Laura Kurgan: You are Here

I want to start with a quotation from the German media and technology theorist Friedrich Kittler:

"The first few generations of a machine that, according to its inventor, [Turing] can be all other machines, were limited to the simulation of mathematical machines and/or minds; hence its architecture didn't have to show any signs of beguiling the sensuality or the aesthetics of its end users. The sole task of that machine was–as so precisely formulated in hacker jargon–to crunch numbers. It has only been the developments of the last two decades that have turned the computer into a medium that will manage to be all other media, both in theory and very soon in practice."

It has been only one short decade since the explosion of the so-called "use of computers" in architecture. It seems important to start off by thinking about just how it is that we "use" these machines–now that they are on the verge of becoming as common as the pens and paper we use, but somewhat more complicated. Kittler's short paragraph gives us a lot to think about here–but there are just a few ideas I want to emphasize, as a way of thinking through the consequences of the ubiquity of computing in architecture.

I always start with a question. What do we do with computers in architecture, or what do they do to us? Kittler draws our attention to the ability of the computer to simulate any machine, beyond the limited task of number-crunching with which it originated. It is in this sense that we all "use" computers in our field–i.e., as machines that do the work of other machines or other technologies. We use other people's programming languages to build models, make maps, and draw perspectives–sometimes all at once. In the same way that traditional–all the way back to the Renaissance–perspective systems construct our way of seeing, so the multiple spatial systems constructed by computer languages and networks can begin to affect, profoundly, our sense of space itself. As networked data flowsætelephone, television, the Internet, and so on–proliferate and come to inhabit our daily life, something like a new construction of space is emergingæbeyond simply the computer as a tool we use and master.

This leads directly to a proposition that computers construct space, beyond simply representing it. There are three broad ways in which I understand the idea that computers construct space, that is, architectural space.

First, as exemplified by the militaryæcomputers are busily digitizing space, every square inch of the globe that could potentially be of consequence to the military. Of course, the fact that this begins with the military–and particularly with the American military–does not mean that this does not have other possibilities. The digitization of the world for surveillance and targeting purposes implies very little about what might be done with all that data: today, with much fanfare, these virtualization technologies are put to work by environmentalists, archeologists, earth scientists and geographers. The use of the images is multiple and the technologies have spun off in many directions. The world converted into data is also the basis of a lot of what we've come to know as the Internet–chat rooms, web sites, digital cities, and the rest. Whether as representation (map, surveillance image) or as imitation (web "site"), the digitization of space seems to take what we know about space for granted.

Second, with digitization and the networking of lots of reality comes the potential to move the digital information very quickly from one place to another. Movement implies a common medium though, and the new ubiquity of networked computers and other information media forces us to ask about the space–for it is a space–within which all this data moves. Today, we are familiar with, but don't quite know how to think about, the fact that other spaces are being constructed which do not base themselves in the same physical spaces occupied by our bodies. These are the spaces of everything from phone calls to the flow of radio signals, but we know them better as the nether-land occupied by peculiar things like electronic money, information warfare, and GPS signals.

Third, something like the reverse of the first process also occurs, when what begins inside the computer or as information flow is output into the so-called physical world, the one in which our bodies move–these can be the effects of rapid prototyping, the destruction inflicted by an information war, a receipt at an ATM, the complicated forms of the new Frank Gehry building in Bilbao, or the new Boeing jetliner.

My own work has taken all these three aspects into account–digitization, electronic flows and output. I've been interested in what I call the space of information–virtualizing reality, realizing virtuality, and the confusing nowhere-anywhere-somewhere where data is stored and moves and is processed. How is it possible to work in this space, and what becomes of a definition of architecture in it? I have been experimenting not with new forms for buildings but new forms for architecture. And what better place to do this than at the heart of the vast, unruly, often dangerous, new space of operations and thinking bequeathed to us by the military. You'll see that I've been working with GPS and other military technologies, not to mention the Internet, the military origins of which are often overstated–but it's important that we acknowledge that intention without accepting it as accomplished fact. There is experimental potential, not liberatory for you or for me in particular, but for thinking, in the unintentional structures of the new technologies of surveillance and control. The potential does not arise from the de facto dematerialization of architecture, but from the existence of new fields of operations and, thus, of new operational possibilities appropriate to those fields. I would be the last to deny that these are fearsome technologies–except that they don't always work in the ways which we expect, which means that they can't be condemned or resisted simply by reference to their intentional uses. They can be more interesting than they're meant to be, theoretically and practically. Here is where my work begins: with the proposition that technology is not always governed by its own intentions and, therefore, we need to ask questions about what transformations in technology–particularly representational or simulation technology–can tell us about space, subjectivity, positions, geography and the very fundamentals of architecture, even very formal things like points, lines and planes.

