the space between us app for iPhone and iPad

the space between us connects two people’s phones that are physically close. Once connected the app will display the spatial distance between each person and show an arrow pointing towards the other person.

--> is where you are

--> is where I am

As we move in different directions, our distances expand and contract. Our arrows move. Like a compass our phones will orient themselves towards each other, as if the other phone has become north. The arrow points away from the screen. Always, we are somewhere.

Across horizons, deserts, days, nights, the grids of cities, we face each other.


Instructions:

In the disconnected mode the arrow spins in a circle.

The phones will connect automatically when they are close to each other. Both phones must have the app open, and must have wifi or cell signal. There cannot be another phone with the app open within 50 yards.

The arrow will appear once a distance of 0.1 km or 0.1 miles is reached.

Tap the unit of measurement to change between km and miles.

To disconnect both phones one user must tap the arrow ten times.


Notes:

You will stay in connected mode even if you close the app or turn your phone off. If your phone has been off, or has been out of service, when you re-open the app the arrow may spin in a circle until it realizes that you are in connected mode.

If your phone’s compass is off, it will ask you to re-calibrate.

At great distances the arrow may seem to point counterintuitively. For example, when one person is in Portland, OR (45 degrees latitude) and the other is in Brooklyn, NY (40 degrees latitude), you would think that from Portland the arrow should point southeast. However, the true direction is northeast. As you move east or west across the Earth your relation to north is constantly shifting. The great circle!

The background color is ultramarine blue, whose name means “beyond the sea.” Originally referring to lapis lazuli, from mines in Afghanistan, it meant a blue that literally came from the distance.

programmed by Miles Peyton.

designed by Mia Nolting.

the space between us was commissioned by Thomas Thiel and Simone Neuenschwander for the exhibition Transparencies, at Bielefelder Kuntsverein and Kunstverein Nürnberg.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight...

- W. H. Auden, Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

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