Stanford Research Institute have a quasi-commercial consulting arm. William Ralston, the VP of Consulting there, led a workshop in Scenario Planning this morning, using a fictional Telco as a context, and future WiFi opportunities as a problem.

The workshop was a pretty straightforward run through the classic scenario-building process, but could have been a lot more ‘interactive’. It was mostly lecture, where I think the group would have got a lot more out of it if he had run through more exercises. A couple of the attendees, inclduing a guy from Vodafone US and another from Accenture, seemed to be having trouble grasping the whole concept of scenario building, and I think they would have understood betting by doing, not listening… Still, it was a good refresher, and made me determined to set in process a programme of sessions for a few groups at work.

We also discussed one scenario that reminded me of a presentation I once gave on modalities in mobile use. I think it was at a pitch to a UK 3G company a couple of years ago, when they had (misguided) ambitions to develop content. I got into a bit of a spat with their head of location-based services. I was saying that users’ modalities (what they were doing) where more interesting and relevant that an absolute location. He was adamant that location was paramount, and it wasn’t until later that I found out that he used to be in the army. That would explain his preference for abstract co-ordinates over the fuzzier, but more human, ‘modality’ concept…

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Pauline from Mute magazine has kindly asked me to tidy up my rather rambling post on the FACT centre for their next issue. I ended up reducing it to just being about FACT, and not really picking up the relationships between the stages of emergent artistic practises I described and blogs/networks. It reads much better as a piece of journalism that way. I never got around to writing the second part of the article, anyway…

[note to self – never call blog entries ‘part 1’ unless you’ve actually already written ‘part 2’….]

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Matt Webb talks about our descriptions of social software as a pre-paradigm, and makes comaprisons with other scientific paradigms:

Social software is like the early days of thermodynamics, before stat mech. Or maybe pre-Newton. Or maybe early electricity: we had to make do with rules-of-thumb. Some day all of this will be filled in with limits so we’ll say: these approximations apply with this number of people; these others with this number.

I’ve always thought that descriptions of the net that focus on its topology in a way mirror euclidean geometry – its an accurate way to describe an abstract space, but it makes assumptions that start to unpick as we develop more sophisticated perspectives.

In the first stages of public understanding of the net, it was important to describe it as a space – to map its topology and the geometry in a way that elucidated its similarities and differences with ‘real’ space. As it has matured as a medium and become integrated into social behviour patterns, the dynamism of these social behaviours creates centres of ‘gravity’, and this creates warps in the abstract maps we have of the topology of the net. A non-euclidean geometrical paradigm is needed, and I think the interest in Power Laws and related network-theory has started to provide this. These geometrical paradigms factor in dynamics, so the static topology of the net is curved according to the patterns of behaviour that occur within it.

If we follow the historical development of geometry further, what would a relativity theory of the net look like? How would it help us describe the effect of social behaviour as a gravity-like force within the topology of net-space? And further still – what about a string theory of the net?

I’m out of my depth here, being a arts graduate whose knowledge of science and maths is gleaned from pop-science books read on the long commute from the south coast to london. Someone like Matt Webb is probably better equipped to know whether i’ve stretched an analogy to snapping point or not. But thats what arts grads are good at – clutching at a few narrative straws, and building a house out of them….

😉

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[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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…

I thought it worth quoting this summary paragraph in full, but please go and read the full essay:

“But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry – hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, “L’Affaire des Quatorze.” But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called “mauvais propos” or “mauvais discours”, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.”

I love the phrase ‘collective creation’, particularly in this political context…

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Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…

I thought it worth quoting this summary paragraph in full, but please go and read the full essay:

“But as the investigation broadened, the picture became more complicated. The poem crossed paths with five other poems, each of them seditious (at least in the eyes of the police) and each with its own diffusion pattern. They were copied on scraps of paper, traded for similar scraps, dictated to more copyists, memorized, declaimed, printed in underground tracts, adapted in some cases to popular tunes, and sung. In addition to the first group of suspects sent to the Bastille, seven others were also imprisoned; and they implicated five more, who escaped. In the end, the police filled the Bastille with fourteen purveyors of poetry – hence the name of the operation in the dossiers, “L’Affaire des Quatorze.” But they never found the author of the original verse. In fact, it may not have had an author, because people added and subtracted stanzas and modified phrasing as they pleased. It was a case of collective creation; and the first poem overlapped and intersected with so many others that, taken together, they created a field of poetic impulses, bouncing from one transmission point to another and filling the air with what the police called “mauvais propos” or “mauvais discours”, a cacaphony of sedition set to rhyme.”

