Comments on: Castle Building Gets Medieval, Bertrand Piccard, and GPS Atari Art http://www.theworld.org/2009/08/14/castle-building-gets-medieval-bertrand-piccard-and-gps-atari-art/ Global Perspectives for an American Audience Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:16:12 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Brett Stalbaum http://www.theworld.org/2009/08/14/castle-building-gets-medieval-bertrand-piccard-and-gps-atari-art/comment-page-1/#comment-1389 Brett Stalbaum Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:14:05 +0000 http://www.theworld.org/?p=9355#comment-1389 Hi Clark, long time listener to your excellent show, First, I have to say this it is a little difficult for me to critical of your reporting, which I have come to value very much. But, I think you may have been a little sloppy on this one. First, you have credited the very cool GPS Atari Art project with coining the term "GPS Drawing". A simple google search may have been in order, for example Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood are artists who have been been using the term "GPS Drawing" for some time, since the year 2000. You can learn more at (I really do hate to point this URL out), at http://www.gpsdrawing.com/. It may just be a blind spot in your knowledge, but there is an entire generation of artists who have been using GPS as a specific medium for this and related kinds of expression since the 1990s. Perhaps the very very earliest (for GPS) is interesting work by Masaki Fujihata. The "Impressing Velocity" project, though poorly documented online, is the example I am thinking of. (1994!) I teach locative media (and history of computing in the arts, and computer programming) in the department of visual arts at UCSD, and it has become very common for our undergraduates to work with locative media in ways very similar to your story. Arguably the first examples of drawing on the map to produce physical movement in the mapped spaces date back to the non-site work of Robert Smithson in the 1960s, but the first example that I am aware of where "the animation animates the animator" was this project in 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzIKFvZMFKU I worked with Christin Turner, one of our best undergrads in recent years, to complete the technical requirements to implement her concept in 2007. I could go on, but I sometimes teach an entire quarter-long class dealing with this material. So again, I love your show. But I did want to point out that because it is new to you, well again this pains me, it may not be entirely new! And some cool guys in San Francisco (who I suspect I would like to meet) certainly don't deserve to be credited as the innovators of the form or the creators of "GPS Drawing". There is a very interesting history of locative media work that you may be interested in. In fact, I am in Germany as we speak installing for an exhibition at the Edith Russ Haus for Media Art. The exhibition is titled Landscape 2.0; you may be interested. Cheers, Brett Stalbaum Hi Clark, long time listener to your excellent show,

First, I have to say this it is a little difficult for me to critical of your reporting, which I have come to value very much. But, I think you may have been a little sloppy on this one. First, you have credited the very cool GPS Atari Art project with coining the term “GPS Drawing”. A simple google search may have been in order, for example Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood are artists who have been been using the term “GPS Drawing” for some time, since the year 2000. You can learn more at (I really do hate to point this URL out), at http://www.gpsdrawing.com/.

It may just be a blind spot in your knowledge, but there is an entire generation of artists who have been using GPS as a specific medium for this and related kinds of expression since the 1990s. Perhaps the very very earliest (for GPS) is interesting work by Masaki Fujihata. The “Impressing Velocity” project, though poorly documented online, is the example I am thinking of. (1994!) I teach locative media (and history of computing in the arts, and computer programming) in the department of visual arts at UCSD, and it has become very common for our undergraduates to work with locative media in ways very similar to your story. Arguably the first examples of drawing on the map to produce physical movement in the mapped spaces date back to the non-site work of Robert Smithson in the 1960s, but the first example that I am aware of where “the animation animates the animator” was this project in 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzIKFvZMFKU I worked with Christin Turner, one of our best undergrads in recent years, to complete the technical requirements to implement her concept in 2007.

I could go on, but I sometimes teach an entire quarter-long class dealing with this material.

So again, I love your show. But I did want to point out that because it is new to you, well again this pains me, it may not be entirely new! And some cool guys in San Francisco (who I suspect I would like to meet) certainly don’t deserve to be credited as the innovators of the form or the creators of “GPS Drawing”. There is a very interesting history of locative media work that you may be interested in. In fact, I am in Germany as we speak installing for an exhibition at the Edith Russ Haus for Media Art. The exhibition is titled Landscape 2.0; you may be interested.

Cheers,
Brett Stalbaum

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