A conceptual drawing, " All roads lead to Rome - a line made by driving" uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) installed in the artists‘ car, to trace their road journey of Rome. Rather than travelling in a straight line from A to B, they roamed in two giant circles, constructing a drawing of the BMW logo, which doubled as a digital trace-map of their journey. The work uses visual conventions from game design; multiple viewpoints and the ability to shift from view to view. The result is as well city a tour by random, like in the situationists’ practice.
- DVD, 64 min. 1999/2000

All roads lead to Rome
- a line made by driving

Fischer and el Sani decided to set the navigation system an unusual task. On 11th December 1999, they set out in a BMW equipped with a Global Positioning System and a digital map of Rome.
“Rather than take the ‘classical, functional’ route from A to B, we wanted to describe a shape as close as possible to the BMW logo.”
The entire journey was documented by a video camera in the car. The artists later compressed the 8 hour video to length of 1 hour, and of 1 minute. The car’s location was simultaneously monitored on a screen at the BMW navigation headquarters, Milan. The individual location points connected by a continuous line – ‘a line made by driving’ – engendered on the city map a trace of the artists’ presence in the city.
A city tour uniting scientific methodology and artistic strategy, during which the navigating passengers encounter places as it were by accident, inspite of – or precisely in virtue of – the navigation system.
Jone Scherf for exhibition catalogue: "Autowerke", Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, 2000