Jeremy Wood

For Platform21 = Checking Reality Wood created a new sculpture that was placed in the park. GPS Data Cloud is based on the inaccurancies still present in this modern technolgy.

In a spot where until recently there were ‘just’ two park benches often used by park visitors, there now stands a sculpture by Jeremy Wood. The piece addresses the inaccuracy that continues to be present in today’s advanced technology.

GPS Data Cloud consists of a great many park benches that overlap and cut through each other, as if they have moved a few centimetres again and again. And they have. Jeremy Wood placed a GPS receiver on the two existing benches and used satellite technology to check the benches’ position every ten seconds for one minute. He processed the successive GPS locations into a one-minute picture of the benches as they had stood there (according to the satellite, they were here... no, here... no, here...).

The benches overlap, intersect, and differ in position and height. The entire piece forms a kind of digital disturbance ín the real world.

In this work, Jeremy Wood plays on the near-blind faith we place in our navigation systems and the modern technology that constitutes an ever-greater and increasingly taken-for-granted part of our everyday lives, in spite of its clear inaccuracies.

At the same time, the work thus tells us something about where we are in relation to where technology thinks we are.

Jeremy Wood will also give a workshop in which participants will make their own drawings by walking in shapes and patterns in the Beatrixpark with GPS receivers.

Jeremy Wood uses GPS technology to ‘draw on the landscape’ as if he were a pencil line on a sheet of paper. For him, to draw is to move, to walk, drive, sail or fly. Drawing means travelling. Holding a GPS unit, he explores the lines between science, technology, art and geography. In London, he walked over city sidewalks and through parks to produce ‘handwritten’ quotes. He also flew through European airspace to five cities in order to draw a giant star in the sky.

In his work, he explores the functions and values of travelling and establishes the boundaries that limit and test our movements: streets and roads, spatial awareness, and navigational skills.

Jeremy Wood started drawing with GPS in October 2000 when he recorded the delay pattern of a commercial flight from Berlin to London. Since then, GPS drawing has developed into a personal cartography in which all Wood’s travels are recorded in digital traces.
www.gpsdrawing.com