NSEW – Urban Explorations along the Matrix

Abstract

Exploring urban landscapes off the beaten paths and collecting ignored places to share these impressions via the World Wide Web. This is what 'NSEW – Urban Explorations along the Matrix' is about. The project NSEW (North–South–East–West), founded by Austrian artist Evamaria Trischak in 2004, uses global positioning system (GPS) devices to locate the exact minute intercept points of the geographical coordinate system (i.e. the 'matrix') within urban agglomerations. Once a place on the GPS grid was visited, the documented perceptions of the exploration are shared by uploading the captured results (i.e. photos and stories) onto the NSEW website. The technique applied on these urban expeditions – the dérive, or drift – refers to the psychogeographic experiments of the situationists. The NSEW approach and method was entirely approved within the Vienna based project 4816 – referring to the geographic coordinates of Vienna (N48° and E16°). But how does the concept work out when applied to other cities? This article reveals the similarities and differences of traversing such different cities as Vienna, New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Dortmund, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and Frankfurt using the NSEW method.