GPS and All That

Last week, my friend, R, shared with me an article on how people are losing their spatial memory ability due to habitual use of GPS guidance.  When people stop thinking about where they are heading and just follow the GPS commands of their car's navigation system, they also lose the ability to remember, "Left turn, second right, go three miles left fork, 1 mile, turn right...." and I imagine they also lose the ability to read and interpret a map and convert it into directions.

One of the ideas that I continually explore in my artwork is the concept of knowing where I am, as opposed to knowing what my location is. It is a practice of paying attention to the details of my surroundings.  It is a developed skill that isn't particularly difficult, just requiring some time and focus. My own lifelong fascination with maps led me to learn the technique of plane table surveying.  It is a visual old-school skill using a horizontal drawing board mounted on a tripod.  Instead of taking compass based sightings, one draws the sightings to scale on the drawing board.  During the survey, one is focused on finding landmarks and map worthy features. You assign many of those key details your own personal work names so that you can refer to them, even if only in your own thoughts. At the end of a day of that, one can pretty much visualize the entire area without referring to the map.  In fact, I still remember key landmarks from surveys that I did fifteen years ago and I have no doubt that I could find my way through those same forests without the use of a map. The skill translates to wandering without the mapping.  I still know where I am if I see the Trident Tree or the DeadTulip Tree (it's not a tulip tree, but a dead tree that is shaped like a tulip), and I know how far it is to the take-out when Pine Island comes into view.

I purchased a GPS unit when I was helping with an archaeology project. Passing on a precise location to the archaeologist was a pretty good use for a GPS unit. I can't say it was particularly effective as a navigation tool in rugged terrain. But, during that time, I started an GPS based art project, which bottomed out and died after a few months.  By that time, I had a big list of locations, basically a pile of numbers that had no meaning of any interest.  They were just places that I had been, but with none of the context or any of the details that I experienced ...and that takes us right back to the first paragraph. The GPS data left me without spatial information.

Dr Seuss, I presume

I put in under the tall highway bridge and paddled against the flood current down to the marsh.  The tide was high and still rising with a couple of hours to go, so I headed into the narrow channels that weave through the center of the marsh, the channels that often aren't deep enough to pass.  I wandered that area for about an hour spotting quite a few Mallards, some Great Egrets, a Snowy Egret, and a dozen or so Yellow Crowned Night Herons.  I found a beautiful yellow and black dragonfly in the Secret Shortcut, and as I exited the top of that route, I look around and noted eight Yellow-Crowns at one time.