Automatic Writing

I want to re-evaluate the project interface, in terms of the software interface and the characterisation of the South experience, not being so reticent about it's framing of writing as a type of spiritual/self-exploration and performance, (of a processed based 'identity'). I'm building a detailed 'paper computer' to evaluate with a broader range of people. Opening the project to multiple interpretation(by others) has reminded me of some of my original intentions for the egg and the book, which were poetic and magical.. not so mechanistic

ps this is our abstract for the forthcoming inter-arts symposium in Berlin:

Phi Books: Research territories through narrative.
Phi books is a paper based on a collaborative project between Alexandra Antonopoulou, a designer and children’s book writer-illustrator, and Eleanor Dare, a computer artist. The Phi books use the house as a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration. The two researcher-artists use narrative, making and performance to explore how borders, walls and doors facilitate collaboration. It interrogates the difficulties and pleasure of collaboration between different disciplines working within the same research field.  The project uses, stories theory, drawings, maps, charts, found objects, photographs, dreams, spies, keys, overheard conversations and meta-critical observations.

The artists are going to present their interpretations on the project as a paradigm of joining their individual practices and ending up with a common result that celebrates both collaboration and individuality. Bringing different parts from their disciplines Eleanor writes in an algorithmic way, deploying computational processes while Alexandra proposes a mixed way of writing. She uses fairytale and storytelling elements, odd situations and secrets, families, cats and speaking plates of grapes mixed with theoretical references to outline the potential of using narrative as a form of academic writing and the promotion of knowledge in a research setting.
The project is a response to the inadequacy of historical models for both theorising and practicing creative research collaboration, and to an apparent lack of theoretical mobility across diverse disciplines. Both papers emphasise the co-constitution of theory and practice.

We are both pretty excited about it, because we are 'performing' our work, and because we have made our paper into a type of play script,which was a completly unexpected and shocking departure from any previous perceptions we held about our work together in the Phi Houses.

3/10/09

Its been a while since I've written this research journal, though not for want of research; it was a very intensive summer on that front, completing three thesis chapters -on The South Book, Agents and Agency, and my methodology, as well as completing two papers, one of which (written with Alexandra Antonopoulou) has just been accepted for a conference in Berlin, an exciting way to start the new academic year. Alexandra and I will be 'performing' our books - (our algorithmic Phi books), which we wrote betwen April and August. I know what that means pragmatically, in terms of what we are actually going to do, but I am now thinking about what that means philosophically. Having attended two of Sarah Kember's lectures so far this term, I think its confirmed the idea that performing our books emphasises their processual form - this can be linked to a Bergsonian methodology, following his clear 'rules' and as part of a larger interest in process philosophy and notions of the intra-active. ( 'Bergsonian intuition then consists in entering into the thing, rather than going around it from the outside. This “entering into,” for Bergson, gives us absolute knowledge. In a moment, we are going to have to qualify this “absoluteness.” In any case, for Bergson, intuition is entering into ourselves – he says we seize ourselves from within – but this self-sympathy develops heterogeneously into others. In other words, when one sympathizes with oneself, one installs oneself within duration and then feels a “certain well defined tension, whose very determinateness seems like a choice between an infinity of possible durations”'http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#3) But I'd also like to connect it to a Buddhist notion of Dharma, or practice, also a self-reflexive form of investigation, that, like Bergsoniam philsophy values insight or intuition, and temporality - the certainty of change as much as the spatial, which, in its stereotypical chracterisation can avoid the notion of the dynamic or relational nature of experience.

06/07/09

In the middle of writing a chapter on agents and agency, so no mental capacity left to write a silly old blog. But plenty of energy for documenting my robot collection:

17/06/09

Models and 3 dimensional stories continue in an artists' book collaboration with Alexandra Antonopoulou...this week we have broken through into the fifth room, in these strenuous and intricate narrative excavations. Perhaps I have been cursed like Howard Carter because of these disturbances? I am being pursued by a Blank Dog with the unreadable face of Anubis himself. Tropic X-Rays reveal there are certainly only six rooms, at least on the ground floor, so we are nearly complete with this level. We may just start again, scratching at the surface over and over until exhaustion sets in.