I'm now going to show you a series of projects which gave me the opportunity to actually inhabit an information system–to find that the totalizing system of the network itself is scattered, even in its most basic architecture it is not a space of liberation, but one of confusion, at the heart of the ideology of precision. This was a series of installations called "You Are Here" in which I succeeded in actually working with the data in midstream, as it were, generating and using the data rather than just watching or displaying data from elsewhere. "You are Here" was an attempt at interfacing with a massive information network, one which aims for a truly extraterrestrial position, the Global Positioning Satellite system. My effort has been to use this locating system to ask some questions about just where we are, in the space of information, and to stage an encounter, another interface, between networks and buildings. The interfaces turned out to be multiple–between the body and an infinitely large network, that is, between scale and scalelessness, between the homogenous field of longitude and latitude and the specific space of a building, between dynamic and static systems, and so on.

This project has had 3 installations–"You Are Here: Information Drift" began as an installation at the StoreFront for Art and Architecture in New York in 1994, then was redone in a new Barcelona version for the inauguration of Richard Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art, and was redone in a smaller version at the Banff Center for the Arts. I used an interface with the Global Positioning Satellite mapping with which I–or anyone with the right equipment–can tell pretty much exactly where I am on the face of the earth by turning on a portable satellite receiver that listens into signals from space and determines its position by something like triangulation. What the manufacturers of these devices–which are rapidly being spun off from their military origins–are saying about the GPS system is that "knowing where you are is so important that soon this technology will become as common as the telephone." The system is being advertised as the definitive solution to the allegedly perennial question of knowing where you are. My interest was in the irony of the fact that the system which claimed to locate things, precisely and definitively, incorporated within its own architecture the impossibility of ever defining a precise and single point. My point is simple: at the heart of the new electronic satellite technology for determining the point with extraordinary precision, emerges a basic instability in definition of the point–one of the most basic and fundamental elements of architecture.

To summarize what I did with this (I'm going to focus on the Barcelona version of this show)–the installation presented, in drawings and wall stencils, the traces of two hours spent some months earlier on the roof of the museum with a GPS receiver, along with a monitor displaying in real-time, for the duration of the show, the output of a GPS receiver recording position information from that same roof.

The images generated from the data collected by the GPS receiver–and you should understand by now that this is, to put it lightly, not precisely what these instruments were designed for–the images simply present, in slightly reprocessed form, the position records of my time in and on the building.

Here I am, standing still. You will notice that there are a lot of different dots for someone who isn't moving. In fact, I stood as motionlessly as I could on this one point for 10 long minutes. I may have wiggled but my feet didn't move. So what exactly is the point, here? The GPS receiver records one position every 2 seconds. Even though I did not move, my position was documented as wandering around an area 100 meters square. I am not going to go into detail of the whys and hows of this, but suffice it to say there is some inaccuracy built into the system–and there always would be: how big is a point, after all? –and accuracy is further lost when using a simple the civilian-model receiver that I did, in that the military scrambles the signal. But even if I had used a military-quality receiver, the documentation of my position would still have appeared as a scattering of points within a smaller window of accuracy (after all this is only a machine ....all it does is draw one point every second). This is no surprise to GPS users, and we all know that we must now correct the recorded information by a process called differential correction–this process accounts for the built-in error by measuring the raw readings against a known reference point. The error is reduced and then averaged and the accuracy of the position reading is now within a 3 - 5 meter window.

I like to think about this as "drawing with satellites" ... from points to lines, the GPS network defines physical space–whether it's the roof of a building, the public space of a city plaza, or the wide open sea–as a surface for inscription, of data. Not just for inscribing the data that pins down the point or identifies the place with an "address" precise enough to call for help or to direct a cruise missile, but for writing in the narrow, everyday, sense. You can take a walk with a receiver, pace out the steps in the form of letters, and watch the display unfold on the computer screen: writing with data points. Lines make letters and letters join into words: information of another order, a word written–and read–not from above, not even seen in any conventional sense, but traced on a purely digital surface. What's great about it is that walking, under the satellite sky, is writing, somewhere else. On the roof of the museum, the carefully rational Richard Meier grid that frames the skylights marks out the space of a virtual word, in Catalan: M U S E U. The structure of the word is built into the building, like the characters latent in the LED display of a digital clock: the points await their configuration into any number of signifying combinations. Dot by dot, the GPS data points are transformed into the word that names the building and the institution. Now, the roof reads "museu," museum ... a machine for collecting and preserving, for inscribing, the traces of a culture. Two styles or spaces of inscription cross with each other, two conventions of description or interpretation: the precise coordinates, in longitude, latitude, and altitude, of the building, and the letters of the name, of the institution which, as such, sets off and demarcates that space as a zone of preservation and display. Two information networks, two virtual spaces, condensed into a map of this museum ... and exposed.

Here is the final image as drawn by the satellites–a strange transformation of a classic Meier building with its universal rational grid, here rotated and stretched and distorted, by the precise position machine, into definite and imprecise points on another universal grid.

What would it mean to call this an "architecture of information," an architecture at the speed of light? In these formulations, I still think that the word "architecture" is the one that demands our attention, not because it's threatened by information or speed but because it's become questionable. It's opened up even at the level of its so-called fundamentals, its so-called basics,–points, lines and planes, or should I say–the scattering of the definition of the point, the distortion of the line, and the multiplicities of scale in both points and lines.

A few months back in the New York Times Magazine, where James Gleick–in an article called "Lost in Space"–proposes that QUOTE "GPS is, along with the Internet, one of the government's two greatest contributions to the technology of our time." How come? Why else, of course: "no-one and nothing will ever be lost again." But he's also concerned about the built-in error which I've described–not the irreducible error that accompanies any representational system, but the purposeful distortion of the GPS signal for "security reasons." He asks something like the same question I have–"why is the US distorting its own satellite navigation system? "–but for different reasons. He wants to make it perfect, to end the distortion of this "modern miracle." Who could disagree? Obviously, I think that the better the system works, the better–I'm not an anarchist–so I applaud his activist call for the Department of Defense to turn off the blocking mechanism, called selective availability, and let boat owners and airline pilots and terrorists and evil-intentioned enemies of the free world do their thing as accurately as possible. But the claim that "no-one and nothing will ever be lost again" is something more than an empirical observation or prediction. It's precisely, as it were, and absolutely the dream that GPS gives rise to, of a more fundamental orientation, a loss of loss, once and for all, a final solution to the question of location. This is at once the dream of all these cyber-technologies, for their proponents, and the thing whose loss they seem most fearsomely to represent to their opponents. It's about this dream (whether positive or negative), and its implicit vision of subjectivity and space, that I've tried to raise some questions. My conviction is that it's important that some distortion remain, that the irreducible error–the drift and disorientation–which accompany representation and mediation be acknowledged, worked with, and not repressed or cleared up, once and for all. There's a space there that shouldn't be made to go away.

Fortunately, thanks to the spillover or spinoff of military technology into the public sphere–or even the private sphere–we have access to some of these technologies and the questions they raise. The demilitarization of GPS parallels another widely-publicized act of glasnost in our time: the much heralded opening-up of the satellite sphere for profit-making picture taking, and the declassification of the government archives of its decades of spy satellite images. [If I were in booster-mode, I might modify Gleick's claim that the Internet and GPS are Washington's two greatest technological contributions by adding the high resolution spy satellite to the list.]

This brings me to a recent project, "Close Up at a Distance," which investigates and inhabits the spaces of these satellite images, views of the earth from outer space. More exactly, the project examines particular swaths of high resolution satellite images, and by high resolution, I mean 1 meter resolution, even though the military today would probably mean 10cm when they say "high." Perhaps, if you can you remember an article in Wired magazine last summer called "Private Spy," by Oliver Morton, you'll remember that, in excited detail, it described how, very soon, anyone would be able to order high resolution satellite imagery quite cheaply with a credit card and an Internet connection. Gorgeous pictures of Washington and Paris that looked like they were taken from ten feet away, but apparently shot from outer space, illustrated Mr. Morton's extravagant claim that no longer would there be "secrets the size of cities." Vast new fleets of private spy satellites were being lofted into space, and between these new imaging platforms and all the existing ones, Spot and all the rest, the entire globe is viewable in its minutest details. I took the bait and tried it, only to find that the whole article was illustrated with simulated pictures and that none of these satellites had been launched yet, although their Web sites were already in place. The article falls into the familiar trap: the greater the accuracy the better the image... and again, of course, it's true.

But what else is at stake in the potential 1 meter blanketing of the earth? This is what I tried to investigate in an installation that was displayed at MIT this fall, called "Close Up at a Distance." Beyond and against the hype, how can high resolution images, even if they're not yet available at the swipe of a credit card or the click of a mouse, at least not to anyone, tell us something about the peculiar spaces of precision in the information age?

