C5: GPS Media Player
June/July 2005
C5: GPS Media Player
The artist collective C5’s GPS Media Player was developed as part of its Landscape Initiative (2001–7), a series of projects exploring data visualization systems as art. Engaged with mapping, navigation, and land search through Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the series consisted of three parts—The Analogous Landscape, The Perfect View, and The Other Path—for which C5 members (Joel Slayton, Steve Durie, Geri Wittig, Bruce Gardner, Jack Toolin, Brett Stalbaum, Amul Goswamy, Matt Mays) undertook massive performative expeditions all over the world. For The Analogous Landscape, for example, they climbed peaks such as Mounts Whitney and Shasta in California and Mount Fuji in Japan. Their respective journeys were tracked by GPS and Digital Elevation Modeling (DEM). The C5 GPS Media Player, a visual interface, allows users to navigate and explore the GPS tracks stored in the C5 Landscape Database. Users can conduct comparative track analyses, sorted by the Landscape Initiative projects, artist, or events. Each track traces a hiker’s journey from a first-person perspective through images and text recorded during the trek. Blending conceptual, performance, and land art with research, business, and exploratory adventure, the project investigates shifting understandings of the landscape in information visualization and reconsiders the role of exploration in art.
The original GPS Media Player is no longer online, but documentation is available at c5corp.com
C5 (active 1990–2009, San Jose, California) was an art collective that specialized in cultural production informed by the blurred boundaries of research, art, and business practice. C5’s guiding principle was “theory as product” and their work focused on the development of tactical strategies involving information visualization, databases, and distributed networks. C5 projects have been featured at institutions such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University, Phoenix; and the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, California. C5 representatives have participated in international symposia and festivals including Transmediale, Berlin; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; and the Second International Biennial, Buenos Aires (2002).
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.