Embedded Agency - formulation of an idea

***i'm going to skim the surface here, much will be left unsaid. please let me know what is unclear and i will elaborate***

the images (see previous blog) are an important thing. the obey sticker - urban tagging, informal proliferation; the berlin wall - transformation of symbols/shifting understanding of the landmark; the public billboard - agency through communication.

the idea is to create some kind of tag, informally deployed in the urban space of Jerusalem. it would be more than a just a sticker (a signifier). it would have a technology/connectivity component. basically it would be a processor, a transceiver, a small amount of memory (512K - 1G to start) and a power source. Networked, these would become a distributed dataspace and source of bandwidth.


as simple as this?

The network would aggregate in the urban space according to some collective, emergent logic (think OBEY), filling in dross space most likely (like OBEY). they would construct a distributed, anonymous data/communication haven. with sufficient aggregation, they activate, and start broadcasting, providing access to anonymous bandwidth. people can tap into this, communicate through it and store data on it, setting up new relationships between the populous and the urban space.

first of all, this offers a new way to conceive of landmarks in an urban space. The aggregation of these nodes would create some kind of effect on the urban landscape, on particular zones in the urban landscape, opening up new niches for socio-cultural interaction, allowing for pollination across existing cultural divides, setting up a space for the reconsideration of the collective narrative and contested history.

more importantly, and much more speculatively, the network presents the possibility of the becoming and evolution of socio-cultural "shields" in the contested urban landscape. If the network could become sufficiently essential to the social-biological functioning of people, to everyone in Jerusalem, Israeli and Palestinian, it would become impossible to dismantle (think about the lack of potency of the government in the face of the worm in Shockwave Rider) The government, the defense forces, the suicide bombers, anyone, really, would be dissuaded from destruction because they might risk crashing this distributed network, embedded in the urban fabric. blow up a bomb in the wrong spot, the whole techno-social system blows up in your face. of course, this brings up all kinds of issues - but design issues - which is a good thing...

immediate questions come to mind:

do people know these tags have this embedded technology while they are proliferating them? or do they come online at some date, with some event, according to some rule...?

how is this bandwidth used? is it a bad thing that a terrorist can use it to communicate/plot? how do you interface with this network (mobile devices, on the internet, through human interface (sight, touch, gesture, inhabitation, etc)?

what do these things look like? do they do anything other than network/memory? do they have some kind of signage like OBEY?

and on and on...

pamphleteerism - agency through interface

I am progressing into a new mode of design. The goal of this project has now become the creation of a pamphlet outlining the strategies, techniques and program for a technosocial campaign in Jerusalem. Not of protest or activism, this campaign seeks a deepened interface between the virtual and the physical, the mediascape and the urban fabric. The larger goal is the discovery of new sources of collective agency in the landscape of contested history.

Iterations of the evolving pamphlet will exist here:

mediascape wiki, jordan_Pamphlet

a sea of eyes, an actuated minimalism

The Sea of Eyes is a virtual projection, a digital, realtime representation of a shifting perceptual reality. The eye has its own, very rich contested history and exists here as a diagram, a metaphor and a reflection of itself. The eye is disembodied and in this way abstracted, objectified, particularized. The image is undermined as a purely representational device. The user is compelled to see more than just themselves; they are thrust into the full range of (contested) narrative landscape. There is no stable ground, either in the physical here-and-now or in the virtual construct (in a "suspension of disbelief"). The user oscillates between the two, aware and yet fully engaged, inhabiting the interface as much as anything. In this reciprocal hybridization, new modes of interaction, beyond contest/consensus, are implicated.

agency in multiplicity

It is important to be clear about what is meant by contested space. It is not about contest; contest is the process by which contested space is packaged, constrained, delimited, framed, turned into content, embedded with the marks of power-domination. Rather, contested space contains the many layers of history, points of view and positions that surround any thing/idea/understanding. As a construct, contested space is fundamentally ambivalent, a dataspace representing the range of intellectual, emotional, political negotiations and divergences. It does not frame this dataspace in any way, but remains smooth, fluid, amorphous, isotropic. This raises the question of interface. What are the characteristics of an interface into this dataspace such that it can be embedded with (transient, self-recursive) meaning/organization - that it can be folded onto itself - without introducing contest/consensus as a mechanism of control and definition? In other worlds, can an interface be conceived which allows agency without disrupting multiplicity?

memorial minimalism

Case Study: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)

I said all along that I wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before. And one that was different and slightly unsettling. The world is too full of information and here is a place without information. That is what I wanted...