20/05/09

Machinka can now investigate the core components of the South book and egg which are its algorithms or activities. These are defined by the processes she has just undertaken. Depending on her ‘type’, and on the contextual factors detected by the software, each reader’s experience will follow a unique path. The algorithms centre upon a journey to the mystical Axis Mundi or South East Pole.

Below: A triumphant finale, the South East Pole discovered.

19/05/09

Currently putting together a user persona, showing how the South book, egg and software work together in real life scenarios, with a real user etc etc, this involves following a specimen human being around the South Bank and observing their interactions, interrogating them and getting them to write and take notes and photos, this strikes me as a good way of conducting research, actually get someone else to do it, it reminds me a lot of my past career as a market researcher, only this is more interesting as it isn't about margarine or financial services...

14/05/09

Dâr:In this scene we will walk around the South Bank area of South London following the diagonal lines and circular configuration of the Golden Canon of book design, here combined with Rosarivo's construction. My schema has been tried and tested over decades. It utilizes Rosarivo's construction by division of the location into ninths and a fusion with Tschichold's figure thereof. The curiousness of my method is its synthesis with reflexological mappings of the feet and hands. As we saunter let us consider how these mappings relate to our own organs and biological systems and to each of the actors in the circumambulatory drama that will now unfold.

[Readers should now cast actors from Street View, try to consider ‘talent versus temperament, some actors require greater "pampering" and stroking, while others will nail their lines on the first try.. If someone shows signs of making excessive demands, or not being a quick study, look elsewhere to fill the role’†. Here are some actors we observed earlier; all via Street View on Southwark Bridge. From left to right characters B, C, E and F:]

Dâr: What will characters A, B, C, D, E and F make of this? Naturally you are A in this production and I am D, my mother’s very own Daleth. A door or a fish depending on which way the wind is blowing, but what characteristics will you assign to the others? In my experience the letters found in names are a surprisingly reliable source of information about the personality traits of their owners. My own name, Dâr, might also be expressed as or der. Over the years a few astute physicians have remarked on the coincidence of Dâr and der. Der is the boundary of a set in topology. What chuckles this has raised in light of my own psychological problems with edges and endings. Today we will walk the boundary of the boundary or the der or ders. Before we proceed I recommend you undertake a thorough examination of the letters that represent each member of our cast.

† From ehow.com, advice on casting actors: http://www.ehow.com/how_2304540_cast-actors-crew-low-budget.html

13/05/09

Dâr: My sainted mother was a scolder. They say mothers are divided between kissers and scolders, so she was hardly in a minority, but this location, I have to say, is a father site, not a mother; it may be different for others (there are countless variables involved) but every location has a parental aspect; Look at the colour of that concrete, wet mushroom , that’s no mother’s colour, not to me anyway, it has too much yield in it, its opinions are understated.

[walk the Golden Canon walk, from the bottom left corner to the top right of the Verso (left) page, you will face obstacles but these must be navigated using your own judgement. As you walk try to work out if this route represents (or feels like) a mother or a father location. Write your reasons and responses in the area below]

Reader: [write your own lines here]

Dâr:The Recto is fatherly, like my right foot; According to reflexological mappings we have the presence of our parents written on our bodies, there’s no getting away from them, even after death. I could take off my socks and show you the calluses to prove it – my left hands and feet are mapped to the mother as the right are mapped to the father. Books, I have always suspected, are the same. I am sure we could devise a blind test to prove this. My toes, you will see, are north of 4 and south of 6, a handy fact to hold onto on rocky days. You should check out your own toes sometime, the mechanisms of operation defy even the sturdiest germ theories of disease, and yet there they are, plain as day, in the physician’s tomb at Saqqara, I’ve seen the evidence with my own eyes, including several scenes of a medicinal character.

