A Global Positioning System

[T]he narrative follows the global production line … from the military controlled diamond mines in sub-Saharan Africa to the anonymous computer production lines in Asia (Source: Gee & Vogelaar 2019, p.6).

By animating the routes and methods of production, Jackson reveals an incredible journey from the rubber trees of Sri Lanka to the tin mines of the Congo, on to the production lines of China and finally to the palm of your hand. This voyage reveals reveals the complex web of locations, processes, materials and labour that go into the production of this hi-tech consumer product, uncovering the paradox of the expansive infrastructure needed to produce a device used to locate just one person in the world (Source: Anon 2006a, np link).

Breaking down the GPS manufacturing workflow is made out of two movements: on one hand panning across the world, from the global centres of consumption into the factories in China and further afield into the mines of Congo or the rubber trees in Sri Lanka; and on the other hand, a zooming in process, going from the macro-scale of the global economy into the most intimate gestures of manual production and the microscopic components of the gps unit (Source: Roush nd, np link).

This animation refers to the schemas of material flow analysis as used in the fields of design and technology to trace the intellectual development, mineral sources and working processes involved in the manufacture of a consumer product (Source: Anon 2009, np link).

The film and accompanying poster produce a complex map of locations, processes, materials and labour, all brought together in a hi-tech consumer product, designed to locate the position of an individual in the world (Source: Anon 2006b, np link).

As [the film ends] the voice over narrates: this GPS contains materials that come from the following places: Guinea, China…India…Germany, England, Zambia…Brazil, Australia, Turkey, Nigeria, Spain, …Mexico, Chile, Philippines, USA, Argentina, Portugal, Japan, Korea…South Africa…Angola, Democratic Republic Of Congo, Namibia, Venezuela… (Source: Roush nd, np link)

I spent a week with the manager of an electronics factory exploring the industrial mechanism involved in creating a Global Positioning System, which revealed giddy statistics in terms of the scale of the industrial infrastructure in place to produce and support this device. It takes in the region of 2kg of raw materials and over 300 chemical processes to make its 2g micro-processor alone. Thousands of lives will have been touched in the production of a single device. I also continue to explore animation as documentary, or its ability to act as a gauge of ‘real events’ through narrative and other strategies such as outsourcing animation sequences in China and beyond. A Global Positioning System project entails the visual mapping of mineral and human resources implicated in the manufacture of a hand-held Global Positioning System device. It witnesses the status of various forms of labour: from the extraction of mineral resources to the presentation of telesales, from mines to satellites. The project explores this paradox: that so many subjectivities, manufacturing processes and working lives are implicated in a device designed to locate the position of a single individual. Filming began in China where the devices are manufactured, and extended to a ‘remote’ visiting process by asking academics, scientists, artists and industrial workers internationally to email me with texts and images of the sites that contribute to the resources that feed into a finished industrial product. Mineral resources from every continent are used in such a piece of technology, and thousands of industrial processes. There is a sense of the GPS being a ‘clean’ piece of technology – though certain mineral components are dug by hand from makeshift mines. The work registers a contrast between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ industries and processes we associate with them (source: Jackson 2006, p.116).

All this is realised in simple cartoon line drawings (Source: Anon 2008, p.13).

I am interested in what happens in documentary filmmaking when the lens is replaced by drawing. The ‘work’ of the film, the succession of mark making is evident, in the same way that the work involved in the manufacture of the product is made visible. We are always aware that it is an individual register that is bearing witness (of other individuals). Drawing admits that it is illusory, subjective and selective – yet it still holds the ability to tell a true story (Source: Jackson 2007, np link).

Melanie presents this journey as a way of depicting the material process of production and challenges the disjunction that capitalism operates between things and their image. From images of miners working in the sandpits of Congo, she uses drawing as away to develop connections with the more abstract level of high tech glossy consumer technology (Source: Roush nd, np link).

The finished work takes the form a single screen 5 minute animation underscored with electronic music, and a paper foldout map of the genealogy of the process. Through the use of animation we are conscious that we are bearing witness – but through a human, individual register, rather than a optical device. The animation uses cutting edge technologies, but links to an ancient, haptic process. The work uses a combination of drawing from memory, conjecture and photographic sources. In places images are composed using only drawing and in others photographs are referenced, layered behind the image and worked onto to make them move and draw them into narrative moving sequence. The work is redolent of a public information film through the use of graphics and diagrammatic over still and moving image sequences as part of the narrative explication of this journey (source: Jackson 2006, p.116).

The analysis is visual – unlike the textual investigations carried out in these other fields. It explores Marxist notions of alienation, while acknowledging the fascination, desire and phenomenal global industrial infrastructure implicated in an everyday piece of technology. Thousands of lives are implicated in a product designed to locate a single individual (Source: Anon 2009, np link).

