Artist Response No 6

The Region of the Transborder Trousers

As it is stated in the excerpt on blackboard ( http://courses.smcm.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_10810_1), at the turn of the twenty-first century, artists began to experiment with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices that track, via satellite, our movements in physical space.

In The Region of the Transborder Trousers (La región de los pantalones transfronterizos), Torolab, a Tijuana-based collective of architects, artists, designers, and musicians led by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna, use GPS transmitters to explore the logistics of daily life in the twin border cities of Tijuana and San Diego. This project not only makes visible the transnational mobility of the region's inhabitants, but also demonstrates the artistic potential of locative technologies.

For a period of five days, members of the collective carried GPS transmitters. The members also kept records of their cars' fuel consumption. In the end, the GPS and fuel data was then fed into a computer and visualized (using software reprogrammed by Torolab) as an animated map.
Regarding the picture, one should know that each tracked Torolab member appeared as a colored dot on an urban grid surrounded by a circle whose diameter indicated the amount of fuel left in his or her tank.

In my eyes, the idea of using Global Positioning System (GPS) for making daily life easier but PS a software used to give them directions while driving their car. On the other hand, one of my first associations was to track criminals. This might be due to the great amout of Hollywood movies that used this technic to spy on people ( for instance mivies like "Enemey of the State") .
As Torolab did, the possibilities offered by such advanced technology can be used to produce a kind of art that might seem new to the layman.
Yet, I think is interesting that people start using these technologies for producing new kinds of art.