Most of the images declassified by Executive Order 12951, signed by President Clinton three years ago last month, were from the so-called Corona, the first American reconnaissance satellites, which orbited the earth on "top secret" missions from 1960 through 1972. Now hundreds of thousands of these photographs from space are in the public domain, many providing detailed imagery at a ground resolution of five to seven feet, or two meters. This means that objects and ground space larger than two meters are visible in these images. Compared with the best satellite images previously available to the public, from Landsat (thirty meters and Spot (ten meters), it seems that we, or at least some of us, are getting closer and closer, from farther and farther away.

The question here is one of surveillance, and that in fact is the topic of the show at MIT (it was called The Art of Detection). Corona's images, it is said, were designed for searching–to answer the question, "Is there something there? "–and not for surveillance, in which as one satellite pro from Lockheed Martin wrote, "I want to continue to watch that something, learn more about it, identify it and classify it." Today, the distinction between search and surveillance has become somewhat less sharp. To inquire about the existence of something, and to investigate and watch over it, can now happen simultaneously, and from enormous distances in striking detail. Increasing the resolution implies erasing the distinction between existence and identity—"high resolution" means that looking for things and looking after them, searching and "bona fide surveillance" take place in the same gesture.

An American KH-4B satellite passed over the southwestern tip of Africa on 11 November 1968, leaving a trail of imagery behind for us to examine. Hundreds of miles above Cape Town, it exposed something political, opening up a landscape of data and of history in the image. Search or surveillance? What can we do with what we see there now?

What remains for us to see in these blurry, high-resolution pictures? We don't just see things on the ground, places or people in and around Cape Town, apartheid city, seat of the South African Parliament today as then. What's there is data, like it or not, and now we can look at and into the images to monitor in our turn the creation of this new datascape. Data need to be interpreted, and never can be fully. Scanning the surface of the image, scale can disappear , while shapes and textures, differences and identities, threats and possibilities, statements and metaphors emerge, moving in and out of the contexts that the long strips of film provide but never guarantee. Things become unrecognizable here, familiar features decompose, as others come sharply into focus. Today, we can search, and watch, across many degrees of magnification, for the future in this image.

Why was that satellite there? There was a reason. These satellites were 'tasked,' in 1968, and this one went looking for something in particular, searching. Something sent it over my house, the park where I played, the beaches where I swam, and all the places I never went. I don't know why it was there, although I suppose I could guess, in principle. There's no essential mystery, especially in the age of declassification, but my current ignorance underlines an openness in the images. They result from a mission whose aim is impossible to read from the images themselves. And even if I did know why that satellite was there, overhead, the image has been unhinged from its purpose. That openness transforms the image from the document of a search to the record of surveillance. Whatever it was searching for, the satellite was also watching, no, recording, guarding, keeping vigil over.

By way of conclusion and of leading into the topic of this conference as a whole–i.e., public strategies, public art, public space–and in line with what I understand to be the theoretical premise of all of these few days, what I'm proposing is that we rethink the notion of site, or expand it to include all sorts of things: the structure of software, the surface of the screen, archives and databanks of images, laws governing the distribution of data and images and the precision of hardware, the patterns and flow of information in the electromagnetic spectrum, to name only a few. This means that site is no longer such a comfortable resting place, and nor should it be.

The work has thus far resisted a set of formal conclusions about architecture and information, which is to say, I resist some kind of new language that will tell us how to build in so-called new ways for the data age, ie, inscribe the surface of our buildings with video screens or fill them with Internet connections or shape them organically. I have insisted instead on working with and in these invisible zones, and constructed sites in which this can occur. In other words, an inhabitation, which, as we have seen, has taken place through the familiar and everyday things of architecture like points, writing, memory and, of course, buildings.

Synopsis by Allen Jackson

Technological encroachment into our daily lives has begun to not only challenge traditional means and methods by which we see the world, but also to alter the vocabulary we use to engage that world. The work of Laura Kurgan, a practicing architect, investigates the relationships between the rapidly expanding scope of cyberspace and the traditional realm of architectural space.

Kurgan's investigation of the term "space" recognizes the prevailing use of the word with respect to measurable volumes located within the physical environment. The tangible limits of these spaces would be defined by recognizable units (i.e., inches, feet, ounces, quarts, pounds, tons, etc.). Conversely, when Kurgan spoke of cyberspace, she questioned how this space could be materially understood. What units of measure are applicable to define its limits?

