TEST

[NB - this text was originally written for a conference in June 2002, when Matt Jones had just launched the idea of warchalking. In fact, Matt was at the conference, getting freaked out by the incredible velocity of the meme as it worked its way up daypop. The fact that this ephemeral meme might now be on its ebb tide is a poetic metaphor in itself...]

Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen’s Hard Shoulders Soft Verges (Edge Town)

Hard Shoulders Soft Verges is a project about the boundaries of urban space, and about devices that passively map and visualise activity within these boundaries. It invokes the situationist metaphor of the city as a palimpsest – an accretion of unconscious communication in the city, both structured and serendiptious.

Cities are already a forest of signs, but most of these signs are authorised
texts; part of the official story of a city. Public space was already a conflicting narrative of official and unofficial texts before the introduction of mobile communications. Billboards, road signs, street names, shop windows – these are the stories that have fascinated flaneurs since the 19th century.

But the city also has a tradition of writing itself in unauthorised ways, from graffiti tags to the wall paintings marking sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland. These are signs of a city marking its own boundaries, and also a dynamic public discourse about the structure of the city itself. In her book ‘Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England’, Juliet Fleming describes the practice of writing on walls in private and public places as a form of public discourse that has been lost to history, erased both physically and historically in favour of authorised printed texts:

“I imagine the whitewashed domestic wall as being the primary scene of writing in early modern England. That the bulk of early modern writing was written on walls, and was consequently both erasable and, in our own scheme of things, out of place is a proposition with consequences for current assumptions about the constitution of statistics of literacy and schooling in the early modern period.”

Fleming describes a discourse in 16th Century England that has been erased for us. Save for a few etchings in glass windows, on furniture, or on mantelpieces, we have very little evidence of this very vibrant social discourse. There is a similar form of social discourse happening today over SMS – a similarly ephemeral medium to the chalk writing of 16th Century England.

This ephemeral discourse is not part of a city’s official narrative, but can form underground communication network that are critical marginalised communities. A contemporary version of 16th Century wall writing is the ‘Hobo Codes’ that are used by transient communities in the USA. These codes, written on buildings in residential areas, tell stories for other hobos, and offer advice about finding food or shelter. For example, a squiggly line in a black box means “bad tempered owner”, a number of dime and nickel shaped circles means that there is a good chance to get some money, and, one of my favourites, a simple circle with two arrows, meaning get out fast.

Matt Jones recently proposed that we could reform some of these underground symbols to indicate the wireless networks that are starting to open up around our cities. Following on from ‘war dialling’, an old hacker term used to describe random attempts to access closed phone networks, Jones has called this system of ephemeral signs ‘Warchalking’.

Warchalking inscribes invisible communication networks into the physical space of the city, creating an iconic visual language that is deliberately ephemeral. Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen’s Edge Town is a technological version of these ephemeral icons – a vocabulary of small gestures that tell the city small stories about itself, about what happened, what accrued and what was washed away. Their series of sensors and small displays are a city listening to its own background noise. The patterns that emerge are part of a tradition of ‘edge town’ languages, from 16th Century Graffiti to Hobo languages and Warchalking. Edge Town turns the technological infrastructure of the city in on itself, creating a feedback loop of listening and representation. Will the ephemeral language created by this loop be stories about the technology itself? Or will it create a new vocabulary of icons for the inhabitants of the city? What stories will Edge Town tell us? How many of them will be remembered, and how many forgotten?

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

« Read the rest of this entry »

Rachel Baker’s Platfrom

We have always located ourselves by mnemonics, by having shorthand visual maps of our environment. This is as true for virtual information spaces as it is for ‘real’ geographies. Memory experts use visual mnemonics as a way of remembering lists of information. These techniques propose visualising a room or a house with many shelves or cupboards, and then walking around depositing the bits of information you need to remember around the rooms of this virtual space. When you want to recall the information, you mentally walk around the space until you find the memory object you placed there.

