PURE FLOW: a tool to explore the abstract materiality of noise in the GPS system
This App is a miniature, hand held application for a mobile and global audience, that reveals the noise generated between GPS data systems and multiple satellites, 3G networks and Wifi hotspots as a tangible presence in the environment.
These networks lie at the threshold of everyday visibility ... satellites moving persistently through orbit ... phone mast transmission ... wifi connection ... Invisible architectures connect behind screens, to inform, direct and navigate.
The APP visualises the instability and fragility of Live signals, passing through cloud cover and urban architecture; absorbed by bodies, reflecting off concrete and refracting through glass. Once activated, PUREFLOW reveals these signals as a sliver of fluctuating white noise, responding directly to the movement and immediate environment of the device. The user can manipulate the outcomes by touching the screen.
PURE FLOW transforms the GPS system into an instrument of abstraction; a tool to explore the materiality of noise that is normally reduced to enable user-friendly communication. The APP subverts the use-value of GPS as a surveying and navigational tool; revealing these invisible data streams and highlighting their increasing ubiquity, as sophisticated military technologies become key components in daily life.
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‘Our society is constructed around flows of capital, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not just one element of the social organization; they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political and symbolic life.’
Manuel Castells
'The Rise of the Network Society'
'Machines for seeing modify perception'
Paul Virilio
PURE FLOW is generative, open-ended and unpredictable: it exists within systems of flux that oscillate between the near and far, haptic and optic, visible and invisible, revealing new perceptions of the technological systems in which we are embedded.
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‘All images produced by electronic and digital technologies are transformations and combinations of intensities, forces, fields, taking place in the flow'
Maurizio Lazzarato
'Video, Flows and Real Time'
'Life can never be too disorienting'
Guy Debord
PURE FLOW [mobile edition] is available on Android and iTunes
For further information on PURE FLOW and other works, please go to http://www.katyconnor.com
Credits:
Artist - Katy Connor
Producer - Dr Duncan Rowland
made in collaboration with http://www.sentinelweb.co.uk
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