, or even the international space station. These are all points of latitude and longitude. They also vary greatly in altitude, The way to see gps signal in this sense is that of a mesh net with these points and their surface lying within it and with specific points on them. This opens up a sense of location as varying in altitude and as potentially non-fixed ie moving.
The other factor that is most important is that of how this relates to scope. Think of 3 point perspective. You draw to a horizon line and create forms that display depth. Now imagine these drawing made up, at a few feet, at several feet, and at greater distances. The objects are the same, but the scope of their information and detail to view shifts radically. The works are all of the same subject and space, but are totally different. The same is true for cities. The same is true for landscape.
This experiment/project will look at the International Space Station (ISS) as both a (moving) location and of a point of altitude to trigger art in cities below. This will allow for the information to be a narrative of place and of data, but set to change in scope of detail, of narrative form and expanse and of shape with shifts in altitude from the ground to flight level.

The work will have an advanced type of google earth model, but one with the space station tracked along its outer atmosphere. When the astronauts post a report or diary entry it will be encoded as a form above the earth, at the precise location the astronaut was above when he communicated. This entry/icon is, in a graphic/tracking sense, a "location"

The work will also track the forms of communication made by the temporary residents of this non-fixed location (astronauts on specific missions). The type of language used and level of collaboration will form an architectural shape over time gridded in a 3d space by time intervals.

This creates another recontextualization of "location":: that of the finite experiental location. The astronaut lives in a place like a small section of earth, but machine made and in orbit, and does so only until a mission is over and then they return to where that location is not visible but with tracking software on a computer and the corrolated website. The shape made by the graphic engine will therefore create essentially the experiental form, or "place" as expressed by the astronauts in flight. It will be an architectural model but formed by communication, experience, tasks and the temporary.

floating Points: Locative Media, Perspective, flight and the international space station

2006-07-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

Introduction: History and context of Locative Media works

The primary concern in locative media has been, understandably, location. This has been a great new leap in terms of art, technology, science and narrative. Locative Media Art consists of artworks utilizing locative technology to trigger artworks in a specific physical space.

Locative media art goes back to early experiments such as Telepresent by Steven Wilson in 1997 that was an object equipped with GPS left to be communally interacted with and moved while continually sending images via the Internet.

<

Another key development was the GPS drawings of Jeremy Wood in 2000 in which he discovered that by tracing his movements as he drove or walked with GPS that he could form shapes formed by the sequence of plotted movements. Other projects worked with Geo-Annotation which placed a comment or reflection on a physical location (similar to what hikers for years would do at posted signs on certain trails). Then came the project 34 North 118 West that was the first locative narrative.

34 North 118 West was a mapping of a four block area of Los Angeles where the primary non-passenger rail yard and related infrastructure at the turn of the last century and the original grand passenger station of Los Angeles (La Grande station) once stood. The majority of the buildings are the same but have changed in usage in time, state of disrepair and who has come to live and work in them in waves of development and housing.

Other buildings were destroyed over the years and only the ghosts of historical information and personal accounts remain. The project created a "narrative archaeology" as the layers in time were to be agitated into being. In one place would be narrativized data from 1936 a few hundred feet from a spot before a building that triggered something from 1910.

Now groups such as the C5 collective are doing work such as the GPS mapping of the entire great wall of china and then placing the coordinates in another location. This type of work creates a layered commentary and plays with form and semiotics as well as referencing the Situationists who developed absurd commentaries like a walk through the streets of Paris following a map of another city.

Perspective and the New Locative Paradigm

The untapped area of great possibility is perspective. The obvious example would be the base semiotics of "seeing New York". The city is iconic, has great architecture, history and mythology, but it also is quite large and with great variance in layout, architecture, and micro communities such as the art district, financial district, parks, boroughs of residence, etc.

If you drove in a cab down Broadway for an hour in a fog and rain is that New York? If you spent 2 days in the outer boroughs and caught an art opening one night is that New York? If you flew across the heart of downtown in a low flying plane is that New York? If you saw it as a grouping of lights at night near a coastline from space or simply as the coordinates and name and all you know and imagine of the city is that New York? Which is most truly "New York" in the most iconic sense? The question is the basic core of semiotic theory. What defines the city? Is it one or the other or all of these things? You can even discuss it in hierarchical terms; How do you weigh specificity versus scope?

Location as Multiple senses of place/distance and viewing

Shifts in perspective allow a prismatic definition of location and forms layers and tension between multiple possible viewpoints. There are a thousand New Yorks and yet still it is New York. This is what projects utilizing elevation and perspective can now work with in ways currently untapped in the field.