...I was against the graffiti coating from the start. If a swastika is painted on it, it is a reflection of how people feel. And if it remains there, it is a reflection of how the German government feels about people painting swastikas on the monument.
- Peter Eisenman (interview transcript here)

Many great images of the project here.

Eisenman takes the position that minimalism is necessarily in contemporary memorial-making. For him, the introduction of content by the designer always leads to sensationalization.

The Holocaust memorial is a case study and a foil for the re-conceptualization of the landmark (of which memorial is exemplar). The effort is to understand the relationship of the landmark to content/narrative and to speculate on the potential of the landmark to be responsive, context specific, and ultimately, deployable or perhaps, ubiquitous.

recursive dots

here is the output from a simple processing code. not sure how this will play into the jerusalem project, but i love the aesthetic. two iterations using the same control parameters (with a random variable modulating number of branches and angle of repositioning):

contested histories

The lesson of Wikipedia is one of contested histories. Under the surface of each content page exists a world of contention, negotiation, politics, intervening identities. The edit history pages are a catalogue, a genealogy of vacillation, and in this sense remain inherently ambivalent. The content pages "pop out" from this body of contention, digested, calcified (at any given moment), framed, ready for consumption and proliferation. This emergence is inherently violent (like any birth); it stems from utility and yet contains within itself all of the marks of power-domination:

The relationship of domination is no more a "relationship" than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in ritual, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it. Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.
- Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History

Notes from Desk Crit with Gregory Thorpe (10/12/2007):
- remapping wikipedia: the landmark as the "content page" of the urban landscape - i.e. an act of control/ repression/ reframing/ consensus/ etc. - packaging of culture and the urban space - it is an architecture of controlled history.
- the alternative to this, what does it mean to have an architecture of contested history?
- in this effort, I necessarily take a position of ambivalence
- in that case, how do i reinsert myself (back) into the system/process?
- here is the critical issue of authorship in the open-source/ ambivalent mode of cultural production..., in fact this defines what art IS/has become.
- sine wave video editing as a tentative example
- re-define existing landmarks or create new ones - or both?
- using processing to diagram patterns of landmark use, both in physical and virtual terms
- indexing landmarks - news feeds, placeblogger, overlaying different perspectives as a generative process
- hyperlocal vs. hyperglobal data feeds

the ecology of wikipedia

Evaluating the verifiability of wikipedia:
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/

Re-linking identity with content:
http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

seems inevitable that i would end up here

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

entering the edit wars

1) Diagramming a Wikipedia page, understanding the degrees of freedom offered on the surface (the content pages themselves) and in the subsurface (the underlying discussion/history pages).

2) Understanding the Wikipedia community in terms profiles, relationships, hierarchies, definitions - the Edit Wars and the politic of Wikipedia.

3) Specific interventions - understand the implication of the beans-up-the-nose warning - and the ethical considerations of flamers - is it possible to fold Wikipedia back on itself without engaging in a useless expenditure of "energy." I'd like to push the limits of content embedding in Wikipedia, see what is retained, what gets pulled down. But I also don't want to engage in gratuitous disruption, to "wildly de-stratify" the construct, that seems utterly counterproductive. Sock puppets, Trolls, Vandals, Self-Promoters, these are useful examples, perhaps all the more useful when transfered to other venues, but in the context of Wikipedia they seem a bit played-out.

4) Tracking specific webpages - both created and existing - visualizing change through animation/video of refresh screenshots.

