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In 1969 George Spencer-Brown wrote his seminal book 'Laws of Form'(1)
in which he states: "...a universe comes into being when a space is
severed or taken apart". From here on Spencer-Brown develops a calculus
not based on numbers but on distinctions. The actual operations of Spencer-Browns
mathematical system does not need to concern us here. What matters is
that when he turns the frame or the boundary into the central unit of
his system it opens up a shelter of logic in which the paradox that
- one can move from one place to another in one frame
- while simultaneously remaining in one space when viewed from another
frame
is incorporated in his calculus.
This double-edged sword of Spencer-Brown's system is also at work in
the psychogeographical study of urban space. By studying the perception
of space one is invariable making distinctions within it. Identifying
one space to have distinctions, means splicing it up into several places.
The identification of place within space will (over time) reinforce
the distinction. But the psychogeographer is not interested in miniaturized
place but in space: that is the greater picture.
All exercises in mental mapping(2) prove that the mental image of a
city is a mixture of distinctions on the large scale, while spatial
familiarity will provide some localised detail. Landmarks take on an
exceptional role in the mental landscape as they operate as anchors
of distinctiveness in the reconstruction from memory of the composition
of the city. Mental mapping is an art of memory, the psychogeographic
experiment on the other hand surveys these landmarks & it's surroundings
at face value by marking distinctions as they show themselves while
walking through the urban system, questioning the real merit of pre-fabricated
boundaries of political & cartographic administrations, usually taken
for granted.
Psychogeography is by definition a subjective activity, but by mapping
the area collaboratively & afterwards aggregating the results it is
possible to attain an accurate bolagram (boundary language) of the area.
Because the urban territory can be defined by it's distinctions, mapping
the boundaries of these distinctions simultaneously implies that by
studying the boundaries one is studying the city as a whole.
What is needed in order to be able to combine individual psychogeographical
accounts into a psychogeogram is a protocol. This protocol can take
different forms: a graphic notation system, a psychogeographical mark-up
language or a system of metadata connected to a signifier of a space
like street names, position in an arbitrary grid or GPS-coordinates(3);
something more like XML than HTML. The latter option seems most worthwhile
as it means compiling a dataset; enabling the root-psychogeographer
to pump the resulting data into different soft & walkware applications
& thus making it fairly easy to analyse it from many angles & compare
cities with one another.
2
As said: to understand the city it is enough to study it's distinctions.
The reason for distinction & that what it is distinctive with, might
differ for every psychogeographers but what matters is that they all
identify the same place as being distinct. In certain occasions however
the psychogeogram might well beget more depth by taking in account the
nature of the distinction. This is tricky business as it means making
sense out of subjective experiences of which the method of questioning
is already part of the final result. When done properly the emogram,
the map of emotive impressions, might validate the bolagram by showing
the underlying friction that produced the rift. In small groups the
psychogeographical brute force inquiry most likely will do best: every
participant names a number of first impressions for every loci selected
from the database while passing by them during the drift. The diversity
& amount of impressions per item is in itself already an indication
of it's emotive qualities.
3
The map is not the territory, but a map without regard for the actual
spatial composition of the territory it is supposed to represent remains
difficult to imagine for even the most perverted cartographic sadist.
However, maps that disobey territory are exactly what 'network cartography'(4)
produces.
In a database geographical items are stored as bits of isolated data
(like an endless list of street names) that require a pattern to become
meaningful. These patterns, created by grouping data according to the
specifications of a query, are not maps in the classical sense. When
sorted according to a connectivity matrix they are flow charts or streetgrams
that visualize the connections between the loci in the database: streets,
squares, parks, specific buildings, etc. This is a definite break with
the efforts of traditional cartography that draws from life by measuring
distance, defining absolute positions & displaying properties, variables
that in network cartography are technically optional but conceptually
redundant.
Mapping the patchwork of the street grid as a pattern of connections
enables the cartographer to organize them in relativistic space: in
the zero-G environment of information space. Maps of public transportation
systems often employ this kind of abstraction to enable smoother
navigation(5), but in network cartography this freedom from the territory
becomes absolute: orthoimagery is being replaced by aquabrowsing.
4
The psychogeogram comes into existence after merging all datasets (the
bolagram, the streetgram, the emogram, but also external data-feeds:
annotations, sensor-data, sound, etc) into one. Taking the psychogeogram
of an area means cracking the urban equivalent of the Konami cheat code(6).
With the cheat code in operation it is possible to 'play' the city with
a self-assurance that otherwise would have taken years to master. But
that doesn't mean that the psychogeographical challenge ends here: what
the psychogeogram does, is generating a new path that when followed
shows the city in all it's nakedness.
Perhaps the psychogeogram is nothing else than a current-day version
of the mappea mundi; the medieval world map that mapped the physical
realities of oceans & continents in one breath alongside all sorts of
obscure information. These wonderful maps not only educated the viewer
about the size of the earth but also about the seamlessly endless variety
of shapes within it. A typical map could include ghosts, an imaginary
bestiary & symbols of both Christian & pagan origin, that when viewed
together took the form of a FAQ, answering every question any explorer
could possibly have. As strange as this cartographical fantasia may
seem today, it can't be denied that these maps conveyed a grasp of inclusive
knowledge (not to mention a sense of adventure) that was lost as soon
as the middle ages turned into something else. The unbounded exploration
of the world that marked the renaissance, turned the cartographer from
a teller of stories into the provider of the tools needed to keep up
with overseas conquests. In a sense their maps were bolagrams too; meant
to portray the new overseas boundaries of the western empires: but here
borders depicted distinctions based on property & thus exclusion(7).