In his classic book on urban planning “The Image of the City” Kevin Lynch describes how important this kind of technique is when we navigate real spaces;

“Way finding is the original function of the environmental image and the basis on which emotional associations may have been founded. But the image is not only valuable in its immediate sense in which acts as a map for the direction of movement. In a broader sense it can serve as a general frame of reference within which the individual can act or to which he can attach his knowledge. In this way it is like a body of belief or a set of social customs, it is an organiser of facts and possibilities.”

Lynch is making a very distinct link between a repository of knowledge -a body of belief as he calls it -and physical space. A contemporary example of this is NYCBloggers.com. NYC Bloggers maps Blogging activity in and around Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, encouraging bloggers to register their physical location by marking their nearest stop on the subway. Visitors to the site can navigate the map of New York, clicking on the subway lines presented as mnemonic linking blogging activity. Using this mnemonic structure, you can find out who is blogging on Canal Street, or who’s blogging at 5th Street , or in Queens or in Brooklyn.

In Platfrom SMS is used as a medium for a similar group of individual mnemonics. The train journey from London to the North is described not just a train journey but as a repository of stories and anecdotes. Train drivers tell stories about work, about how they have to be constantly thinking about the next station ahead, landmarks rushing by triggering them to think further down the line to the next station, the next curve, the next signal. For them the landscape is a series of mnemonics collapsing on themselves; each one a domino knocking a visual memory of what is further up the line.

But the drivers’ stories in Platfrom are tinged with melancholy for the rail industry. The lines that provide the visual mnemonic that enables them to do their job has been cut up and reformed through privatisation. With privatisation, a form of collective memory has been lost too. Kevin Lynch describes a similar disorientation in subjects who have suffered brain injuries:

“These men cannot find their own rooms again after leaving them and must wander helplessly until conducted home or until by chance they stumble upon some familiar detail. Purposeful movement is accomplished only by an elaborate memorisation of sequences of distinctive detail so closely spaced that the next detail is always in close range of the previous landmark. One man recognises a room by a small sign, another knows a street by the tram car numbers. If the symbols are tampered with, the man is lost.”

Platfrom makes an explicit connection between the privatisation of the railways and the corporate ownership of the cellular networks we have come to rely on so much. The cellular network, like the railway network, enables us to augment our environment with stories – mnemonics that root us in dynamic space. But who owns these memories? Are your private reveries really in a public space, or are they reliant on a private infrastructure that can be broken up and resold? If we had invested in memories in such an infrastructure, how would we find our way around then?

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

« Read the rest of this entry »

Natalie Jerminjenko’s Sniffer Dogs is a playful exploration of intelligence, agency and avatars. At the heart of the project is an inversion – the domestic face of artificial intelligence, exemplified by the recent craze for robotic dog toys, is repurposed for a more sinister task – sniffing out radiation levels in the landscape. Jerminjenko reprograms the toys with a custom chipset and radiation sensor implanted in the dog’s nose. The dog then ‘sniffs’ the air for radiation, following the scent and mapping radioactivity levels as it walks.

The contrast of these cute robot toys with their grim nuclear task gives a frisson of perverse glee. Jerminjenko uses the inbuilt system of behaviours programmed by the toy manufacturer, so the dog wags its tail and perfroms a little dance whenever it senses radioactive material. But perhaps there is an even darker concept lurking underneath. Jerimenjenko suggests in her supporting material that these domestic robot dogs have had ulterior motives all along, killing their time barking and playing with bones and smiling at their owners while secretly awaiting further instructions.

This suggests a new spin on the issue of technological agency – instead of the domesticated avatar, we have the double agent. Most technological futurology see agents as benign, as obedient slaves who only have our best interests at heart. Jerminjenko playfully suggests that a dark heart always exists, even behind the most domesticated technologies. If cute robotic dogs harbour secret alter egos, who knows what ulterior motives lie behind your PC screen, or your mobile phone?

In Bruce Sterling’s short story ‘Maneki Neko’, a similarly domestic icon – the Maneki Neko, a Japanese good luck item in the shape of a cat – is the icon for an intelligent social network co-ordinated by ‘Pokkecons’ – PDA style ‘pocket controllers’. These devices organise their owners lives around a gift economy of seemingly random gestures. Your Pokkecon might order you to buy an extra coffee and hand it to a stranger in the street, then when you return home you find a parcel has been delivered containing your favourite type of sweet. These daily activities are seen as benign to people who have woven the pokkecon into their everyday lives, but a visiting American executive who doesn’t engage with the system find herself under attack, like a foreign agent rejected by its host:

“’I know very well what this is. I’m under attack. I haven’t had a moment’s peace since I broke that network. Stuff just happens to me now. Bad stuff. Swarms of it. It’s never anything you can touch, though. Nothing you can prove in a court of law. I sit in chairs, and somebody’s left a piece of gum there. I get free pizzas, but they’re not the kind of pizzas I like. Little kids spit on my sidewalk. Old women in walkers get in front of me whenever I need to hurry.
‘My toilets don’t flush. My letters get lost in the mail. When I walk by cars, their theft alarms go off. And strangers stare at me. It’s always little things. Lots of little tiny things, but they never, ever stop. I’m up against something that is very very big, and very very patient. And it knows all about me. And it’s got a million arms and legs. And all those arms and legs are people’.”

The Pokkecon initially seems like a benign agent for goodwill, but by the end of the story, it’s more like a shadowy double agent for an immoral underworld, as if the Yakusa or Mafia had invented an IM client. Unlike the perfect intelligent agent who understands your every need so well that you don’t need to think or do anything anymore, the double agent is a threat – a shadow lurking around every corner. A double agent isn’t looking out for you, but instead gives you the eerie feeling that you are being watched, making you look over your shoulder. In their benign forms, intelligent agents exist solely to smooth your path towards a technologically seamless future. Its sinister twin, the double agent, is evidence of a complex past returning to haunt you – an uncanny doppelganger from a future that is really a half-remembered, re-engineered past.

The double agent also has an existential literary cousin in the private eye – an agent who has no life except as lived through others. Constantly trying to make sense out of an incomplete picture, the private eye is an imperfect avatar, always a few clues short of the whole story. In the classic gum shoe novels of Raymond Chandler, this anti hero is always getting in the way rather than getting to the truth, getting implemented in the crime and led down dark alleys. How much more interesting are these double agents compared to the dumb shiny world of the intelligent agents? The double agent recognises that intelligence can never be perfect, and those who hold intelligence cast a malign, powerful shadow. After all, even the best, most discrete butler always keeps a few too many of his master’s secrets.

The intelligence we are building into our technological landscapes will be cast with these same dark shadows, so lets build infrastructures that recognises that instead of hiding it beneath an illusory surface of perfection. We need to have more cute robotic dogs turned into Geiger counters. Interactive Barney needs a double life uncovering conspiracy theories instead of reading saccharine-coated bedtime stories. Lets build intelligent avatars that remind us, not of upcoming commitments, but of our past mistakes. We always think we can make the future better, cleaner, and brighter, but we never quite get there. By setting our targets lower, we might achieve something more complex, unpredictable, and truer to our own dystopian lives.

(originally commissioned by proboscis for the Private Reveries/Public Spaces project)

« Read the rest of this entry »

I gave a presentation a while ago at this event organised by Giles Lane. I promised Giles I’d write up my notes, and (only about 6 months late!) I’ve finally done it. I think Giles is publishing them in some form, but I thought I’d put part of it online as well. I was asked to comment on three research projects by artists/designers: Platfrom by Rachel Baker, Sniffer Dogs by Natalie Jereminjenko, and Hard Shoulders, Soft Verges by Shona Kitchen and Ben Hooker. The texts are ok – I’ve rewritten them quite a bit from the original presentation – so i thought I’d stick them up here, starting with my favourite, on Natalie Jereminjenko’s Sniffer Dogs. This brief essay talks about agency in intelligent systems, and pokes a tongue out at the idea that swarms or smartmobs are always benign. I structured the presentation around three themes – Agency, Accretion and Memory - so those are the titles of the essays.

« Read the rest of this entry »