[Now you are entering the recto, (or right hand) of the Golden Canon, walk from the top left corner to the bottom right of the page, you will face more obstacles, these must be navigated using your own intuition. As before, you should try to work out if this route represents (or feels like) a mother or a father location. Write your reasons and responses in the area below. Describe what you encounter in efficient yet effective prose. Show don’t tell or tell don’t show according to your verbal proclivities]

Reader: [write your own lines here]

09/05/09

08/05/09

07/05/09

06/05/09

05/05/09

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03/05/09

02/05/09

01/05/09

30/04/09

29/04/09

28/04/09

27/04/09

26/04/09

20/04/09

Sad to hear that J.G Ballard has died, not just sad, actually really sad. I saw him talk a year or so ago, and although he was clearly frail, like William Burroughs in his last years, he was still enthralling and had a lot of critically relevant and significantly subversive things to say. Not least of all about environmental catastrophe and spurious social values. His description of growing up in a Japanese internment camp was completely cliche free and oddly uplifting, he said that children still engaged in play even in the midst of such a bleak situation, it seems to apply to 'creativity' in adulthood as well, which he exemplified despite his advanced prostrate cancer. "I have - I won't say happy - not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"----- This is a description of what the word Ballardian means: BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments. from, a site called "Ballardian.com": > link to Ballardian.com>>>

05/04/09

The fictional character Ivan Dâr experiences a bewildering lack of groundedness, loosely based on a condition known as ‘legendary psychasthenia’, in which people cannot locate themselves, or differentiate themselves in relation to the wider world, which one might conceptualize as the environment beyond the boundaries of their own skin. Roger Caillois in 1935 described this condition as one in which space becomes an annihilating agency acting against subjects: Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e., what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species (Caillois, 1935). The South book attempts to reconstruct some of these experiences and assimilations to space, both in its structures and in the exercises readers are invited to take part in. At times the book deliberately aims to bewilder or undermine its own readers, hinting at the possibility of space as an annihilating agency working against them, generating a hostile space by means of its aesthetic strategies and by asking readers to undertake paradoxical or impossible tasks, lying to them, issuing contradictory instructions or leaving exasperating lose ends. Andrew Haslam in (2006) describes the way in which the design of books can facilitate ‘emotionally ‘repositioning’ the reader’ (Haslam, 2006 : 26). In South the visual language of the book is deployed to communicate and, indeed to manipulate readers, as much as its written language. Concepts such as ‘chunking’, ‘mimicry’ and ‘self-similarity’, explicated in for example Lidwell, Holden and Butler (2003), and drawing upon the Gestalt theories of Max Wertheimer have been used within the formulation of South to generate meta-narratives through non-verbal means. These are narratives of dislocation and spatial ambiguity that reflect the wider concerns and fictional themes of the South project.

23/03/09

This is the gist of what I'm writing about this week:

Psychometric Evaluations:

A significant part of my practice has involved the construction of evaluative processes and procedures, both in analogue and digitally mediated forms. I have also researched the historical context of such evaluations and critical approaches to the notion of personality assessment. The analysis of psychometric tests relates closely to my research into the notion of the subject, expanded upon in Chapter 3. The notion of psychometric evaluations has its roots in the evaluation of intelligence (associated in particular with the eugenicist Sir Francis Galton) but later also evolved into the investigation and evaluation of ideas around personality traits, the notion of psychological types, such as ‘extroverts’ and ‘introverts’. My own interest in Psychometric tests stems from my childhood exposure to many forms of psychometric test designed by my Grandfather, who was an educational psychologist involved professionally in the psychometric evaluation of children. The procedures he designed were often tested on myself and my siblings and had the quality, at least in my own mind, of games, a connotation that I have clearly not abandoned over the years. The South software and book frames subjective evaluation as a form of mutable, multi-linear fiction and performance. This engagement with subjective evaluation is also intimately connected, within my work, to the notion of the site. South proposes a mutable form of both subjectivity and site specificity. The site in South is formulated by specific situations and corporeal sensations, the book therefore emphasises both situated and embodied interaction. Many of the evaluative procedures involve the senses, and indeed the progression of the evaluations through the five senses is part of the underlying narrative of the assessment process. The emphasis upon sensory and embodied interaction in both the South book and software also enforces the central notion that technology does not exist in isolation, either from the cultural or physical spaces in which we live and work. The question of what constitutes knowledge or intelligence in these tests is also challenged (it is also an important question in the context of claims about intelligence and computing), what, the book asks, do we mean by intelligence? Are there other types of intelligence or knowledge that computers and conventional research processes can deploy, such as:


