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This one looks like a deer; that one like a figure with arms stretching upward, legs intertwined. The global positioning satellite receiver, designed for precise measurement and tracking, is subverted and re-cast as a kind of giant pencil or tool for making chance compositions. —Teri Rueb, “The
Choreography of Everyday Movement”
David Rieder
Teri Rueb’s project, “The Choreography of Everyday Movement,” is part of a recent trend in contemporary art that uses Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technologies and Global Information Systems (GIS) data to explore our changing relations to place and territoriality. In her project, GPS receivers transmit the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of a performers’ changing position in an urban environment (Baltimore; San Antonio) to a Java applet which then translates the information into a continuous, abstract line. As a performer walks or drives through an urban space, following sidewalks or streets around turns, starting and stopping with a crowd or at a traffic light, the line grows, twisting and turning on the computer screen—and as the line grows, spectators are invited to project their own meanings onto the “chance compositions,” which can result in a renewed connection to urbanized space. Dramatizing the responses of her audience, in the epigraph Rueb writes, “This one looks like a deer; that one like a figure with arms stretching upward, legs intertwined.” The GPS receiver, which is typically used to determine one’s location, is transformed into an inscription technology for developing homegrown interfaces through which a spectator can reconnect with a locale that may be increasingly difficult to make meaningful on a local or personal level. It may not be obvious that Rueb’s project is a contribution to contemporary writing studies, so I’d like to make a case for viewing her work in those terms. To do so, I’ll draw on a few passages from Mina Shaughnessy’s work as well as on André Leroi-Gourhan’s theories of prehistoric writing.
[W]riting is a line that moves haltingly across the page… —Mina Shaughnessy Taken out of context, this definition of writing could be applied to the kind of writing Rueb’s performers produce. Excerpted from a comparison that Shaughnessy develops in the introduction to her book, Errors and Expectations, in which she contrasts the multidimensionality of spoken language to the constrained, one-dimensionality of academic discourse, this definition is meant to underscore the challenge with which the basic writer is faced. Shaughnessy writes, “For the BW [basic writing] student, academic writing is a trap, not a way of saying something to someone” (7). For her basic writer, a dynamic, real-time connection to an audience in a speaking situation is seemingly impossible to recreate in academic writing. Writing “puts him [the basic writer] on a line, and he doesn’t want to be there.” Whereas spoken language offers speakers “chances for groping and backing up and even hiding, leaving room for the language of hands and faces, of pitch and pauses,” any deviation from the written line’s projected path and the writer suffers the wrath of a reader whose energy has been unduly taxed in a zero-sum economy of linear argumentation. On a superficial level of comparison, we might say that Rueb’s example of line-writing resembles the multi- or non-linearity of spoken language. Like the line(s) of thought a speaker can explore in a conversation, Rueb’s performers can speed up or slow down, move north or south, or backtrack over their positions. Admittedly, this comparison breaks down pretty quickly. Nonetheless, there is something in Shaughnessy’s description of spoken language that resonates with Rueb’s model of writing. In the above-cited passage from her introduction, Shaughnessy alludes to the language of hands and faces, which reminds me of the following passage from André Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech: “The hand has its language, with a sight-related form of expression, and the face has its own, which relates to hearing. [. . .] The gesture interprets the word, and the word comments upon the graphic expression.” In Gesture and Speech, Leroi-Gourhan argues that the pre-phonetic writing of prehistoric man was expressive of a more balanced, coordinated practice of graphical and spoken languages. In his anthropological study of prehistoric cave paintings, Leroi-Gourhan theorizes that the drawings of bison and deer, or man and woman, are not examples of a primitive realism. Rather, these drawings are the graphical support-structure for a long-lost oral tradition. They are the visual remnants of an audiovisual writing practice that dates back to 30,000 BCE. Leroi-Gourhan writes:
Winding our way back to Shaughnessy, it’s worth noting that for Leroi-Gourhan as well as for writing theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, both of whom draw on the French anthropologist’s theories, writing was breaking free of the one-dimensional model of writing throughout the twentieth century. Definitions of writing are being transformed to include an ever-growing range of non-phonetic elements, from talkies to GUIs. With this broader backdrop in mind, we might redescribe Shaughnessy’s basic writer’s dilemma as follows: her (graphical) hands tied behind her back, she has had to forfeit the “rich orchestration” of multi-dimensional, audiovisual “writing” for a single dimension—and when she deviates from this line, she is told she can’t write. A connection does exist, then, between Rueb and Shaughnessy. Although it’s obscured in Shaughnessy’s reduction of the “rich orchestration” of hands and face to the facial/phonetic element, there is in both projects a recognition of a language that operates beyond the constraints of a one-dimensional line on the page or the screen.
As I continue to think about Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of audiovisual cave writing, I see that Rueb has found a way to extend the walls of the cave to the streets of the cities in which her performers “write.” Using GPS technologies as a haptic medium of sorts, the visualized movements of her performers connect to the conversational discourse of her spectators, creating an audiovisual language that is simultaneously global in perspective and local in reach. Rueb has subverted the normal use of the GPS mapping data— and the Abbottian flatland it represents—into a giant writing surface. Moreover, breaking through the implied data-surface in order to explore the local meaning of place, she’s taken these technologies in unforeseen directions. GPS technologies are part of a broader process of communication that dates back to the early 18th century, the objective of which, Armand Mattelart argues, is to network the world. While this process was originally informed by a liberalism promoting social equality and freedom, this “local” concern has been superseded by an ideal of pure circulation. Mattelart writes,
As the process of globalization continues to change the ways in which we relate to each other as well as to the places that we call home, the exigency mounts to find new ways to (re)write ourselves back into these spaces. Rueb’s project is one such example. As her spectators point to abstract animal and human figures in the lines that “move haltingly across the screen,” I’m reminded of a similar process whereby constellations of stars or individual clouds support an audio-track for the terrestrial cultures below. The drawings her performers leave behind are a reminder of a conversation that “took place,” a conversation in which the placelessness of many urban spaces was re-infused for a few moments with local discourse. Works Cited Rueb, Teri. “The Choreography of Everyday Movement.” 1 October 2003. http://www.research.umbc.edu/~rueb/trackings. Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Trans. Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1993. Mattelart, Armand. Networking the World, 1794-2000. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A.Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide of the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Citation Format: Rieder, David M. "GPSWriting." The Writing Instructor. 2004. http://www.writinginstructor.org/files/gps/index.html (Date Accessed). David Rieder's column is a regular feature of TWI. |
