Returning to GPS, art works, mapping and drawing, Message in a bottle, From Ramsgate to the Chatham Islands is an interesting work that was exhibited in the temporary Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate (close to Ramsgate) while I was living there (up until November). I meant to post on it at the time but it slipped my mind as it never really did the rounds on any new media lists / weblogs etc. (good to see it has finally now popped up on some).

Here’s the premise of the work:

On 25th May 2004, fifty bottles containing messages were released into the sea off the south-east coast of England near Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Kent. The intended destination of the bottles is The Chatham Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The islands, which are 800km east of mainland New Zealand, are the nearest inhabited land to the precise location on the opposite side of the world to Ramsgate Maritime Museum. It is anticipated that the bottles may be found several times before reaching the Chatham Islands.

A cross between the original message in a bottle idea; send a message across the sea in a bottle, and the small world experiment carried out by Stanley Milgram to research ideas of six degrees of separation; try to send that bottle to a specific place, map its journey and the number of people it encounters along the way, the work is not so much focused on the destination but on the journey to that destination and the information it returns / the story it tells. The work is once again very focused on mapping and the idea of information as art. The bottles employed in the work are:

tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress.

Here is a time-lapse animation of the GPS bottles journey and also more information on the GPS system developed for the work.

Originally seen on Pasta & Vinegar.