Abstract
Global Positioning System (GPS) allows users to remap physical space in relation to location, movement, perspective and use. Focusing on GPS and art as a way to enter the larger, diverse locative media practices, this class researched and explored current habits, laws and assumptions challenged by the introduction of GPS and other wireless technology on public spatial practices.

Keywords
GPS, art and GPS, locative media, social practices, spatial practices

Description
Art & GPS is a project-research based course offering students opportunities to work with GPS technology within an art-studio context. Current practices, projects, conceptual, historical and theoretical concerns relating to locative media, with a focus on but not restricted to art, inform the content and direction of the course.

Theory/research/practice are the cornerstones with each informing and shaping the other. Goal-oriented exercises combine with more exploratory meanderings, emulating movements through and means by which we learn about our surrounding physical spaces.

Everyone in the class actively contributes materials, commentaries, resources and projects ideas knowing that these will later come to characterize and portray this new and emerging field at this point in time.

Course objectives fall in three categories:
1. Conceptual/Theoretical/Historical
• Learn GPS history, politics and use in art and non-art arenas.
• Consider how GPS and other wireless technologies inform spatial experiences and language.
• Identify artists (and others) using locative media to redefine, reshape or recast familiar spaces.
• Explore related conceptual, theoretical and historical ideas, such as mapping,
historical and contemporary means of navigation, spatial narratives, cross-cultural spatial models.
• Seek trans-media/trans-disciplinary opportunities for collaborations and conversations involving GPS, wireless and other locative media.
• Consider how we, as artists, can participate in, shape and contribute to the newly emerging discourse and practice in art/GPS/locative media.

2. Studio/Hands-on
• Bridge and create new relationships between physical and virtual spaces.
• Explore various technologies and software, mapping programs and GPS devices to navigate, map, mark, track and generate projects and ideas.

3. Research
• Gather materials related to course curriculum and individual areas of interest.
• Research, write and present materials throughout the semester focusing discussion around evolving practices and emerging themes.

II. Two class exercises

Locative media is radically changing social spaces — notions of public and private, local and distant, behavior, expectations and laws. The following two exercises bring attention to and open discussion around forces that govern public spaces. The goal is to interrogate habits, laws and assumptions defining and shaping spatial practices, comfort and familiarity.

1. Navigating
Components: San Francisco map, notebook

Description: In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau distinguishes between maps and tours. Maps are conceptual overviews, objective representations of space marked by coordinates. Tours are descriptions from experiential points of view. This exercise explores differences and relationships between the two.

Process: Pick two points on the map. Go to one, wait for a passer-by and ask directions to the second. Follow their directions exactly regardless of accuracy or expediency. Draw the routes you take on the map noting points of interest along the way. If you get lost, ask another passer-by for directions and follow these similarly. End once you reach the second destination.

::Class discussed differences between tourist and resident; spatial familiarity informing the capacity for unique spatial experiences; Michel de Certeau’s writings on * maps * and * tours * as experiential models; purposeful navigations versus flaneur meandering; creating situations of estrangement as strategies instigating new experiences.

2. Following
Components:*Wired flaneurs* (Students with web cams, laptops, GPS devices)

Description: Surveillance, public space and performance constitute reference points for this exercise as passers-by are clandestinely and discretely mapped by mobile trackers.

Process: *Wired flaneurs* chose a person or group to follow surreptitiously until the flaneurs are noticed or until the person or people they are following enter a building or leave the university campus parameter. A classroom receiving station monitors * Wired flaneurs’ * trajectories and observations with paths recorded by their GPS units.

:: Class discussed social conventions and laws governing public space; technologies reshaping public and private boundaries; social control through public surveillance; technology redefining the body as a multi-functioning transmitter/receiver/performer.

Biography
PAULA LEVINE is a media artist and Associate Professor of Art in Conceptual/Information Arts, at San Francisco State University. Her current research and art practice is in GPS, remote and locative media.

As a participant in the 2004 IntraNation Residency, The Banff Centre, Levine produced SpeakingHere and Shadows from another place: San Francisco ß->Baghdad. She presented a paper on these locative projects at MIT:4 – The Work of Stories, as a Mobile Narrative panelist.

Levine is currently working on a series of projects and essays based on her ideas of transpositional mapping: using coordinates of distant events as templates that are overlaid locally. Collapsing the safety of distance, these hypothetical maps ground foreign events in local terms. Security Wall, a transpositional mapping of the Israeli barrier, is a work in progress.

In April, 2006, she will exhibit Signature, a GPS triggered sound installation, as part of Sonoma County Museum’s centennial commemoration 1906 California earthquake.