My intermedia work over the last few years has been examining and investigating the visualisation of invisible signals. The works to date comprise a series of plan drawings using white chalk, which manifest, delineate or invent boundaries stemming from different forms of technological signals. I think of these as poetic actions, that resonate against on coming and developing ideas, in and around locative media and mobile computing. 

The most recent drawings take existing physical urban structures and augment them into new geometries using chalk lines and a Global Positioning System (GPS), resulting in globally referenced longitudes and latitudes marked directly onto streets. These temporary drawn manifestations of invisible electronic signals create navigation, boundaries, and in turn new territories, building layers of points and planes which are unmistakably architectural and stem from their urban setting. Using the satellite network, exact positions and times are plotted by drawing directly onto the ground, fixing elements in the urban environment, making this both the subject of, and the surface of the work.

Rather than have clear intention and precise preconceived meaning prior to the work being made, the works are often made from an instinctive idea, with meaning emanating from the work itself, unravelling slowly and ultimately pointing to subsequent directions that could be explored. Viewers are effectively 'immersed' in the drawings and physically walk through them. These locative works prompt the viewer to re-look at their immediate environment. My initial area of exploration was firmly rooted in the field of architecture, stemming from my teaching at the Architectural Association in London. I have often thought of these works as a form of conceptual architecture rather than soley conceptual art.

The drawings are labour intensive, with the most recent large ones taking more than 7 hours to complete. The drawings themselves remain for any time between a few hours to a few days, depending on the weather. Rain can (and often does) wash them away almost immediately. All the drawings to date are documented as real time split screen video lasting somewhere between 1-4 hours. Two presentations of this work in 2004; Location, Location, Location a solo show at Eventnetwork Gallery in London and a lecture and drawing at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; allowed a  synopsis of my current ideas and an opportunity for me to begin to examine and view the pieces as a growing body of work and research.

I purposely use the term ‘research’ as each work is as much investigation as demonstration. These works ask questions rather than give answers. They do not advocate locative technologies, they state and present poetic examples that allow a viewer a conceptual window into the world of our immediate, oncoming and imagined futures. They are attempting to provide an experiential sense of how our movement through a landscape of the future might alter our presence, thinking, ideas and feelings.

Location, Location, Location my London solo show, was also the title of the largest plan drawing to date, a  1km sq. that guided the viewer from an underground station in Bethnal Green in East London to the gallery space. On arrival in the space, there was a triptych of plan video projections; a projected video of  the recent drawing, which was still physically outside; two earlier works; a chalked drawn map of the route of the drawing outside drawn directly onto the gallery floor; a library of texts on the theme of ‘location’, donated by selected, writers, thinkers and architects.

The two earlier works presented were;  Work Place (2002) – a 1:1 scale office plan drawn in chalk outside the Architectural Association in London, where I worked within its drawn confines as an ‘office’, and connected to the internet via laptop using  an 802.11b signal;  and Here, here and…here  (2003) – where I globally positioned the entrance to the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, drawing an entire GPS screen, including all the satellites diagrams. This was prior to my talk on  Locative Media and Performance, which immediately followed the first locative media workshop in Karosta, Lativa in 2003.

Inside the gallery, a dotted line, with a longitude and latitude bisected the entire space and traversed from inside the gallery, ‘through’ the wall and outside, creating a drawn section line, not bound by physical objects or material.  The GPS co ordinates of the line were written on both sides of a wall, interior and exterior – but it was only possibly to imagine, rather than see them both at the same time.

This show was the first time any of these works had been presented in a gallery setting. The title drawing was actually made on the day of the opening, over a period of 6 hours. Many attendees to the show were not aware that the work effectively started 1km away from the gallery at the station entrance.  As visitors walked in the street, many observed the white chalk marks and co-ordinates, but believed them to be technical markings to designate on coming road works. Many reported being surprised as they slowly realised the markings were, in part, a form of navigation towards the gallery and drawn specifically as the central part of the gallery show. Rather than drawing an image to seen from above, all these drawings are designed to be journeyed through at ground level; a low-no-tech mimicry and emulation of an imagined urban augmentation.

I work very fast and spontaneously, only having planned my route. I never pre fix exactly where I will draw or why, preferring to respond and be surprised by my immediate environment. On conclusion of the drawing, elements from them resonate back to me in different ways, displaying varying approaches and emerging methodologies. I position fixed objects; pillar boxes, bus stops, benches.  I extend  and manifest existing boundaries; drawing the “safe” space around cash machines; drawing a fourth and ‘closing’ wall, on a three sided bus stop; extending and joining parking bays; drawing lines emanating from a doorway dimension. I  invent or imagine new boundaries; the pollen and blossom fallen from a Ceanothus bush onto a pavement; drawing a dotted section line across an entire road; grouping a series of paving slabs into a single marked ‘territory’.

The drawing Location, Location, Location was a significant development in my ideas, thinking and practice. During this piece I positioned groups of rubbish bags on the pavement.  These were temporary obstructions (or maybe constructions) occupying physical space similar to a post box, not fixed, but fluid, with time and inevitable change built into their presence. Each cluster was marked with a time, date and co ordinate, I would sometimes return later to find the rubbish collected and gone and only my dotted boundary outlines remaining, with my hand written Time Code and Place Code identifying the spot. These small changes and movements in the urban landscape are one single example of transient, fluid and ephemeral moments which could have been cars, data or people.

Many of these emerging ideas have been clarified and in part tested via a series of on going and extended conversations with the writer Ben Russell. These exchanges often articulate, clarify and solidify complex ideas. Our presentation at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam 2004 allowed these works and ideas to find an initial placement and lineage within the context of contemporary art practise. The invitation to present work within this fine art context, allowed me to look at the development of my own emerging ideas, and also to look at their progression in parallel with, the formation and acceptance of locative media as a significant and growing area of exploration and practise. What emerged was my recognition that the current use of the term ‘locative’ actually expands beyond the limitations currently imposed by its intrinsic links with technology. 

Locative, in fact, embodies any essential visual and conceptual link to notions of location: Canelletto; Monet; Cezanne; Gaugin; – each of them clearly linked within a field that fuses, painting, landscape, location; more recently: Christo; Robert Smithson; Joseph Beuys; Richard Long to name a few. Viewed in this way, ‘Locative’ becomes a mechanism to re-view location and art, and frees the term locative to become fluid, and incorporate, art, architecture, technology and literature. Locative work is not a new idea, but is a current and profound extension of a concept that has preoccupied and absorbed artists from the very earliest manifestations of creative civilisation.

Imagine a room. It is a bright sunny day, and sunlight streams through a small window. It creates a sharp square shape on the ground, drawn in light.  A movement in the room causes dust to rise; tiny particles swirl and float and for a moment a beam of sunlight is solid, like a cone, fixed and solid. You can see what it is. You can observe it. You can walk through it. You can feel its warmth. Then, the sun is obscured by a passing cloud, and the square window shape and the solid beam of light fade slowly and disappear. They are gone.