The Republic of Null Island
“The intention to make a mistake”
Null Island is described as an imaginary island, a cartographic placeholder on the earth’s surface where the Prime Meridian and the Equator intersect. The point has the GPS coordinates 0°N 0°E and is located in international waters in the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean, marked by a stationary buoy. All data that cannot be assigned to a geographical coordinate or is mistakenly entered as 0,0 in databases is assigned to this point to make it easier to find and correct such errors. Thus, data is erroneously mapped to this point, which depicts a place or the image of a place that exudes a certain aesthetic, not what people do within it.
Due to the amount of different data that accidentally ends up there, Null Island has been given nicknames like a place for “Bad Data” or “A Place like no place on earth.” This data spans databases and datasets and affects some of the world’s most popular location-based services with hundreds of millions of users. Most location-based services rely primarily on the geolocation of smartphones. However, sometimes these do not determine our exact location, which leads to content like photos and other geotagged content being associated with (0, 0). Such problems affect a variety of applications, such as geotagged photo services, fitness activity trackers, and traditional social media.
In a way, Null Island can be considered the modern equivalent of Atlantis or, in other words, as a kind of “Atlantis of the Internet,” a mystical island lying in the depths of the digital expanses and carrying a unique symbolic meaning. Atlantis has often been described as an advanced, ideal society that supposedly existed on a mythical island. This utopia was often associated with advanced technology, knowledge, and harmony. According to the reports of the philosopher Plato, Atlantis was a highly developed civilization that perished due to its own mistakes and arrogance. The idea of Atlantis served as a symbol of the desire for a better society and can today also serve as a warning to find the balance between progress and responsibility.
Many have tried unsuccessfully to find Atlantis, and there have been repeated clues about where this place might have been since the exact location was never precisely mentioned. But unlike the mythical island that sank into the sea’s depths, Null Island exists as a pure construct of digital coordinates and bytes, whose geographical position can be clearly assigned in the Atlantic Ocean and is defined by the GPS coordinate 0,0. Null Island may seem like a mere cartographic placeholder at first glance, but in reality, it is much more than that.
“Null Island is neither entirely virtual nor completely real!”
Michel Foucault coined the term “heterotopia” for places that are both real and unreal, that represent other spaces within our society in a kind of micro-society and negate or reverse them. Null Island can be considered such a heterotopia — a place on the map that does not exist and yet exists. Compared to utopias, as Atlantis symbolizes, heterotopias have a physical place on the map and are geographically locatable. He describes heterotopias as places that unite and connect other places within them (gardens, cinemas, theaters). Places where a section of time opens up and is captured — “heterochronies” (libraries, museums), places that are preceded by a system of opening and closing, making them both isolated and permeable (rituals, purification), places whose function can change at a certain point in time (fairgrounds, festivals).
For him, heterotopias are “real places, effective places that are drawn into the fabric of society, so to speak counter-placements or buttresses, actually realized utopias, in which the real places within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and turned, in a way places outside all places, although they can actually be located.”
This place “Null Island,” where reality and imagination merge, where ideas, dreams, and visions come together, has piqued my interest. Here, what doesn’t belong together is brought together, showing what shouldn’t be, in a place that questions our ideas of space, knowledge, and humanity, to explore the hidden layers of the digital world and hold up a mirror to us. I want to travel to Null Island, but how do I get there? How can one travel to a place whose nature is that of a void? Whose materiality is fleeting! A place that only exists to give place to what doesn’t belong, a place full of errors, mistakes, typos, a land that arises only through its bad data. How can I get there? Or simply put:
“How can I intentionally make a mistake?”
People make a lot of mistakes. I personally make a lot of mistakes. I think it’s especially important to face our mistakes, to own up to them. In our algorithmic cultures, many “mistakes” are made around us as well. What would it mean to approach the data in its raw state? To listen to the data as it arises, is born, lives, and is in limbo. What exactly is it that makes certain data “bad”? How is bad data generated?
In his essay “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes the ship as the heterotopia “par excellence.” A floating piece of space, a place without a place, which exists for itself, closed in on itself, and at the same time surrenders to the infinity of the sea. If civilizations had no ships, he writes, “dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventures, and the police take the place of pirates.”
I realize I need a ship, a small one that appears both in the online world and the physical world to travel from one heterotopia to another heterotopia (the “other space”). “Where did the road lead if it led nowhere?”
N 52° 28' 13.848'’ E 13° 28' 5.715'’
I start my journey and sail towards the zero point. Null Island first appeared on maps by Natural Earth in 2011 as a 1x1 meter island at the intersection of the Equator and Prime Meridian. They write that it should never appear on maps and serve as a placeholder for erroneous data. I try to map the island but find only blurry watermarks on Google Earth. How can one get there? Do the inhabitants consciously prevent access?
N 44° 24' 25.443'’ E 8° 55' 22.648'’
I have found a source showing part of the activities on the island, a heat map showing the actions of athletes on the island by tracking their movements. I wonder what the big white circle in the middle indicates?
N 36° 47' 58.385'’ E 8° 55' 22.648'’
I find an archived website of the “Republic of Null Island” with a flag and the name Smythe, the island’s president. The island seems to have an economy based on bauxite mining, which is mined by the company NIBEC. This website, which no longer exists, is the source that tells me the most about this place, but how is it that it has not been available or updated for such a long time?
N 24° 54' 19.487'’ E 10° 10' 13.102'’
If I imagine this island I am traveling to as a place that exists for what doesn’t belong there, I should not only think of poorly tagged images or misspelled tweets. Probably something else is hidden there, something that doesn’t want to be found, perhaps a kind of Bermuda Triangle of information.
N 10° 21' 42.391'’ E 4° 40' 27.292'’
If I interpret the data correctly, I am getting closer to the matter. But I feel the more I know, the less I can locate this place and understand its existence. My body seems to dissolve the further I advance the journey. This whole expedition could be an allegory for something else… Again and again, new information appears that almost prevents me from arriving there…
N 6° 24' 11.571'’ E 4° 40' 27.292'’
After such a long journey, I start to lose quality. qual. qual. i . ty. Every time I stop at a new place, my body begins to fr4gment6. I have d$ARk-web disentangled, I scro==le through 000 and 333… I HAVE found l3akes docVmentSS. Ma capacité à les lire change… chaque ÉCRITURE s’efface sous mes yeux. Pero no tiene sentido que todo esto no este funcionando. pprque no pued3 ten3r. I must change the SPr4ch3 because I’m beginning to lose comprehension in this dark OC3eanno…
N 0° 0' 0'’ E 0° 0' 0'
ERROR. ERODA, IVE FCOKEKB to be, so close to Arrhtng, rthe destibathoh, I can see the curve 4 4 4,. the speed accelerates-, fragments of the illusion, deptis notiond of TRUTH anehy many Mist4akes. I see it so N3ar 0 ISLAND. 0. No country quite like this……