[A Global Positioning System was first exhibited in Jackson’s Road Angel] exhibition at Arnolfini [in Bristol, UK], [which] explores how ideas, people, products and raw materials circulate in our increasingly mobile world. She is inspired by news stories, that describe inventive means of getting by, of survival beyond the odds: and uses a combination of animation, drawing, sculpture, film, video and printed matter. How can we make sense of all the places we read about but probably will never get to, and what are the networks that have linked us together (Source: Anon 2006c, np link)?

[The artwork in Road Angel] explores how ideas, people, products and raw materials circulate and then settle in our increasingly mobile world. … [Downstairs, Jackson’s] sprawling installation Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World, 2003 … comprises of hundreds of intricate, hand-made architectural models constructed in minute detail from international newspaper pages. Amongst this. Lilliputian landscape sit a number of videos – footage of Hong Kong’s Filipino servant community. This transient workforce come together each weekend in the deserted financial district to socialise and chat in their native tongue. In contrast to these images and symbols of migration and mobility, Jackson has produced a poster which exhaustively lists the diverse (and often bizarre) items that cannot be sent around the world: Algeria – Funeral urns, watches and clocks.., Germany – Playing cards, USA – Goods originating in Cuba, North Korea or Vietnam… (Source: Arnolfini 2007, np link).

[Upstairs], her major new animated work, A Global Positioning System, 2006, deconstructs a hand-held GPS satellite positioning unit, tracing each component part back to its source. In this way, Jackson reveals a tangled odyssey back to the rubber trees of Sri Lanka, the tin mines of Congo, and the production lines of China… (Source: Arnolfini 2007, np link).

I’m nodding my head saying, yes, yes isn’t it awful and Jackson is right alongside me saying yes, yes I know and suddenly I realise the bone sticking in my throat is the nagging feeling that I am not made to feel uncomfortable enough, this is a nice presentation of a nasty situation. The deconstruction of the “system” is an interesting and fascinating project, but that is just the problem. I find myself full of new facts and information and strangely detached by the systematic nature of her inquiry. … According to Marx the alienation of the worker is a result of their separation from the end product. I wonder if Jackson’s systematic project was intended as a mirror of the systematic way the working individuals are treated? The comparison has been made between the way Jackson works, using painstaking animation or construction techniques, and the monotonous repetitive working actions of her subjects. Placing Jackson in relation to her subjects in this way is too much of a leap for me. Can you say that animating film footage to your own specification and design in a studio environment is akin assembling microchips and soldering each tiny piece together in a factory? Crucially, as an artist, you are not alienated from your production you are highly invested in it and you and your interests largely drive it. Once it goes out into the world you encounter all sorts of problematic market related issues but the actual work is the fun bit, fine it is a drag sometimes but it’s not a sweatshop. Does the operation of aesthetics get in the way of the reportage? … China and all things related are definitely the “it” kid of current contemporary art circles. I started off thinking Jackson’s GPS proposition was an interesting and guileful approach, in many ways I still do but, it doesn’t make me think any deeper about issues of global economics it just underlines it with a funky colour and then allows you to move on (Source: Tullock & McCalden 2007, np link).

The postmodern propositions that explanatory ‘master narratives’ are obsolete and that reality cannot be grasped from a single viewpoint have had several decades to lose whatever shock-value they once possessed. But Jackson’s animation A Global Positioning System invites reflection on another vantage point that has gone, this time a technological one. A Global Positioning System originated from the concept of mapping the totality of technologies and sites of production represented by a GPS device. However the range of components that constitute this apparatus turns out to be so complex and diverse that no single individual can have a comprehensive overview. The map is impossible. One assumes this must also be true of many other mass-produced devices on the market. It’s a less grandiose, but somehow more insidious, disappearance than the philosophical disintegration announced by postmodern theory. In Jackson’s video, we briefly meet the boss of a Chinese factory that assembles GPS systems. Seated in his smart black leather chair, he shows us the integrated circuit that he identifies as the “heart” of GPS technology: a cluster of millions of transistors, “like a whole city of skyscrapers”. On the soundtrack, we hear the voice of the director of a GPS factory in Guangzhou recorded by the artist on location whilst researching the work in 2005. In the finished work, the character’s facial image and mouth movements don’t lip-synch neatly with the recorded voice. Via Jackson’s animation technique, the tiny marks and lines that form his mouth shatter and regroup, solidify and liquefy. Albeit fleeting, the effect of the disconnection is subtle but decisive: something is not quite right, yet exactly right in its elusiveness. This man seems friendly and trustworthy and what he’s saying is perfectly reasonable. But connections are now visibly unhitched. The facts are dispersed and decentralised and can only be grasped collectively. This seems a cause for both optimism and anxiety. Technological production hinges on the sharing of practical expertise across collaborative networks. But part of the network may fail, or be destroyed, or opt to withhold its knowledge. What then (Source: Withers nd, np link)?