The technology exists to alter data on the ground based on individual gestures (turning, direction change, shifts in location) the same is true for above the ground. This allows GPS based data to trigger above locations and at different altitudes. The shifts in scale, in semiotics, in totality and inclusion in the sense of the amount of space accessed at once; these are all factors to be quantified into shifts in sound, scope of data and narrative of data/history and are ultimately as malleable as is one’s gaze and position in a 3 dimensional space.

GPS, The International Space Station and Flight Paths: Gps signal triggered works above the Earth

The International Space Station ISS orbits the Earth in a near-circular orbit at an average altitude between 330 to 400 km. Traveling at a speed of 7.7 km per second, the projection of the orbit onto the Earth’s surface ( i.e. ground track) extends over an area containing 95% of the world’s population, completing one orbit every 90 minutes.

As The Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation of navigation satellites orbits the earth at an altitude of 20000 km, the ISS altitude is concurrent with the higher echelons of the gps signal .

This creates a fascinating possibility for a massive paradigm shift in locative media and in art dealing with space. The number of crossed cities on a flight path and their variations in landscape , history ,layers of identity (architectural , semiotic , ethnographic , historic , economic , political, etc.) creates the possibility of "reading " multiple cities from above. The space between then opens up the pure geography, cartography and landscape of the earth as projects can triggers anywhere outside of cities. These will tell of scientific data, of changes in time, of what is and what was. Essentially any place along the earth beneath a flight path can be a trigger point and is lush with potential.

Variant Altitude: multiple artworks to be created by distance and scope

The specific example of the flight path of the international space station and all other vehicles of flight cross specific cities, landscapes, natural landmarks, waterways. All of these are open for works to trigger signals up to the station as it passes. The earth can be "read" in works in and out of cities and again both on the ground and above.

The potential now exists for works to trigger at many altitudes. The concepts are applicable not only to space stations and shuttles, but most importantly by planes and helicopters as well. Shifts in altitude are also shifts in perspective and scope of what is seen. Artworks may generate different data, narratives , images and sound depending on not only location, but relationship of distance to it. This is an area of massive possibility.

Another amazing area of possibility is of information triggered by flying craft crossing the flight paths of former entities on specific missions/flights. The "ghost" of the trajectory hangs in space as a series of plotted points as well as an event. One can cross the former paths of the Hindenburg, Lindbergh’s historic flight, historic balloon flights, the fall of Skylab, below the trajectory of Apollo etc…

A new sense of Location

Location has long been seen as a specific area, a static point in latitude and longitude and other measure. The meaning essentially is of flat navigation, but navigation is 3 dimensional and can include elevation, topography and pure point of entry. Location is seen as a stationary point, mapped and fixed. But what defines a location, a point? If you have a functional environment, temperature, life form , a functional shape and can be plotted by latitude and longitude and altitude is this not a location?

This is the international space station.

This is a commercial or private plane.

A moving point.

This may seem like quite an extreme paradigm shift, the clichéd wrenching of the gears etc, but location is not simply a point on a map. Topography tells us this, elevation tells us this, the adjustments of maps after extreme earthquakes tells us this. The space station already can be mapped on a free public site by latitude and longitude. Planes and balloons are mapped as well. These moving points not only cross the cities below in a patterned arc thus creating the possibility of triggering artworks from above, but are themselves moving locations.

The key in broadening the consideration of location is that the concept of communication comes in the fore in terms of GPS, signal data, distance and perspective. The astronauts and passengers in planes can trigger artworks on the ground from locations plotted in the GPS grid, but importantly will also be a moving place above, the astronauts living and working in shifts in a floating plotted place and space.

The Experiment"Floating Points" is a locative media experiment for the International Space Station in three sections

1. It aims to investigate the locative narrative of the ISS in relation to the ground and astronauts’ relationships to a temporary place and its created community. The use of GPS at ground level and above will allow a whole new contextualization of position and location. The city is a shifting confluence of shapes, boundaries, landmarks, events in time, people, moments and semiotics. The inclusion of perspective and scale allows a whole new area of locative media to emerge that previously has not been tapped. The levels of data, the scope of information and metaphors, the sense of place and its connectivity within as well as disparate layers in form and in time ; all of these elements will differ depending on point of reference. The works on the ground will be traditional in the field as it so far has established itself, the fascinating new area is in the corresponding works triggered from above. The artist and scientist now have a whole new list of parameters, modes, contexts and shift determination materials to work with.