According to Kurgan, the same dilemma arises when one attempts to address the concept of a "site." In an architectural sense, a site is the location where some type of spatial modification will occur. It can also be located through its tactile sensibilities in the three-dimensional world. Within the realm of cyberspace, however, the notion of a site must be considered in an entirely different capacity. Without the assistance of a computer, how does one detect a particular site and how does one define the space it occupies?

Kurgan points out that military uses for digital information have helped to expand the role of computers within our daily lives. Originally, during the Cold War, the military used digital information for monitoring Communist bloc countries and other perceived enemies of the United States. According to Kurgan, the development of the internet came about as a result of the need to map the activities of adversarial nations. Digital information allowed for the rapid movement of data from one site to another. Examples of this condition, provided by Kurgan, are seen through advancements in telecommunications and money-moving networks. In both of these instances, digital inputs result in outputs that can be located in the physical world.

The idea of being able to acquire material information anywhere on the globe carries broad implications. One potential use of this information that Kurgan puts forth is the possibility of locating another individual anywhere on the planet. Theoretically this information could be obtained instantaneously. The ability to read a license plate or see a dime on the ground from a satellite located miles above the earth are claims of this technology's abilities challenged by Kurgan.

Skeptical of these claims, Kurgan designed an experiment to test the limits of these technologies, to determine the nature of their accuracy. Outfitted with a device that allowed a satellite to track her movements, Kurgan walked along a predetermined path on the roof of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. In the gallery below, her position was plotted every two seconds. At five points along her path, she stood still for 10 minutes, in an attempt to test the computers' ability to locate her accurately.

Kurgan was able to determine that the capabilities of the computer fell far short of its claimed abilities. Even with the application of corrective measures, the computer plotted her location as an oval with an accuracy range of plus or minus one meter.

Kurgan feels the implications of this kind of technology are significant to say the least. The idea that one could never be lost on the face of the Earth again has a great deal of positive implications. But the potential for exploitation by those whose motives are other than honorable is compelling. Sometime soon, anyone might be found simply through the use of a credit card.

As of right now, however, the scope of technology's reach into our private world via satellite surveillance has its limits, and Kurgan does believe its accuracy should be improved to match its proponents' grand claims. Nevertheless, with rapid technological advancements being made daily, the nature of space will never be the same.

Analysis by Roddy MacInnes

Architect Laura Kurgan is passionate about mapping, about new technologies and about space: real space, virtual space and digital space. Each point in space contains within it infinite amounts of information. The information that Laura Kurgan desires to extract from any given point in space is its location: physical or theoretical. She has a strong appreciation for the principles of architectural space but points within such a space, generally, have no relevance outside their own parameters. Laura Kurgan has a grander agenda; she wants to know where points in space exist relative to an evolving sense of location or to the full potential of space itself.

Advances in Global Positioning Satellite Technology (GPS) and its availability for civilian use has provided Laura Kurgan with an excellent tool to approach the problems of locating and illustrating points in space. Using a hand-held instrument that receives signals transmitted from navigational satellites in fixed orbit around the earth and, through a process of triangulation, digital addresses can be applied to any point under the satellite umbrella in the form of longitude, latitude and elevation. Still these points exist only in theory, as numbers and compass bearings, but if the address is fed into a computer and displayed on a screen we are given a new appreciation of space.

Satellites are a recurring theme in Laura Kurgan's life. As a young girl growing up in Capetown, South Africa, both Russia and the United States were engaged in an extensive satellite surveillance operation around strategically significant South Africa. Although no satellite cameras were pointed at her specifically, she was indeed being observed, photographed and mapped, without her consent and without her knowledge. The definition of space, public or private, could never be the same for Laura Kurgan.

As an exercise designed to humanize digital space, Laura Kurgan created a public art project on the roof of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. On the flat roof of the Museu she established several grids. On these grids she collected GPS data. The data was differentially corrected to remove error (built into the system by the military) and thus render the points accurate to within several meters. When the points were plotted on a computer screen and connected together, the word Museu appeared. Although somewhat crude, the exercise illustrated the transformative nature of space. Physically there is no record of the word Museu ever existing on the roof. It exists digitally as coded information trapped in cyberspace.

I found that the information presented by Laura Kurgan raised more questions than provided answers. This is understandable when we consider the nature of her work. She is a true pioneer operating at the frontiers of knowledge were there is little or no language to adequately describe where or what she is exploring. Her research is profoundly original and provides a valuable contribution to our appreciation of what the definition of location is in the digital age.