ARCO
Part of Coming Communities organized by Peter Weibel
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Coming From
Mapping the Urban Homunculus
The future of computing is ubiquitous, aware, embedded and distributed. Increasingly, computers and devices such as RFID tags that communicate with computers will be embedded in objects throughout our environment. These skeins of computing can and almost certainly will give rise to nightmare scenarios of total information awareness by governmental, commercial, and illegal powers. At the same time, especially if we can maintain a system of protocols that is predominantly open, these capabilities can be used to give expression to personal points of view, which, in turn, can be mapped into collaborative, alternative visions to TIA. These will not be sufficient actions, but they are necessary.1
Various ideas of the public have been theorized at least since the Greeks, but whether it is Socrates confronting Callicles about mob rule in Plato'sGorgias2 or Jurgen Habermas' "public sphere,"3Walter Lippmann's "big picture"4 or Chantal Mouffe's agonistics,5 this public has almost always been intimately connected with a parallel notion of public space. From the agora to the piazza to the commons to the park, in some sense robust public discourse can only flourish in public space. In part this is an issue of audience. What makes discourse public is having an audience. With the rise of the printed press, radio, television, and now Internet-enabled communications, the potential public expands beyond physical space into the virtual spaces of communications systems.
Making Things Public
Our notions of politics have been thwarted for too long by an absurdly unrealistic epistemology. Accurate facts are hard to come by and the harder they are, the more they entail some costly equipment, a longer set of mediations, more delicate proofs. Transparency and immediacy are bad for science as well as for politics; they would make both suffocate. What we need is to be able to bring inside the assemblies divisive issues with their long retinue of complicated proof-giving equipment. No unmediated access to agreement; no unmediated access to the facts of the matter. After all, we are used to rather arcane procedures for voting and electing. Why should we suddenly imagine an eloquence so devoid of means, tools, tropes, tricks and knacks that it would bring the facts in the arenas through some uniquely magical transparent idiom? If politics is earthly, so is science... . Bruno Latour, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
The Community Domain theme stands in relation to contemporary debate about Public Domain 2.0 (Kluitenberg, 2003), but emphasizes the idea of domain from a grass roots perspective and the idea of community starting with the individual rather than the demographic. ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to engage diverse communities -- of interest, geography, ethnicity, race, andn belief. In particular, we seek projects that recognize the hybridity of communities and take transverse routes across communities. Many of the members of these communities have no specific interest in art or technology or their intersection. Yet they have stories to tell and images of the city to map. ISEA2006 and ZeroOnen San Jose are looking for projects that actively engage these audiences and help build bridges between them in ways that may utilize digital technologies, but which are not about those technologies.
Homuncular Community
In Theory of the Derive, Guy Debord quotes the sociologist Chombart de Lauwe:
an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.
This is a map by de Lauwe of all the movements made during one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement of Paris. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher, illustrating, according to de Lauwe, the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives and which, according to Debord, ought to provoke outrage at the fact that anyones life can be so pathetically limited.
Regardless of what one may think of the students life - and probably many of us can relate to a dominating triangle of home, work, and hobby at various points in our lives - metaphorically speaking, de Lauwes mapping of the students movements in Paris is her geographic homunculus.
A contemporary version of de Lauwes project is Real Time Amsterdam by Esther Polak with the Waag Society. In November 2003, participants were offered tracer-units - modified PDAs - that tracked their movements through Amsterdam, capturing in real time individuals routes as trace patterns. These traces were collated and reproduced on a map of Amsterdam - with all the geographic information removed - leaving only the ghostly traces of hundreds of routes via all manner of transportation throughout the city.
The issue, of course, with such homuncular maps is that individually, they dont create a rich image of the whole city. However, with new understanding of complexity and emergent systems, it is possible to imagine that when these simple views are combined, as with the Real Time Amsterdam project, the sum may be greater than the parts, and perhaps the map will be the legend to a more complex system that was not previously understood.
The Communicity
PDPal, a mobile, public map art project by Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow, and Julian Bleecker pursues the notion of a communicity - a city written by individuals and filtered by individuals to create alternative cartographies, both physical and emotional, which would never be found on Mapquest, yet which collaboratively map the homunculus of a city.
PDPal is designed as a new way for users to share their experiences and learn about others' experiences of, currently, the Twin Cities, and Times Square in New York. It is a mapping application that is intended to transform everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that the user creates, composed of the places she lives, plays, and works - shades of de Lauwe - as well as those she remembers. PDPal is also a new kind of virtual public art practice, bridging the physical and the virtual, the cartographic grid and psychogeography, the personal and the community, according to Scott Paterson.
I tend to think of the term public as a spatio/temporal phenomenon. It concerns the experience of collectively constructing zones where we then act out roles as citizens of that public. PDPal is a public art project because it provides two platforms that support the collective construction of these citizen zones. Inspired by psychogeography, cognitive mapping and Hakim Beys temporary autonomous zones, PDPal investigates methods of construction via dimensions beyond the latitude and longitude of geographic mapping such as time, memory and emotion. PDPal exists as a public art project in that it considers mobile devices and the web as a constantly shifting ephemeral public space generated by the expressions of its population of users a place we call the communicity.
When you log onto the PDPal website, your city or personal map is displayed, and it can also be filtered according to various criteria, and visualized alongside the cities of other PDPal users. You can connect with other users whose home places are near yours in order to see how they imagine the neighborhood you both share, in effect, or filter the maps by keywords used when entering data, creating what the artists refer to as a communicity out of everyones personal city, without losing access to the personal and the individual. With this communicity aspect - everyones individual maps can be combined and recombined, PDPal image maps the city without authority intervention; the map(s) are both individual and algorithmically collaborative.
D-Tower (2004) by Q.S. Serafijn and Nox Architects is perhaps a more realized "communicity." The esidents of Doetinchem in the Netherlands fill out a questionnaire, which contains 360 questions. Every other day, four new questions are made available. An example: "Are you happy with your partner?" Possible answers:
very much
yes
a little
no
absolutely not
not applicable
Each answer has a score, and these score can be mapped to the respondents' emotional states - specifically love (red), hate (green), happiness (blue), and fear (yellow). Their answers along with their postal codes are used to create a dynamic, emotional map of the city, showing which parts have a happier profile, for instance. A tower at the edge of town is lit by a combination of colored lights that represents the emotional state of the town that day. If it's too hateful or fearful, you might want to stay away.
Agonistics
Software artist and media theorist Warren Sack refers to the new "spaces" of conversation enabled by the Internet as "very large-scale conversations" (VLSC) and argues that "VLSC poses a fundamental challenge to all existing social science methodologies because it constitutes a different scale of conversational interaction, a scale that has not been previously addressed by social science." Two of his projects specifically address this new space, Conversation Map (2001) and Agonistics: A Language Game (2004).
Conversation Map, as its name implies, is a way of mapping - and hence understanding better - the type of very large-scale conversations that happen on the Internet, such as in Usenet groups. The software program has four components.
A network map connects message authors who respond to and/or quote one another. This is a visual overview of the connectedness of the groupa social network map.
A list of themes is extracted through analysis of the messages content.
Conversation Map performs automatic thesaurus computation on the themes to create a semantic network map of potentially connected terms in the conversation.
Finally, highlighting any of the nodes or themes highlights related information, including the conversation thread that generated the mapping, so that the user can review the original, if she desires.
One of the most interesting aspects of Conversation Map is how its thesaurus function will connect terms that are being used in very different contexts by different sides of the debate. For instance, in an analysis of several hundred messages to the Usenet group soc.culture.Palestine during August 2001, Conversation Maps thesaurus computed ｫJewsｻ and ｫArabsｻ and ｫlandsｻ and ｫpeoplesｻ as possibly similar terms.
In Agonistics the software play of Conversation Map becomes a defining aspect of the project. Sack writes:
Political philosophers have been arguing about arguing for a long time. . . . [A] third camp tries to break up the fight between the moral conversationalists and the political rhetoricians by attempting to get everyone off the battlefield and to reconsider the shape and forms of the field of engagement. . . . Political theorists like Chantal Mouffe provide us with alternatives by pointing out that - even if argument is war - war is just one form (although a deadly form) of contest between adversaries. Mouffes alternative to a utopic, moral, deliberative democracy is - what she calls - an agonistic pluralism where agon is understood as the ancient Greek term denoting "A public celebration of games; a contest for the prize at those games; or, a verbal contest or dispute between two characters in a Greek play" (OED).
The rules of Agonistics are such that conversants in a very large-scale conversation are players. A player wins the conversation (at least temporarily) by articulating the issues in such a way that not only does a broad swathe of players respond to her posts - they are in dialog - but her ideas are influential and propagate throughout the conversational network. Visually, this is represented by placing automatically assigned faces of the most influential players closer to the middle of the screen. By awarding points for agonistic behavior and building a game-like interface to a very large-scale conversation, Sack intends to both map the dynamics of the conversation and influence how it is played out.
Means, Tools, Tropes, Tricks and Knacks
In 1997 historian and critic Eleanor Heartney identified a "third way" of public art, different than the prototypical examples of Richard Serra and Scott Burton, writing:
Although they exist at opposite ends of the public art spectrum, these two examples are united by a failure to grapple with the real complexities of the public context - Serra by reenacting the old standoff between avant-garde artist and philistine public and, Burton by conceiving of the public as some kind of uniform mass unproblematically joined by common interests. . . Recently, however, a third approach has begun to surface in the work of artists like Dennis Adams, Alfredo Jaar, Kryzsztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer that conceives of the city as a locus of competing interests, ideologies, and languages, and infiltrates preexisting forums and forms in order to dramatize rather than resolve conflicts inherent in modern life.
Heartneys formulation, similar conceptually to Mouffes contested, agonistic democracy, cites the city as the public sphere, but the cybrid environment cannot be ignored - public space is both physical and virtual. I think part of the solution is in Latour's "means, tools, tropes, tricks, and knacks. At the material level of the tool, what can be done?
Maphub by the Carbon Defense League is ineresting in this regard for one simple reason. While it is a homuncular mapping project, like dozens if not hundreds of others around the world, by adding a bulletin board function onto the mapping interface, CDL has created a platform allowing direct, point-to-point communication between participants. This simple, practical, pragmatic move, shifts Maphub from simply mapping community toward a greater liklihood of enabling it.
Community Domain
In conclusion, as I begin to produce the ISEA2006 Symposium and its thematic of Community Domain, there is probably one issue that cannot be underestimated. Time. As Amanda McDonald Crowley says in a recent interview with me:
Steve: You spoke of the projects you have worked on in terms of empowerment, but not network or community building. Can you expand a bit on the potential to build virtual communities through these projects.
Amanda: I think the biggest issue is simply resources and time. When working with Mongrel, what was of primary importance was the development of new works with and by communities. To go the next step and make links across communities requires a huge amount of follow up both for the artists and for organisers. The artists of necessity often go back to their own locations. Building virtual networked communities I think takes a lot of follow up and communication, much of which really still needs to be undertaken in real time in physical follow up sessions.
As every speaker at this conference has emphasized, technology is not enough; the virtual alone is not adequate. At the same time both are necessary and unavoidable for becoming community in the 21st century.
1. Steve Dietz, "Mapping the Urban Homunculus," in ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING, edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (Design Institute, University of Minnesota, 2004) 2. Regarding the fear of mob rule, see in particular Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. 10-12 and throughout. 3. Denis Gaynor, "Habermas' Public Sphere" in Democracy in the Age of Information: A Reconception of the Public Sphere, 1996. http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/gaynor/publics.htm 4. Warren Sack, unpublished transcript of "Algorithms and Interfaces for the Presentation of Public Opinion" at Media Art Net Lectures, ZKM Karlsruhe, January 24, 2004. 5. See Patricia C. Phillips,"Creating democracy: a dialogue with Krzysztof Wodiczko," Art Journal, Winter 2003.
Kevin Lynch, Image of the City
