The most Geo-tagged Place on Earth
A homage to the Degree Confluence Project and the metaphysics of the GPS glitch.
It can only be a matter of days, until we will see the 2015 edition of Instagram’s top-ten list of the most geo-tagged places on earth, giving the highly anticipated answer to the question whether Disneyland, the Suvarnabhumi Airport, or the Siam Paragon shopping mall (both in Bangkok) takes the top spot this year (for reference: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014).
But then again, Instagram is only one facet of the geospatial web, which (at least in my book) began with Alex Jarrett in 1996. In this year, he uploaded the first photo to his Degree Confluence Project, a distributed effort to find and document all locations on earth with a pair of whole-integer GPS coordinates, such as 43N/72W.
Jarrett started what should become a highly popular global crowd-sourcing project, ten years before the term crowd-sourcing was coined. Today, it has become a bit quiet around the project except for a short Wikipedia entry, and Alex decided not to become a Silicon Valley billionaire, but instead to co-found a bicycle-operated, worker-owned waste hauling cooperative in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The project was nevertheless the reason for many adventurous journeys to often remote and inaccessible areas just to snap a photo of the GPS display in an otherwise completely unremarkable location (in one instance, sought while on a combat mission during the second Iraq war).
The trophy for the first art project using GPS technology, however, goes to a different pioneer, the Japanese media artist Masaki Fujihata. In 1992, Fujihata sent a group of students with GPS-backpacks (a term that no longer makes sense) on a hike to the peak of Mt. Fuji. At this time, GPS only delivered two dimensional coordinates, no altitude value. In his 1993 project Impressing Velocity, Fujihata undertook the reconstruction of Mt. Fuji’s three-dimensional shape, based on the walking velocity and the corresponding location. His reasoning: when the velocity is low, the hiker traverses steeper terrain, while higher velocity means a flat path. Using this algorithm, Fujihata did in fact achieve a three dimensional shape of the mountain. Since the hikers stopped once they reached the peak, the algorithm went hilariously berserk (see figure below).
Legendary also Fujihata-san’s justification why he decided to use GPS technology for an artwork: “because it’s there.” Quoting George Mallory, who gave the same answer in 1924 to the question from a NY Times reporter why he plans to climb Mt. Everest.
Reflecting on Fujihata’s work, I was struck by the notion that GPS and a computational medium can be used to represent subjective space based on individual experience. A space that is not bound to the absolute Cartesian coordinates that structure our technology-mediated world, but instead, can also be measured in units of time, attention, or memory. And most interestingly, these subjective spaces can also be represented (or at least approximated) by a computational algorithm.
Inspired by Fujihata’s (as well as Joachim Sauter/ Dirk Lüsebrink, or Michael Naimark’s) work, I developed visual models for mapping the subjective space of Los Angeles — time, visual information, memory. In 2000, I traveled to LA, mounted a video camera in the side-window of my car and systematically collected data over the following three months. The 2002 wegzeit project unfortunately almost fell off the edge of the internet world.
Space in the geospatial web seems to be a trivial concept, so trivial that a combination of three common words can be used to accurately communicate any location. Compared to the richness of spatial experience, this seems incredibly reductive. Yet, the absolute spatial reference system of Latitudes and Longitudes and the fluid, relative spaces of everyday spatial experience cannot be neatly separated. Instagram’s most popular geotags describe an imaginary space as much as they reference absolute locations, while the subjective spaces over everyday experience become operationalized in measures of walkability or statistical models for perceived safety or overall urban experience. In this context, the technical artifact, even the GPS error can become generative for producing spatial meaning.
This brings be back to what is likely the most geo-tagged place on earth. It is a place that can be found marked with unambiguous precision on many social media sites or self-crafted mapping projects. The place seems to be relevant in almost any context, and has been tagged and described in an unaccountable number of ways. The place seems to combine many places at once, all sharing the same location — similar to Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph:
The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.
On google maps, however, the place looks like this:
This real-world Aleph of the geospatial web is located somewhere in the Gulf of Guinea—its only distinctive quality is that it has a Latitude and a Longitude of exactly zero. Tags with this coordinate pair are not uncommon, and is usually the result of a geocoding error, a glitchy GPS reception, or any other exception that might occur when working with geospatial data.
Thanks to the Degree Confluence project and Lina Faller, Marcel Mieth, Thomas Stüssi, and Susanne Weck, we know how the place looks like in the physical world, when the location display on the GPS is not the result of a bug.
PS: as
noted, this place actually has a name: Null Island—“You can always check the weather there.”From the natural earth release notes:
A troubleshooting country has been added with an Indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island (1, 2). It is a fictional, 1 meter square island located off Africa where the equator and prime meridian cross. Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude) it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services. Aside: “Null Islands” exist for all local coordinate reference systems besides WGS84 like State Plane (and global if not using modern Greenwich prime meridian). Null Island in Natural Earth is scaleRank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping. Side note: Rank 30 (zoom 29 in Google speak)
Article by Joanna Glasner (@jglasner) in Wired 2004.
Global Map of Flickr Photos by