By importing our bola- & emograms into the network cartography dataset,
boundaries are not lines of exclusion, but vectorised ghosts that suggest
movement & exploration. Ghosts that are as much an integral part of
the map as once the griffon was of the mappea mundi.
Now we can return to Spencer-Brown in order to introduce more context
which would embed the psychogeogram in the even bigger frame of a map
of several dimensions at once. The most important element in Spencer-Browns
calculus is the "cross" (going from one space to another) or the "call"
(identifying a space), both mean the same. In Boolian math one space
can be one place only, so you are either inside or outside. In Spencer-Browns
system, 2 places are parts of one space: crossing the boundary between
places make 'going outside' & 'remaining inside' simultaneously possible.
That's why the following is a valuable statement
if a=b=c then a=c
In other words: divided we stand, united we are(8). Severed space is
still one space, you just have to refocus the frame. For instance: viewed
on national (another instance of an arbitrary but self-reinforcing distinction)
level, fields like ("street name" + "city") might show up differently
for the same streetname(place) in the streetgram while it's still one
streetgrid(space).(9) This changing perspective while zooming in & out
of the picture is not that novel in itself, but what makes Spencer-Browns
system so novel is that for the first time all multiple views, all contradictions
are put in one sound logical system: the microscopic, the mesoscopic
& the macroscopic are all caught in the same act.
Undivided space exists only in mathematical systems & metaphysical pondering(10).
Our space is saturated with place in all scales & dimensions. Psychogeography
(among other things) is one way to discover & to make sense of them.
Our research into the construction of a peripatetic computer(11) might
be applied in this department too. Specially designed .walk applets
can be used to adjust, analyse, validate & manipulate urban place, the
meta-walk of the psychogeogram can be .walked.
5 Cracking
the Dordrecht Cheat Code
When the 'Atelier Rijksbouwmeester' approached socialfiction.org to
cooperate on an assignment they were working on for the city of Dordrecht,
they were interested in what way psychogeography could help them to
better understand a certain area called the Hofkwartier. This invitation
resulted in a psychogeographical experiment on the 3rd of September
2003. This experiment had two goals: bringing together people who are
at this moment playing a role in the process of the future refurnishing
of the Hofkwartier & to show them like new this small bit of Dordrecht
that they know by heart. Also it was used as an occasion for data-retrieval
in order to be able to take the psychogeogram of the Hofkwartier & it's
surrounding.
The experiment consisted of 2 parts. The first was designed to take
the emogram of the Hofkwartier: all participants were asked to walk
every street in the Hofkwartier & give a minimum of 1 & a maximum
of 3 first impressions. This took 15/20 minutes.
The second experiment was designed to take the bolagram of central Dordrecht
as it enfolded from the Hofkwartier. From wherever they were participants
started their walking algorithm(12) & continued this for one hour. Every
time a distinction was perceived the place was marked on a map.
The statistics are as following: 13 psychogeographers together collected
some 120 impressions for the emogram & over 100 points on the map. The
resulting -grams tend to be very large in size but reasonable in download
time. They were made using Graphviz,
designed by AT&T research labs.
Streetgram Hofkwartier
Emogram Hofkwartier
dutch
Bolagram Dordrecht
(Frequency [number of times mentioned as distinct] on the left; streets
in grey are part of Hofkwartier, streets in Red are next to Hofkwartier,
all other streets are blue)
Bolagram -- Streetgram
Streetgram
Dordrecht in clusters
Psychogeogram (Streetgram
-- Bolagram -- Emogram )(500kb)
Dordrecht can now be probed by following the streets with the highest
frequency of marked distinctions. You can do it quick & only walk the
few streets with more than 6 bolagram 'points', or you can take some
more time & walk the streets with more than 3 distinctions. In any case
this information took 13 hours of collaborative mapping to retrieve
& resulted in a walk (the cheat code) that nobody walked but will show
you all that's is needed to see in order to understand Dordrecht in
less than one hour.
datasets can be obtained by contacting us by e-mail
all feedback welcome: info at socialfiction dot org
Version 1.0 | September 2003 | Utrecht
1 His work never received much serious attention, but
is the stuff cults are made of. Brown's system has gained a small but
committed group of followers who have developed his original work, much
of which has appeared on the internet. (see http://www.lawsofform.org)
2 Mental mapping is usually attributed to Kevin Lynch who in the 1950ties
published his seminal book: 'Image of the City'. Psychogeographers &
conceptual artists (Stanley Brouwn) have been asking people to draw
their mental map as early as the sixties.
3 The Remodelling Space project by Jo Walsh is a project like this based
on RDF/XML (see http://space.frot.org)
4 database cartography in an earlier incarnation.
5 See for instance http://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/realunderground
which skews the map of the London Underground system to the territory.
6 Every Konami game had the same cheat code: by pressing: 'up, up, down,
down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start' on the title screen resulted
in extra lives, extra levels, enhanced graphics or other features.
7 For more current day critical cartography see: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CartographicCongress
http://utangente.free.fr/index2.html
8 In all honesty our understanding of Spencer-Browns system is
not that profound, so this interpretation is most just as much our own
invention. In Spencer-Brown's credit no doubt.
9 Buckminster Fuller's One World Map comes to mind here.
10 The monad anybody?
11 .walk; the Swiss army knife of psychogeography creates an interacting
network of psychogeographers performing calculation by walking. The
goal is to create a system that can do everything a 'normal' computer
does: beating chess-champions & AI included (see http://socialfiction.org/dotwalk)
12 aka generative psychogeography. see http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography
