psychogeography |
social fiction
Generative
Psychogeography as a tool for the construction of a hive mind.
1
When an ant colony moves into new territory, the autonomous operating
ants set out to locate food. For this task they use tactics which
are psychogeographical, even Zen-like; their organization is so that
they find it by not looking for it: they actively stumble on it by
randomly exploring the surrounding. When an ant has located food,
it maps the route from the source back to the colony with pheromones.
If there where just a hundred ants, this tactic wouldn't be very powerful,
as it will take a very long time to explore the entire territory in
this fashion: important food supplies might easily be missed. What
makes the psychogeographical foraging of the ants worthwhile is the
sheer amount of psycho-navigating ants that ensure that every single
micro-fraction of land will be visited. This tactic therefore succeeds
by the brute force by which the ant colony is able to use statistics
for it's own benefit.
When a psychogeographer-ant detects a pheromone trail it starts to
follow it, expecting to find food at the end. Pheromone evaporates
after time so a trail has to be visited regularly to remain active.
The most profitable routes will be used more often, this will cause
the increased density of pheromones on this route & therefore more
ants will pass trough it, etc. This positive feedback system gains
in precision if there is a large amount of agents/ant to run the 'calculations';
to filter the available routes for the shortest one. The collective
intelligence of the ants-colony thus emerges from the bottom up.
This somewhat rude description on the forage mechanism of an ant colony
(or termites or the open source software movement) has attracted lots
of attention over the time. In pop-science these distribute intelligence
network without a central processing unit are called 'swarm brains',
'hive minds' or (think Star Strek) 'borganisms'.
The comparison of patterns created by ant-colonies & groups of generative
psychogeographers is so remarkably similar, that it is logical to
think that it should be possible to use generative psychogeography
for the construction of a hive mind.
2
The 'urban art' phenomena which is currently appearing in the streets
of every large Dutch city might give a clue on how this could be made
to work in practise. Their stickers, the default medium for most urban
artists, tend to appear in the city in the slipstream of the daily
patterns of the artist. So when the hype had reached impressive momentum
& people unknown to each other started making stickers as well, the
stickers stopped to be isolated, visual noise & become signal, traces.
If one took the density of the stickers as the rule for a psychogeographical
experiment & began from the Utrecht central train-station one might
end up at the Tivoli, an alternative concert venue, at which entrance-door
the trace ends abruptly. If one picked up on another trace one could
easily end up at the front door of an urban artist. A visitor easily
finds the most interesting shops by following the route with is covered
thickest with stickers. In Amsterdam one can detect a trail which
goes from the Dam into the American Bookstore at the Kalverstraat
where it runs dead on the shelve with the graffiti magazines; no kidding.
Just like ants do, urban artists tend to follow each other, so increasingly
reinforcing already strong signals while other less targeted streets
will increasingly turn obsolete, (as far as the presence of urban
art concerned).
So it turns out that the urban art movement has unwittingly created
an external cognitive map, a hive mind for shopping & partying, in
which every tourist, (who shares certain interests) can plug into.
Echoing this 'urban swarm art' we will organise an experiment in which
we will try to construction a hive mind. We will use stickers as the
communicational interface for the group.
3
Like in every psychogeographical session the participants gather at
a certain place & time. Everyone is handed a different algorithm to
follow. The participants agree on a time to end the experiment & off
they go.
Generative psychogeography at it's most basic is no more than this,
now we will have to add some extra features to enable the group to
share the collected information with each other trough an external
system. For this we will use colour coded stickers; green = good,
yellow = alright & red = bad.
The task for the GPHM (Generative Psychogeographical Hive Mind) we
want to create with this experiment is a system that is able to locate
a bar where we can discuss the results afterwards. Of course we don't
want any bar but a nice one, with good music & a wide variety of beers
to choose from.
When the participants pass a bar (restaurants, bistro's & hotels are
excluded) during a stroll the added rules of the GPHM experiment come
into play. The participant checks the quality of the bar & decides
if it's worth a green, a yellow or a red sticker. The participants
resume their algorithm where interrupted by the bar with the difference
that from then on s/he will apply the decided colour of sticker in
public space. When the participant encounters another bar s/he the
coding changes with regular intervals as necessary. In this fashion
the participants walk on. When the participant encounters 2 bars opposite
of each other the bar at the right hand will be evaluated.
However, when they run into a red sticker from somebody else
they must follow this trail. This brings the participant in front
of the positively appreciated bar. If s/he agrees that it is a nice
bar s/he continues her algorithm applying the red sticker as well.
(Until s/he runs into a bad bar & the colour changes once again).
But these trails don't carry a direction so you might easily be walking
away from it, ending up at a dead end or at a rotten bar where the
red trail turns into green one. Ants encounter this problem as well
but they don't seem to matter, so why should we? When you followed
the red trail to it's most logical conclusion & can go no further
than restart your algorithm.
You stop following your algorithm at the designated time. It's time
to meet the groups again, to do this you must immediately control
the quality of the fresh cognitive map laid out by the GPHM experiment.
By now the city will be covered with different stickers all connected
by a multitude of trails. Trails which will have doubled, tripled,
quadrupled - intersected; this will produce new routes & perhaps somewhere
you will pick up on a clear green trail to a nice bar. In this bar
you will meet the group again: if the cognitive map works!
Do never think for yourself: when you follow a green trail & end up
at a bad bar which you know to be not the source of the green one
but the end point from a green trail than that's bad luck: for you
this bar will be the end point of the tour. Here you will wait for
any other psychogeographers to show up.
There are several options to determine the hierarchy of the coding
but we chose for this one: green is always higher than yellow, yellow
always higher than red. So a trail which is coded with one green is
stronger than a route which is marked with 6 times yellow. When the
rout splits, chose the strongest one. If one direction is coded with
one green & the other with one green + one red, than follow the latter.
If you are an unlucky sod who happened to not encounter a single bar
during your whole trip you must proceed to start & there try to pick
up on a signal.
If your algorithm runs dead during the time you should be following
it, head back to the point of departure & start the algorithm in another
direction. Do not apply the stickers on your way back.
In this case a GPHM might be called intelligent if everybody ends
up at the same bar.
POST
SCRIPT
on some other Hive Minds systems
---
notes
Dutch Urban Art Site: http://www.stickit.nl
For a more detailed description on hive minds & bottom-up intelligence
see Steven Johnson's "Emergence, the connected lives of ants, cities
and software"
Also an important source for the ideas behind the GPHM have been the
work of Leonel Moura (http://www.leonelmoura.com)
& Vitorino ramos (http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos)
# FORMATION OF COGNITIVE MAPS IN SEMANTIC CULTURAL HABITATS (e.g.
Digital Images): http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/ref_29.html
#
MC2 - MACHINES OF COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE: http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/MC2.html
#
ON THE CONCEPTS OF STIGMERGY AND SEMANTIC ATLAS (e.g. Document maps):
http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/ref_42.html
Java
applets simulating random walks & ant psychogeography, http://polymer.bu.edu/java/