Get Tired I. Concentric Circles GPS Drawn on Edinburgh from Drawing with Satellites
In previous posts I have discussed aspects of layering Google Earth maps with strategies from iPhone games, information production, GPS locations, and alt-cultural archiving. These are intended to advance appropriated game tactics for tracing urban graffiti and studying urban squats as ways to game-study city structure through the Benjaminesque transposition of flâneur into smartphone blogger and street-wise student. These posts have help fuse ideas from posthuman theory with ideas for urban design studios and architectural research for future e-learning classes. And so do the implications of “Drawing with Satellites.”
A few days ago I received a blurb.com publication I ordered and had forgotten about. And, it has further lessons for ways of plotting and experiencing urban space. It’s a handsome little book documenting a project run by Chris Speed, Esther Polak, Ross Cruickshanks, and Karlyn Sutherland for second year architecture students at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. “Drawing with Satellites” is, in its quiet, minimal, and beautiful design, a technological transfer of urban routes into cartographic lines. Drawings, not sketches, these GPS tracked city walks oscillate between minimalist fine-line plots and abstract, yet expressive, portraits of urban movement overwiring living, functioning city spaces.
Student’s worked in groups and accompany their GPS maps with brief descriptions of their conceptual strategies for generating routes they would (mostly) walk as satellites tracked their steps. To various degrees, groups developed strategies with algorithmic-like rules. The group drawing “New Town Old Town Spiral” wrote, “Start from the Missoni Hotel. Walk to the first junction, turn right, walk two junctions, turn right, walk three . . . and so on.” While their algorithm did not produce a spiral, it did produce an interesting portrait of urban movement with a lesson non-linear dynamics; something involving precision formula meets non-linear city. Luckily, the students were flexible adapting their rules and their drawing illustrates a long urban meander across, around, and through Edinburgh. Another group drew concentric circles on a map and then walked their line as best they could through Edinburgh’s decidedly non-concentric spaces. The finished drawing is beautiful with strange over-trackings that seem to translate to dead-end streets as cartographic loops, forcing the rewriting, retracking of routes to complete a the circle-inspired but actually zig-zaggy concentric non-circles — a kind of city space line narrative and movement.
These drawings pack a lot of information, only you the reader has to revisualize and manifest it. They embed and encode information, sequential movement, alternative cartographies, digital flâneries, game strategies — they are moments in time precisely documented in space with instruments in the student’s hands communicating with multiple satellite stations miles above the earth. The clarity of their CAD-and-plotter line is an historic tag to their 21st-century gestation. Nevertheless they join thousands of years of mapping traditions and stories about cities. They are hybridized between students and devices, post-cyborgian, they are telling us there is a view of the city from smartphones and handheld GPS devices that have never been possible before. They are cognitive extensions of architectural thinking, place, time, and movement. And, as noted several times, they are beautiful.
http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2000466
