Loosely Assembled

Happy Halloween!

Location Aware Brain Cells: Trajectory & Memory.

An Ignite Talk at The National Geographic Society #WhereCampDC 2011 by yours truly.

If you and I know each other, consider this an invitation, if we don’t, consider this a call for submissions :)

I’m organizing a small intimate evening bike ride to visit a few rooftops in San Francisco. Unless everything falls apart, it’ll happen this coming Thursday, October 27th, 2011, starting probably at 7pm (specific invites to follow, please get in touch for more details). We have a few splendid and amazing spots confirmed but could always use a couple more. This is your chance: looking for private rooftops that can host a group of up to maybe 20 people. So far everything is in the mission and soma, but other areas are welcome.

To clarify one last point, we won’t be bringing bikes onto the rooftops, but this was just such a cool pic I wanted to include it, thanks to J.B. Davis for the pic.

Cheers!

-Jason

Here’s the outline of a totally analog, social geography game that I tested out for the first time today at #wherecamp 2011.
It turned out to be incredibly easy to operate, self organizing, relatively quick, and fun.

1. Get a group of people in a field or any open space, the more the better.

2. Tell everyone, “This field is a world map, go stand on the city where you currently live.” I found it was helpful to mark out the “latitude 0, longitude 0″ as a center point of the map (ideally you can use a Null Island t-shirt to mark this) and some kind of boundaries so people don’t go off too far (keeping them in voice shot is important).

3. After people are settled yell out the new date, and tell people to move to the city they lived in during that time. We did 5 year increments and it ended up lasting about 15 minutes, adjust as desired.

4. Give people enough time to find the cities and talk for a few minutes with the people there, and enough time to notice patterns that may be happening.

5. Repeat till someone says “hey where do i go if i don’t exist anymore?” – instruct them to stand on the “0,0″ marker

6. Keep repeating and watch as everyone gradually migrates to the pre-conception null island.

7. The game is over when everyone has moved off the map.

(thx mpanighetti for catching this great pic of the prebirth island zone)

@paigesaez suggested adding some physical artifacts to the game to help visualize and physicalize the data patterns, perhaps allowing people to physically mark the cities with mats, or stakes, perhaps to tie strings to the stakes that follow you from city to city, also adding obstacles and entanglements. Maybe just bags of sand and everyone dump a handful on each city?

Anyway, play around, try it out, meet new people and see new connections between you and your world.

In his refreshingly multi-faceted project about the gradual evolution of what we now describe as “the public”, David Cayley dives into one pair of contributing factors that really caught my attention: the institutionalization, canonicalization and therefore social elevation of common vernacular tongues (like French and English) alongside the proliferation of popular cartography. The gist of the argument is that this combination of talking about talking and conceptualizing oneself as a member of a group defined by geography and language helped bring about the idea of self conscious human agency, belonging, and citizenship, providing a new affiliation infrastructure in place of the officially defunct system of monastic and parish based guilds.

I see the shadow of a similar change happening within the current world of Geography related to the contentious neologism “Neogeography” and all the agnostic advances and changes taking place under this monicker of ill repute. In the above mentioned episode there is a story about Joachim De Bellay and his poetry gang’s manifesto on renovating the shabby provincial French language into something capable of expressing grand poetic vision. In this manifesto (Défense et illustration de la langue française) a relatively new term “patrie” (fatherland) is heavily used and advocated but the entrenched defenders of the status quo retaliated with the sentiment, “Those of us with a country (pays) have no need for your fatherland (patrie).” Perhaps the recent deletion of Wikipedia’s page on Neogeography should be taken as a similar expression of defensive self preservation by a status quo uninterested in the elevation and expansion of location based practice? “Those of us with Geography have no need for your Neogeography.”

Part of the idea behind this French linguistic renovation was that a dualistic relationship to the language needed to be in place for it to be more fully understood, analyzed, and exploitable. The language had to be spoken and dissected, internalized and externalized. This could only be achieved if the language was made foreign again, self alienated, reread. I suspect the new organic world of the Neogeographic vernacular will likewise play a role in the rebirth of spatial expression into a form more capable of elegantly handling the increasing complexity of interaction between people, places, things, ideas, and time.

Viva la Neogeography! Shoutouts to @schuyler for getting that page back up, @ajturner and @dianneisnor for their prolific and glamorous use of the term and all the others involved in thinking outside the bounding box!

The Proximeter is a prototype for a device that visualizes your social graph according to time and collision potential. I like this image of it being something you check on the way out the door, but in reality I’m sure it would be a more integrated and frequently consulted item, most likely just an app.

PLAY, a short film by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, explores a potential web of interconnected game spaces that puts the viewer’s sense of identity and context into a centrifuge.

One variant that would be cool to include in a piece like this would be showing the in-game initiation of one of these games inside of a game. This addition could construct a much richer labyrinth of interaction and agency, something much more complex than the obvious russian doll metaphor. The ability to zoom in and out between characters as part of the game play.

Although it’s fairly stimulating to watch someone else’s musing on this potential structure in linear passive form, it might be best explored as a game itself.

A Missing Wall
During the Spring of 2010, the prolific and highly collected street artist Banksy apparently painted a mural on a wall in Detroit’s crumbling Packard automobile plant. Then, soon after, it was gone. It was not buffed, not painted over, not washed away. The entire wall it was painted on had been carefully removed. It turns out that a local art gallery was to blame, or thank (depending on your take on the rest of this story), for the disappearance. The 555 gallery thought it’d be a shame if this piece vanished, so they decided they’d move it to a safer, although private, location, where they could preserve and protect it from vandalism, or worse, from the savage thump of a wrecking ball.

Whose Rubble?
Many people cried foul, describing this act as theft (some claiming the intentionally public artwork has been stolen from the public domain, other that the physical wall, although nearly rubble itself, is still private property, deserving of respect). But as Jeremy Korzeniewski points out on autoblog.com, “As much as the city of Detroit would like to do something about the the 3,500,000-square-foot [abandoned] facility, nobody seems quite sure who owns the dilapidated building.” The massive chunk of real estate seems to be in some pretty complicated ownership limbo, providing a convenient narrative mirror for the dilemma brought to the surface during this ordeal over the ownership rights of street art.

The Property Problem
Part of what makes this topic difficult and interesting to articulate is the fact that much street art is done, in part, as protest against the perceived tyranny of private property. In some cases being thought of as a form of civil disobedience, breaking the rules to change the rules, introducing the world to a vision of what could exist. In the case of street art, the vision is a world decorated and annotated with the hopes and dreams, criticisms, humor, celebrations, mysteries, and challenges of the people who walk, work, and live in those streets. A world where creativity and expression are celebrated. A world that acts as a mirror into the collective hearts and minds of the society itself. Art that acts to negate the aesthetic rights of property owners in favor of the aesthetic rights of those most exposed.

Therefore, where private property is respected and protected, street art can only be seen as having a negative value, as being a criminal activity, and as being inherently corrosive to the social fabric of our cities. But, from a perspective where private property is seen as part of an infrastructure of exploitation and control, a grass roots reinvention of one’s own surroundings is seen as an empowering expression of hope.

Many graffiti kids are not necessarily steeped in the revolutionary political interpretations of their intuitive acts of rebellious art. In fact their personal tendencies might very well lean heavily in the opposite direction once the carrot of financial reward begins to grow in the fertile soil of urban mythology. How much does it cost to convert an act of protest into an act of support? How much does it cost to transform a critic of private property into a zealous defender of it? How much can your art crime be worth?

The complexity of such questions creates a rich platform of diverse opinions upon which to build powerfully controversial social experiments. It is therefore not uncommon for some to consider the [array of situations around the] Banksy brand, and others, as a kind of media theater delivering high potency doses of conceptual and civic irony to an unsuspecting audience throughout the socio-economic tapestry of our cities.

Susan Farrell of Art Crimes states it clearly when she says, “I have no idea how Banksy feels about this wall and its fate, but it’s important to consider that Banksy might actually be a performance artist doing street-media theater and not a stencil artist doing walls.”

Recursive Violations as Creative Context
While the actions of the 555 gallery is being defended as benevolent, some art thefts are simply done as selfish acts and the irony is unintended, as in this NYPOST article about actor Adam Shulman stealing a piece in broad daylight.
.

This one is a detailed account of someone trying (but failing) to steal a different Banksy wall. Apparently they got this far, then had to leave, but when they returned to finish the heist, someone else had scored the booty. The blog post is a plea for the second thieves to compensate the first thieves who did most of the hard physical labor.

But other times the irony is front and center, as with Property Games T-Shirts that feature collages made from photographs that claim copyright of images of other people’s graffiti on other people’s property. A theft of a theft of an art crime.

Then we have a community blog for people to post stories and examples of artwork being stolen, copied, misappropriated, etc. It’s wonderfully called You thought we wouldn’t notice. They have a section dedicated to intellectual property theft of graffiti.

Authenticity
After the city of Melbourne apologized for painting over yet another Banksy stencil, a slew of “copies” started cropping up but were discredited as fakes. How was the authenticity of the original one established? Authenticity also has to be considered when you realize people are selling some of this original (stolen, found, gifted) artwork for non-trivial sums of money (at the time of this posting, the Jamaican Banksy wall was back on the market for $50,000).

At least this rat is blunt enough to give us the cold hard truth on the question of authenticity!


(img by cidsoe)

Ephemeral Isn’t Synonymous with Unwanted
Another element of the active critique on banal architecture that graffiti manifests is one of stasis vs ephemerality. The built environment is created by artists who move from one project to the next, availing themselves of new challenges while not quite realizing the long term periods of inflexibility their buildings impose on those who are not fortunate enough to partake in a continually changing landscape of possibilities. There may be something deeply seeded in humanity that expects, craves, even needs, a certain level of change within our physical environment from time to time.

Graffiti artists quickly adjust to the fact that their work is not permanent, that it may be buffed or covered with another piece at any time. Some might presume that acceptance of the ephemeral nature of their work should automatically be interpreted as a general lack of interest in its fate. This presumption underestimates the subtle intuitive intelligence that any true artist has for the arcane contextual nuances within their particular practice. Basically, these guys are making this work every day, of course they think about the temporary nature of their art, and of course those realizations and thoughts seeps into the work itself on some level. If they are building examples of a new kind of world, it’s one that fluctuates and glistens from moment to moment with the changing interests and thoughts of the collective social entity that inhabits it. Moving this kind of work as an intended act of benevolence results in a preserved specimen captured from the wild and provides little more that a shallow spectacle, reinforcing the encroaching dominion of a culture which seeks to understand others through the analysis of decontextualized relics.

This work is more that just the visual image. We value the visual portion of the work because we live in a culture that has commoditized visual iconography, but we fail to value the context and site-specificity because we are not yet able to commoditize location and context. If the 555 gallery had some way to remove and preserve the entire area in which the discussed mural was originally situated, I’m sure they would have. As we stand today, context is simply something we are willing to forfeit. But context is so much more that just the physical surroundings of a piece of street art, it also includes the contemporary prevailing social and economic climate, the legal and political landscape, the fickle vernacular interpretation of short and long term historical destiny, the time line of ancestral artwork on that particular wall, the life and circumstances of the artist at the time of, and since the creation of the artwork, as well as so many other interconnected layers of information. There aren’t current methods available for preserving or even recognizing all the pertinent contextual forces that come into play for the formation of this type of artwork which uses context as a core part of its concept.

Attention Economy
While some interpretations may attribute ideological ardor as the primary drive to produce ephemeral street art, others point to the more fundamental human desire for attention and appreciation. Putting artwork on the streets, with all it’s dangers and pitfalls, may simply provide the quickest and most efficient route to artistic recognition. After all, the streets thrive without curators, committees, or resumes. The streets offer direct access to a huge variety of eyeballs.

All this talk about assumed motivation is here simply to demonstrate how a variety of responses could emerge to the guerrilla collection of guerrilla art, and how the experience of having your own artwork stolen could be a gigantic ego boost in the quest for validation and relevance. If your art is already on display for free, and people still feel the need to snatch it up, to hoard it, there is surely some trickle of pride coming along as well.

Evolving Values
Vandalog takes a rational and balanced view of these topics, bringing into perspective a very important idea: in the future, people will think of these issues very differently.

Will new economic forms evolve around these questions?

Edge cases sometimes become normative.

[update]
It occurred to me a day after posting this that I may not have clearly articulated something critical about all of this debate. So many of the arguments around street art, rights, property, preservation, context see to take it for granted that there is actually such a thing as a “right answer” or a “right position”. While listening to a fascinating lecture by historian Frank Gavin I was struck by the pragmatic way in which so many very difficult decisions need to be made. The notion of what’s “the right choice” is incredibly flexible depending on the myriad of pressures and obstacles that relate to the outcome and impacts of the decisions. One choice impacts many other choices. The road to a functioning and satisfying future doesn’t depend so much on what’s best for the current players in the direct present, but on the complex web of interactions that those choices are apart of, now and in the future.

Maybe it’s not about “what’s right” but about “what’s best”.

We are in a period of mass-market place ambiguity.

Places drift, jump, and fade, physically. Some places have a much higher propensity towards noticeable drift than others, but location, in general, is not stable. The geo-web of the past few years has mostly ignored this as a low impact edge case. The era of the Google Maps API dramatically boosted developer productivity and interest within the geo space because it simplified and lowered the barriers to entry, while simultaneously reinforcing a few paradigms that find easy adoption within rapidly moving startups and business, ideas like “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and “solve for the 80% use case”. Startups are constantly faced with a to-do list that can never be 100% complete, but these catchy ideas formalize and automate the painful process of deeming some desires unworthy of your attention. Since 80% of the places that most people are searching for, or reviewing, or visiting feel relatively immune to change (at least in the “several years” lifespan much of today’s software is being designed for), we have very quickly built up a stiff and rigid framework around these places to facilitate the steep adoption of these now ubiquitous geo-services. The rigidity is manifest in the ways that place drift isn’t handled, places are assumed to be permanent.

This curve based market selection exists everywhere. Architectural guidelines and building codes are designed for average sized humans, websites are designed for the most commonly sized screens, even health care is designed, to put it another way, to ignore a certain subset of problems. I’m not making the case that we should solve every problem, every time. If we tried to solve every problem, we’d likely solve none. What I’m trying to articulate is that we are at a point, in the geo-web industry and as end users, where we can choose to keep building a concrete framework for the places that generally don’t move, and just write off the anomalies as being in the jurisdiction of specialists, or we can start building a new flexible framework that understands and incorporates place drift. If we accept that all places drift, we don’t have to divide the world into places that are easily indexed and those that aren’t, we can more closely match the human experience of flexible place allocation.

The illusion of stasis ignores the fundamental reality that every place eventually drifts, jumps, moves, or vanishes. It’s not the responsibility of any one startup to design, use and evangelize a structure intended to last for decades instead of years, but it might be an opportunity. Or it might fall into the realm of proposals that have to swim against such a strong incumbent current that it is thought best to form some sort of committee, or standards organization.

One tectonic shift that is going to press up against the old concrete framework currently in place is the explosion of real-time geo-data. This shift is forcing designers and developers to shoehorn the 4th dimension into their schemas by attaching the tweets, road reports, and sensor data with flexible glue. This is like building earthquake proof penthouses on top of old unreinforced brick buildings resulting in a Winchester Mystery House. I guess i’m advocating for both new building standards as well as seismic retrofitting of the 4th dimension into the legacy geo-data that is still being used from previous eras.

Ideally the new standards would not just implement a few more date fields (although perhaps this is all that can be expected of retrofitting), but should address issues similar to what KML’s “Level of Detail” concept can address (when you have a lot of data in a region, some is better suited for visibility from afar, while other is better seen up close). It should also be able to deal with transposition (where the temporal continuity connects various locations of a place). Finally, such a new standard should be able to address the flexible and permeable, and pixelated nature of borders and boundaries. The defined location of a neighborhood breathes, it’s alive, it’s a collection of diverse perspectives, each of these perspectives having their own native shelf lives of validity and relevancy.

I’m not just talking about when a dry cleaner moves to a new address, but also addressing the NYC’s WTC past and future, the shifting of Chilean cities from earthquake, the addition of a new wing to a museum, or when an entire mansion is stolen and relocated across state lines.

This all brings me back to the previously described idea of a scatterplot approach, where the notion of canonical location data is traded for an ongoing changing flowing morphing stream of scatterplot location data, a “location field” if you will. This field is a living entity, a wave, that adjusts instantly, and represents the pulse of data available for, from, and about a place. Places are patterns that coalesce, they emerge from, and superimpose over, other places of various size and scope.

Places are like people, we change over time, the atoms in our body are completely regenerated every N years, we learn and forget tons of things, our relationships grow and break, we migrate to whole new sets of peers, yet we somehow maintain some sense of continuity. This hybrid form of change and stasis can and should be integrated more into the digitization of our environments.

Maybe places are more about time than location.

You have a checkin tool as part of your webservice, don’t be embarrassed, everyone does. You also don’t have to be shy about the fact that you are passing the user’s lat long over to Google, Yahoo, PublicEarth, or even foursquare, for a list of potential places they might be at, because, let’s face it, these place databases are not just growing on trees. It would make sense for you to pay attention to the coordinates sent over and which place the user ends up picking as “the place they are at”, to build up a user generated scatter plot of GPS points that might be used in future candidate offerings, but sometimes we all simply depend on the longevity of benevolence from our chosen API providers, no harm in that.

I think the only harm done in this situation would be to continue to assume that a Place has a singular, static, defined relationship to a cartographic framework. If we aspire to understand what Places people are talking about, as they connect to these places with a growing variety of devices and standards, we might do well to move from a vector based polygonal model to something more pointillist.

If we can establish an array of coordinates as the historical collection of points that have been used to define, or to reference, a Place, no matter how askew they may be from our sense of the real boundaries, then we can actually start talking about the same Place, regardless of each tiny, singular, gadget or app specific definition. This methodology is conceptually related to the common notion of subjectivity, in which we learn to understand from early childhood that a toy, or a person, or a Place, looks different from different perspectives, or as seen through different media. We eventually learn that we are talking about the same kitten, even if your photograph looks different from my drawing. The concept of the kitten is just a collection of all the successful references to the physical object. Even in the act of trying to capture, or document, that actual objective nature of the kitten, we are simply creating more subjective references to it. The need, and ability, to objectively define and describe a physical object only becomes increasingly ridiculous and futile the more one tries. The same can be said of Places. The harder we strive to objectively define exactly where a Place is, or what happens at a Place, or what category a Place falls into, the more we realize our measurements and descriptions add to the collage of data they are hoping to clean up.

It’s time to put down the minimalist fallacy of Place Objectivity, and embrace the polymorphic cloud of the Social Scatterplot for Subjective Place Definition.

photo from gps insight