Tristan Thielmann
research fellow, Media Geography Project, University of Siegen (DE)
Tracking the Personal: The Embodied Practice of Vehicle Navigation Systems
Keywords : Augmented Space, Geo Tags, Mobile Cartography, Media Geography, Travel Scouting, GPS
Recent cultural theory has paid increasing attention to the category of space. What received little attention, however, is a particular category of navigation through space. This paper argues, that f uture developments resulting from convergence in geo, media and communication technology can be inferred based on the increasing phenomenon of in-car and portable navigation systems. But this new subject matter for social geographic research may itself have become part of the history of cartography in only a few years, because future GPS-based localization will operate with greatly reduced symbolic sign systems. The newest mobile positioning applications no longer direct the car driver through traffic by simply using arrows, but represent the environment true to reality.
On the monitor of these navigation systems based on "Augmented Reality" (AR) , the user sees the world, and the road ahead, from the same point of view as it is seen from the driver's seat. The "conversion" of abstract maps is no longer applicable. The constitutional moment of this medium is the constant oscillation between environmental space and two-dimensional projection space. The new generation of navigation systems therefore result in concrete manifestation of what Edward Soja (1999) describes as the rise of the perspective of a third space. Using the words of Walter Benjamin, one could also speak of a transparent translation of the world that should not obscure the original.
Thus, the future of mobile navigation lies in the "augmented map", the hybrid representation of cartographic, real and virtual image information - whether on a head-up or a conventional display. On the newest Siemens-VDO (see right figure) the user can switch between a conventional topographic map, the bird's-eye-view or a three-dimensional representation. Different representations on different scales can also be looked at in parallel on the split-screen of the photorealistic navigation appliance.
In contrast to the prior generation of navigation systems, the orientation points are not isolated on the map, but are fully linked with the entire system and databases of other available information suppliers.
It is therefore possible to obtain tourist information on important buildings, find out opening times and address data, make telephone connections or a linkage to the destination. Such navigation systems have more in common with travel photography than with the original use of GPS: the accurate targeting of ballistic missiles. It is therefore no surprise that the future seems to lie in the fusion of travel guides and navigation systems that may led to a standardization of the tourist gaze (Urry, 1990).
Even if there is a definition of space, as provided through the text and the ideology of the map, GPS also opens up a new possibility for subjective cartography. When space is read by the subjects themselves, it changes into a place with a different meaning, a place that refers to the subjects and to which the subjects themselves refer. The space of the Other (the cartographer's, the navigation system's) is transformed into one's own space (of perception, memories, expectation).
According to Jody Berland (1996), the dream of traveling or the creation of travel records meet up with the passion for precise measurements in satellite imaging (and mapping). GPS not only registers the positional coordinates, but also records the high points, notable characteristics and special happenings on a trip - those personal experiences that are not entered onto conventional maps. Although the GPS representation of a trip consists only of a series of lines and points (of interest) and the self appears as a set of trajectories, it is principally the movements of the body that transforms the map from an omniscient territorial record to an individualistic medium of expression. So the tracking of the personal turns the cartographic discourse into embodied practice.
Tristan Thielmann was born 1971 in Herborn, Germany. Undergraduate Studies in Media Science (Media-Planning, -Development and -Consultation) at the University of Siegen. Postgraduate Studies in European Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Bradford and Experimental Media Design at the University of Arts Berlin. Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich. Since 2005 Research Fellow at the Collaborative Research Center FK 615 ?Media Upheavals", preparing a Habilitation Thesis on ?Media Geography".
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