The project named 4816 relates to the GPS global navigation system. Supported by 24 satellites which orbit the Earth and with a GPS tool it is possible to get an exact position of longitude and latitude on Earth. Vienna (Austria) is located in this coordination system 48° north from the equator and 16° east from Greenwich, known as the prime meridian. Because of this the GPS coordinates in Vienna start with the terms N48° E16°. 4816 is about finding the minute points on the GPS grid in the urban area of Vienna. The point N 48° 11,000´ E 16° 19,000´ is an example of these 185 intersections of latitudinal and longitudinal minutes within Vienna. The intercept points are about 1.9 km apart on the north-south axis and about 1.25 km apart on the east-west axis. The goal with 4816 is to find those intercepts with the support of the GPS tool and document them photographically. At each intercept point a photo is taken in each compass direction. By traversing the GPS intercept points you take a journey through Vienna. The goal is known. But what is the nature of its environment? Is it approachable? What is the special thing about it? The fashion in which 4816 directs the individual's navigation through the city resonates with elements of the Situationist practice of derive (Guy Debord), the psychogeographical flow directing individual paths within urban environments. 4816 leads participants to places in the city that they might never have encountered thereby enabling unexpected and unique encounters with the urban surroundings. The official start of the project was on the 31st of August 2006. About 200 people came to the launch party with a raffle and DJs. Also the message board on the website became a well used forum to discuss problems that users faced on their journeys through the urban landscape. So far, participants involved are from Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Croatia, e. g. young geographers from Zagreb. After half of the 185 confluences in Vienna were found, a 4816 video clip was created. It shows all pictures collected by the 4816-community so far. By the end of 2006 70 % of the 4816-points were found, which exceeded our expectations by far. At one of the intersections of the minutes, N 48° 12.000' E 016° 25.000', we set up the geocache named 4816-1225. This geocache is a small hidden box which participants in an international treasure hunt game - called geocaching - visited over 100 times so far. In this game the boxes are found with the help of a gps device. The highest confluence found so far is located at 458 m above sea level, the lower ones are around 150 m. During this project a multitude of pictures of diverse settings were taken, including the Viennese woods, wine yards, fields, train stations, grave yards - and not unexpected gazillions of pictures of house walls, which probably so far haven't been an object of distinct photographic interest. Much to our surprise living objects also played a role in the project, i. e. baby jellyfish, fire salamander, mosquito’s and scary wild pigs. Dog 'Acia' helped to find some of the points in the Lobau, a national park near the river Danube in Vienna. The most challenging points are the ones to be found in the river Danube. There are about seven points in the water. There is still hope that this winter it will get cold enough to freeze the river to gain access. Plan B is to organize boats in spring. The artist Peter Sandbichler plans to build a 3 D model of the city based on the data collected via 4816. Also there is already a small 1:50.000 model cut in Plexiglas which visualizes the progress of the project. As the photos submitted by the participants are mounted on this model a growing puzzle of the city emerges. In the future it will be interesting to apply this concept on different cities. There have been pictures taken in New York / Manhattan already where around 20 intersections can be found. One of the special problems was to get proper satellite connection between the high-rises in Midtown. Otherwise it's much easier to get to the roofs of buildings because of local fire terms. In December 2006 the first pictures of Tel Aviv / Israel have been taken. There are about 40 minute intersections (confluences) in the city area, which is architecturally especially attractive because of its over 1000 buildings of the 1930s in the Bauhaus style. To collect pictures of the landscape and architectural environment during all four seasons, the project 4816 duration spans over a full year. It is an interesting process to observe how long it will take the participants to discover all 185 4816-points, as a significant number of these points is within buildings and a few others are in the middle of the Danube river. These are only two of the difficulties we have encountered so far and it remains to be seen which ones still await us while we search for the missing 47 points. 4816 is a project of Evamaria Trischak in cooperation with Nina Achathaller (concept), Oswald Berthold and sansculotte (database). |
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