I love the phrase ‘collective creation’, particularly in this political context…

Matt has written an interesting post about slowness in networks. He refers to an article talking about minority views and the time it takes for these views to be heard in a system, and relates that to a project he’s working on about online participation.

This reminded me of an ad-hoc workshop I led at a conference at Banff NMI last year. The conference was about networks, mobility and public space, and I brought up an idea that had been at the back of my mind for a while – Public Caches. I’d been fascinated by the distributed patterns of physical media along transport systems – for example the ‘Metro’ newspaper that is given away free at UK train stations. It seemed like such a good way to distribute information – piggy-backing on the dynamics of people’s commuting, and the letting the carriers leave the information, meme-style, lying around on trains for others to pick up. I commute for over 1.5 hours a day, and picking up someone else’s copy of the Metro or Evening Standard can be a godsend on a delayed train.

I started thinking about this in relation to PDAs, and thought of the idea of installing ‘Public Caches’ – stand alone devices embedded into street furniture or trains that people could use to upload or download content. You could send an e-book or avantgo article that you had finished with, or browse the cache to see what people have left behind.

Streetbeam have been doing this for a while with their infra-red beaming stations in street furniture, but they seem to see it as a broadcast distribution network, rather than the decentralised, P2P network that fascinated me.

Anyway, in the workshop, the group got really interested in the idea, but kept insisting that the individual public caches would also be connected to the internet, so that you could upload content remotely. I wasn’t at all interested in this, but in re-introducing a physical aspect to a digital network, something like a Human Computer Transfer Protocol, where individuals with their PDAs are the packet carriers between a number of disconnected storage nodes. Most of the group thought this was pretty pointless, as it runs against the whole point of digital networks – speed and connectivity. But there was something there that intrigued me, something about the contrary and serendipitous network of people-connected nodes that seemed valuable. These values might be:

Slowness, and the reinforcement of community
In such a network, information would have to travel physically between people’s devices in order to jump from cache to cache. The cache on your train or street corner would be full of stuff that only people who physically travelled through or visited your neghbourhood could access. This would mean it would take a long time for ‘memes’ to migrate through a network, but it would also increase local specificity, and so enhance a sense of place and community.

No economy of scale
In highly-connected networks, there is a huge economy of scale – it is as easy to send information to 1000 people as it is to send it to one. In the HCTP public cache network, there is no economy of scale, as you would have to physically travel to each Cache location to upload material across the whole network. The effort increases proportionally for each additional node if you try to broadcast information in a ‘one-to-many’ manner. On the down side, this resists the rapid development of ‘memes’ and other power-law related behaviour. On the upside, it makes it a spam-free network, as would-be spammers face a gargantuan physical task in flooding a network.

Super-connectors
Certain individuals who regularly use the caches would become super-connectors, responsible for a significant proportion of traffic between particular caches. There might be a DJ who regularly travels to Europe, downloading MP3s from European Caches and uploading them in the Caches near his home. Or there might be high degrees of connectivity between suburban Caches and ones in the city as people commute to and from work. Some interesting dynamics of exchange would develop out of this.

But why bother?

This is the question the group ultimately hit on, and I can’t say I have the answer. I was really just being perverse, and thinking about where slowness in a system might be an asset, as so much of our network culture eulogises speed. Interestingly, we came up with no examples where slowness itself was an asset, but a few of the effects of slowness were interesting. One was privacy/security – the Public Cache network most closely resembled the physical networks of drop-boxes and other intelligence/spy techniques. The process of uploading/downloading should be anonymous, like the messages left under park benches or empty trees in many a cold-war spy story. More recently, attempts to close down the financial support for terrorists stumbled on the decentralised, trust-based Hawala system that can allow the transfer of millions of dollars without a paper trail, using a trusted network of individuals.

So there seems to be some value in deliberately slow networks, but these seem to be antithetical to our current economic, political and cultural interest in digital networks. Matt’s post about slowness just scratches the surface. I think we need to reintroduce physical timescales into our thinking on networks, and stop being slaves to the artificial acceleration of our technologies. Pure information might be able to travel at the near the speed of light, but things like trust and community build a lot more slowly.

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