Glow Positioning System is a 1000-foot-long interactive light installation, which in February 2005 transformed an entire city square in Mumbai, India, into a visual “instrument”. Lights could be played in a giant loop across the architecture, on the trees and over the roads, by literally anyone on the street.

Through a crank interface, a panorama is unfolded—a virtual panorama, which transformed the familiar daytime architectural profiles of this space. Thus, the audience enters into a simple yet powerful interaction with their city. This is a visual relationship, but also a relationship about power, scale, touch, and play. For the entire fourday duration of this installation, the crank stopped only to change hands.

This work draws on the tradition of the urban panorama in painting and photography, a trajectory that extends into VR and video games. Also popular in the 19th century were moving panoramas, where crank-driven paintings or images provided the audience with a “traveling” experience. The hand crank, of course, also has a lengthy history in cinema. It was present in both early film cameras and projectors. As such, it provided the force mechanism behind the early “motion picture.”

In our form of animation also, the speed of rotation causes different persistence effects. Turning the crank quickly causes the entire ring of light to light up at once, while slow motion allows a piece-bypiece exploration of the landscape.

Global Positioning Systems tell us where we are at all times, implying we will travel, globally. In our GPS, “tourism” is a kind of in-situ virtual experience, relying on the fading of the actual landscape with nightfall. The experience does not depend on the observer being physically displaced. Yet there is a clear sense of kinesthesia, and the promise of a haptic journey.