Hacking the Language of Crowds
Crowd Crystals on Patrol

"Men travel in manifold paths: who traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing" - Novalis

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Finding Language

There exists a steady theoretical tradition (Gustave le Bon, Elias Canetti) of looking at crowds as the self-fulfilling prophecy of a meta-species. As autonomous entities existing independent from the intentions of the individuals it is made of, consciously acting in the world. When looking for factual prove of the existence of such a proactive, instead of floral-like adaptive, intelligence, one can only start by assuming that this entity must produce some observable patterns. Patterns we can isolate and possibly decode.

Ochlology

The longstanding but obscure discipline of Ochlology (the study of crowds) has developed delightfully intuitive research methodologies to come face to face with the true essence of the crowd. Crowd researchers have been able to identify various crowd related behavioural-typologies like:

OCHLESIS - any disease or disorder caused by overcrowding
OCHLOCRASY - mob rule
OCHLOMANIA - pathological obsession with crowds
OCHLOPHILIA - attraction to crowds (also sexual arousal by crowds)
OCHLOPHOBIA - an irrational fear of crowds or mobs

Canetti, the writer of Crowds and Power and as such the undoubted caliph of the field, suggested binge drinking as a good way to experimentally recreate the impression of crowds on individuals, as the hallucinatory effect of delirium tremens is the only mental state we know that compares to the internalisation of the crowd. Current day psychogeographers have proclaimed Edgar Allen Poe's "The man of the Crowd", as the chief inspiration for many drifts aimed at finding factual insight in the way the crowd is a socio-tectonic force shaping urban experience and behaviour. The Baudelaire/Benjamin line of thought has given us the flaneur, the self-proclaimed wandering spy with a turtle on a leash at drift among a new type of crowd: multitudes of frenzied shoppers scavenging for bargains, spaced out like ants on elephant adrenaline. In our own time the flashmob shows that micro-crowds can be manufactured from scratch with viral speed with little purpose other than its own existence: the crowd as a short-lived pulsar producing a butterfly effect. But photographic documentation of flash-mobs does not fail to make us remember that fear for the unpredictable behaviour of crowds is still present among those outside it. It was this fear for the savage will to power of the crowd, that led Gustave LeBon towards ochlology, earning the credit of being the first to classify crowds in 1895:

A. Heterogeneous Crowds

1. Anonymous crowds (street crowds, for example)
2. Crowds not anonymous (juries, parliamentary assemblies, etc)

B. Homogeneous Crowds

1. Sects (political sects, religious sects, etc)
2. Castes (the military castes, the priestly castes, the working castes, etc)
3. Classes (the middle classes, the peasant classes, etc)

Canetti too occupied himself with crowd-classification in distinct topologies related to the cultural archetypes of civilisation: water, fire, etc. The need to separate the crowd from the crowds, as it were, is a consequence of regarding crowds no longer as random blurbs of people but as individuals. Considering the influence the poetic faculty has had on thinking about crowds, it is odd to find WH Auden expressing a different opinion: "A crowd is comprised of n>I members whose only relation is arithmetical; they can only be counted. A crowd loves neither itself nor anything other than itself; its existence is chimeral". In light of all this, the search for crowd intelligence leaves the metaphors of ochlologicans of yore behind and takes it all one step further. In the process taking the field even further away from Auden and the criminal notion of crowds signifying nothing but statistics. Ochlology does not equal a head count.

What is it like to be a crowd?

Visiting a busy city centre on Saturday afternoon, joining a political rally or attending a flashmob will teach you just as little about the essence of crowds, as watching the entire Star Trek series will help the radio-telescope analyst in recognising extra-terrestrial messages. Hardcore empirical facts are what is needed to be able to propose a first hypothesis about how we expect the crowd to use language. The first fact we need to determine is its anatomy. From the sounds our vocal cords are able to produce and our ears are able to hear, to the number of fingers that inform numerical systems, language is framed by the body of its speakers. Where does the crowd end and where does it begin? Does the crowd have a centre and can it hold? Our search for crowd intelligence addresses these question by singing the crowd-electro, infiltrating it without taking part, dissecting its every move with the frenzied rationality of a satanic butcher slaughtering a goat. Like plankton floating along with the sea, ochlological agents will be clustering together according to pre-defined criteria into form that is pure information.  

The Crowd Crystal

Our search for crowd intelligence will approach the crowd as a medium in which particles can be dissolved and from which meaning can be extracted by analysing the self-assembly of crystalline human agents into Crowd Crystals. Just as crystalline-rocks, diamonds or stalagmites tell about the environment producing it, the crowd crystal is shaped in response to the flux of the converging paths inside the crowd. Crowd Crystals are structures from which we can read the crowd because they are formed in response to, and are the result of, crowd agitation. A crowd crystal is like a book produced by automatic writing, telling us about the system that produced it without interference of reason. And no: putting a Crowd Crystal under your pillow will not cure you from your constipation.  

Amplifying the Crowds Murmur  

Crystals can reproduce itself by breaking into smaller pieces, the pieces continue to grow in the pattern of the initial crystal. Crystals operate like a fluxus machine for found objects, fixating chemical-alien materials that consequently cause mutations in the crystal-specific tessellation-pattern. Distorted crystalline form acts as a forensic trace. Every wave the crowd makes can be amplified by the Crowd Crystal, a Crowd Crystal formation can store environmental changes like a fossil. The crowd researcher can therefore quote with approval Roger Penrose on Cubism as one paradigm of Crowd Crystallisation: "The desire to penetrate into the nature of form, to understand the space it occupies itself and the space in which it is situated, brought about a searching analysis in which familiar contours of its surface have all simultaneously forfeited their customary opaqueness. The screen of outward appearances has been made to undergo a crystallisation which renders it more transparent." Crowd crystals are the unintentional turriphilia of the one large species on this earth not threatened with extinction.

Lost in Translation

Hacking the language of crowds is like making sense of a dream; it is the expulsion of phlogiston before a shaky hypothesis can be transformed into a solid theory easily forking into multiple branches of conflicting evangelical schools. Finding language in a crowd assumes peoples movement to be a form of communication, in some symbolic language we are part of but is not directed at us. The otherworldliness of inorganic strategies are the most easily programmable medium of crowd-surveillance.

* overview of crowd researchers at Stanford: http://shl.stanford.edu/Crowds/theorists/theo.htm