* this is an evolving post, directed at friday's review, and an overall effort to coalesce the research strings into a venue and a directive for design.

learning from flaming fuckwads

"People will play World of Warcraft for 80 hours a week.
There's no difference between that and playing Wikipedia
for 80 hours a week.  It's even more fun because of none
of the characters in World of Warcraft think they're what
they are.  People on Wikipedia, some of them think "hey,
I'm contributing to the sum of human knowledge."  You can
fuck with those people, that's extra bonus time.  So, 80
hours a week on Wikipedia, who cares, that's pretty cool,
that's pretty neat.

So it's not a waste of time to these people, and they're
right.  If they're able to successfully screw with an
article, a lot of people will see it.  I'd buy entirely
that the Penny Arcade theory, which was normal person,
plus anonymity, plus large audience, equals flaming
fuckwad.  That's the mirror that Wikipedia is presenting
to us, and I think that we can learn quite a bit from
it."

-Jason Scott, The Great Failure of Wikipedia
(audio)

make yourself a (B)ody (w)ithout (O)rgans

"You don't reach the BwO by wildly destratifying...Staying stratified -- organized, signified, subjected -- is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times."

- Deleuze + Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

the network surface and its clumps

OK, this is the final general/metaphorical/metaphysical post until after friday's crit. It was written earlier today, as a result of conversations with Aurthur, and thoughts spun off of his intriguing blog, trapped in the green box.

I'm interested in this notion of the "network surface." It is really provocative and no doubt accurate visual metaphor, and yet it seems deeply pessimistic. It paints an image of an undifferentiated landscape of data; a liquid film spreading out over human thought and culture.

It is apparent that the network surface has the capacity (particular with the introduction of Web2.0) to fold back onto itself, clumping around particular, often transient nodes. This clumping is more or less what I mean by patterning. I'm thinking of DNA, which is nothing more then a linear array of data, most of which is junk. This is obviously limiting, and yet the organism has created all sorts of strategies - from the physical folding of the DNA chain, to chemical messenger pathways - to link disparate elements of the genetic code. This give the genetic content the capacity to jump out of the constraints of the physical/chemical structure of the code and cross-fertilize, an essential feature of any adaptive, self-referential, intelligent system.

But I'm still stuck in generalities, so maybe this is no help...

form, content, patterning

check out this homage/illustration/explanation of Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
Michael Welsh, Assistant Professor In Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University

This clip brings up a really interesting distinction between HTML and XML (first and second gen web languages). To quote Mr. Welsh:

"HTML was designed to define the structure of a web document...form and content became inseparable...In XML, form and content are described separately, allowing data to be exported free of formatting."

As a result of added flexibility, XML allows data to flow more freely from site to site. This produces a far more sophisticated platform for the manipulation of data, one in which content can be organized through patterns of use, and in fact this patterning of content becomes content in its own right, in the sense that it retains its own identity and can be manipulated through further patterning operations. This opens the door to the emergence recursive feedback in the system, creating differentiation in the surface of the network, varying degrees of ossification/plasticity. This strikes me highly similar to network models of biological intelligence: populations of neurons self-organizing through repetitive use to form cohesive (and increasingly repeatable) patterns of thought.

Could we venture to say, then, that when pattern-making become more essential - more present - than content, the internet becomes a sufficient contextual framework for intelligent behavior and self-organization - a language, if you will.

*this post has been edited in response to comments, more elaboration to come.

digital, drifting and the end of history

sci_arc hosted a provoking lecture from the italian theorist mario carpo wednesday night, titled above.

among the subjects he touched on was the notion of drift in creative production. mr. carpo discussed the nature of writing before and after the advent of the printing press. before, content was subject to progressive change - drift - through intended (editorial) and unintended (mistaken) revisions during the copying process, placing authorship in a constant state of flux. the printing press radically transformed the situation, de-coupling the creative act of writing from the mechanical act of reproduction. as a result, authorship became fixed.