The types of data, how it is presented, the sense of a sort of typographies of form from above the language of cartography, GPS mapping in coordinates and of scale ) all will allow a new list of metaphors to emerge, of data forms to be utilized previously untouched, and of new layers of how to structure and shift the work formed from the lives of cities in time and the landscape and its processes that would not be possible in the immediacy of single scale formed with land based interaction alone.

2. The astronauts will write about their thoughts at certain points in the mission and at other times of tasks carried out. There already are blogs available during flights but these have been more one way communication and not spatial. In the floating points project, the astronauts will blog and when it is sent it will form an icon on a rotatable 3d globe graphic of the Earth (think: advanced Nasa Worldwind /Google Earth form).

Each entry will be encoded by time and date, but also by GPS coordinates and thus will hang above this graphic earth as an artifact of a moment of coming into being and as an interface between cartography, geography and the inner workings of space flight and the lives of the astronauts while on mission.

People on the ground could potentially even leave notes in orbit, for the ISS to pass through…by a correlation between the ground based 3D earth interface and the GPS based locative media artwork onboard the ISS. This way people leave small notes above their town at the altitude of the ISS…the ISS could pick them up as it flies through them.

In time these graphics will form an interesting pattern of when and where each astronaut completed their thoughts in orbit. And each entry graphic will become a floating point; each will be a floating point of text and thoughts but encoded with latitude and longitude and altitude as though an abstract "location."

3. Located onboard the ISS, a graphic generating program will develop an architectural form based on when each astronaut blogs and the variations in their language and subject matter.

The form will build laterally if there is no interaction and comments on each others posts, becoming a solitary spire. When there is interaction the form will continue to grow laterally as a unified structure. A large percentage of work on the ISS is essentially construction. This part of the floating points projects takes that fact and questions what would be the shape of experiential and interpersonal construction while co-habitating in this temporary existence and place? It will be interesting to see how the form shapes in time and if it will at times be more of a rounded, smooth form and at others made of sharp harsh lines and spires in times of stress.

After an astronaut’s mission, which at present time takes 6 months, one will be able to see graphically as which parts of the whole were formed by who and how in a sort of lego way, they commingled structurally and interacted as a model of communication and dialogue in a mission.

Conclusion

The Floating Points experiment and other projects like it will open up a new area of possibility in terms of art as well as a re-contextualization of what is location and how it is to be interpreted. GPS can not only plot points on a flat plane as is the current perceived norm, but can also do so with a sense of depth akin to perspective. Shifts in altitude and distance are to be a component in shifts of not only seeing, but of interpretation.

A location is not simply a spot on the ground affixed with latitude and longitude. The GPS grid is truly a net of plotted points affixed from far above the earth. It is 3 dimensional as are high rise towers and mountains from a flat surface of earthen ground. The inclusion of elevation allows the awareness of a sense of shifts in perspective and perception of a space by how it seen, both with naked eye and the mind’s interpretation of what is experienced and the science of measurement and shifts in data.

We now can "read" the different faces of cities as one pulls farther away or closer in as well as of the landscape. Most importantly, we can do this from above. There are the ghosts of air flights past and their history to cross in the air and cities in shifting forms below to pass at various altitudes as much as there are layers of history in cities and the landscape. A location is malleable as it is seen and experienced as many versions of itself. All plotted points are essentially locations regardless of if they are still or in motion or at sea level, 500 feet or 22,000 feet above. By utilizing these "floating points" informational narrative can become a fluid, ever-shifting entity free from the confines of rigid and fixed location on a surface.

Jeremy Hight (first author) is a Locative Media artist/writer/theorist. He is credited in George Landow's "Hypertext 3.0" as inventing spatial locative narrative in the first locative narrative project "34 north 118 west" (winner of grand jury prize in Art in Motion festival). He developed the initial concept and was writer on the earthquake data edited text and image project "Carrizo Parkfield Diaries (in Whitney Artport). He has published several essays on locative media and new media and an article about his work is coming out soon in Leonardo out of MIT. He teaches visual communication and English at Los Angeles Mission College.

Alexander van Dijk (supporting author) is an aerospace engineer who studied at the Technical University of Delft, the Netherlands. Following his thesis work at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) of the European Space Agency, he has since been actively involved in supporting and facilitating the growing interests of the contemporary art community in space related activities. Being based in Europe, his direct aim over the years has been to establish a cultural agenda for the European Space Agency.