mr. carpo traced a similar transformation in architecture through a treatise written by alberti at the outset of the renaissance. alberti sought to detach the architect from the guild-system and the tradition of the architect as master-builder (exemplified, for example, by the project of Brunelleschi's dome). rather than a collaborative, evolving process of design-build, the architect would take sole authorship of the design. the product, and the final form of the architecture, was a fully realized representation of the building. the builder then would implement (copy into physical form) the construction from these documents. this conception is very much familiar today, institutionalized in the record drawing set / bid contract structure of most projects.

the emergence of the networked society has called into question alberti's model of cultural production. in this environment, drift becomes possible, and is in fact (like the manuscript) unavoidable. open-source software development and the changing landscape of the music industry are prime examples of this emerging condition. for mr. carpo, the techno-centric cult of the individual, a defining characteristic of contemporary practice and discourse, is in its last throws -- glorious as they may be. a new paradigm is emerging: in exchange for giving up absolute authorship, the architect gains access to a far richer cultural vein, a vast network of real-time data, feedback and cultural flux.

is music a donut?

(open source cinema asks this question when you set up an account)

should music be a product? should it be free? The distinction will be radically blurred as music becomes increasingly customizable and responsive to specific environments. The musician will become a designer, creating the source code for a family of infinitely variable, yet related music. The choice will become whether or not (or to what degree) to release the code.

open-source : research in profiles / profiling

My research at this point follows two tracks:

The first concerns open-source as a tactic: I will track the linage of open-source environments, from ARPANET to the speculative metagovernment prototype and beyond. The immediate interest is to understand the nature of profiles and profiling through these specific frameworks. The deeper goal is to conceptualize how and to what extent open-source tactics might be employed in the envisioning of Jerusalem 2050.

The second will be the development of an online collaborative space. Consisting of a collection of networked online entities, this space will function as an open-source research probe. The space will begin with some very basic automated linkages between this blog, my del.icio.us catalog and a wiki, and will grow to include more sophisticated, customized networking, visualization and organization tools. The intent is twofold: to take advantage of the expertise of a large network of friends, relatives and colleagues; and to test and experience first-hand the mechanisms of an open-source environment.

several important links

del.icio.us = social bookmarking (emergent internet organization)

processing.org = data manipulation platform (coding for artists)

metagovernment.org = open-source government (a protoype)

Mediascapes studio fa2007, an outline

"Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication...
But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world..."
Jean-Luc Goddard

My take on the Mediascape studio:

We will be working towards one or multiple submittals to the Just Jerusalem competition, envisioning possible scenarios for Jerusalem forty years into the future (2050). The date is interesting in that it allows a great deal of visionary latitude and yet enforces a degree of realism and tangibility on the proposal.

We will explore the evolving landscape the city, and world in general, in an effort to understand possible systemic interventions that might bring about a more equitable, workable state-of-affairs in Jerusalem. Central to our approach is the basic assumption that the physical and virtual worlds are converging. The entrée into the project is a study of the practical and metaphysical implications of the profile and profiling. We will track their many dimensions, focusing on the relation to the hybrid physical-virtual network.

Course readings/viewings include the scifi classic Shockwave Rider; movies such as Code 46, Alphaville and Videodrome; and a variety of internet presences. Much more information can be found at the fast growing Mediascapes wiki.

an uneducated manifesto, a starting point

language is a technology; the internet is becoming a language.

the conceptual power of the computing environment is fast migrating from the box to the network. applications and data are becoming increasingly native to the net and correspondingly independent of the box. computer intelligence is no longer a measure of power - the capacity to compute - but of connectivity - the capacity to engage, structure and reconfigure real-time data.

similarly, the critical debate in architecture must move beyond the blob vs. the box. the exploration of form as an end-in-itself is no longer delivering radical shifts. for the past ten years, architecture has focused on computationally intensive geometry. now, it must engage the territory presented by the network, both as a site for a new kind of architecture, and as a tool for rethinking the nature of design.


(This is only here so i an add it to my profile)