• Embodied knowledge

• Tacit knowledge

• Situated knowledge


The processes presented in the South book and software are designed to facilitate an exploration of these questions within and through the South Bank location. My own subjectivity is also posited as a site or meta-location, resonating throughout every aspect of the South project. The book and software therefore aims to understand individual subjects and sites, but in order to work with these concepts I have had to investigate what the notion of a subject and subjective experience means. My research, (including lived experience) suggests that the notion of both the subjective and the subject is politically fraught and philosophically unstable; as such it is highly conducive to a critical artwork that capitalizes on instability and contingency. The dynamic, mutable and networked nature of the subject framed by my research is highly suited to a computational form, and can, I suggest, support a meaningful use of computational strengths in relation to books, augmenting them with dynamic qualities that one could argue analogue books do not (literally) have. The notion of the site is also posited as a similarly complex configuration, one that I investigate at length in chapter 4.

14/03/09

Survived the rigours of yesterday, (the date that dare not be written) despite cycling down Lewisham High Road wearing green. Those who dare win, blah blah blah. I'm going to write a chapter now about the South book, as suggested by Helen and Zimmer during my upgrade last week, I'm also building a rudimentary 3D model of the South Bank to elucidate the relationship of space and site to the notion of the South book, sounds like bullshit put that bluntly but I'm hoping it will represent an eloquent interrogation of the book form by the time I've finished...

06/03/09

Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fool’s boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks (Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilisation).

05/03/09

Got through my upgrade in one piece, what a relief. Helen and Zimmer both thought it would be a good idea if I write an early chapter on the South book, can't believe I didn't think of that myself, but it really makes sense, it would ground the thesis and also make all the subsequent, more theoretical writings seem clearly relevant. I guess it wouldn't have to be a huge chapter, maybe 5000 words or so. Helen said it would be an enjoyable chapter to write, I said writing about my own work seems somehow too pleasurable or easy compared to more theoretically centred writings, but that is a silly attitude, almost a sort of Puritan work ethic. Zimmer spotted a stupid error I made, referring to Spinoza's irreducible monad, instead of his Monism, got him mixed up with Leibniz, grrr, glad he spotted it before my final examiners. He also suggested turning the thesis title around, to 'Navigating Subjectivity: A Psychometric Text Adventure', It does sound snappier that way round! Helen also noted typographic inconsistency in my bibliographic references. All in all it was a much more supportive experience then I had expected, I feel buoyed by it and quite re-energised by the feedback. Its a good way to finish the term.

01/03/09

28/02/09

Haven't written this for ages as I've been busy with other things,such as preparing for my upgrade exam on Thursday and researching my next chapter. But today I went to Kinetica 2009, and was hugely proud to see the work of four students from the MFA Computational Studio Arts: Ryan Jordan, Nanda Khaorapapong, JeeHee Lee and Artemis Papageorgiou. The atmosphere was very energetic and their worked looked great, there were also loads of visitors. Naturally I can say without any hesitation that their work was head and shoulders above everything else....

06/02/09

He was systematically undermining his own rational view of the world.

at first it had been a carefully controlled experiment but now he had lost all sense of the independent variable.

in fact he couldn't remember what a variable was, something that changed, but everything changed all the time so it seemed like an

unhelpful description.

01/02/09

30/01/09

Images from Ivan Dar's Journal 1965 .

Ivan Dar in front of his oological dwelling, 1965. Note the more conventional zonohedran accomodation of this intentional community in the background. Dar's full beard is his only concession to 'hippiedom', he is still wearing a full suit and tie, despite the blistering Californian heat. Link to review of T.C . Boyle's Drop City >>>> a fictional account of life in this community.

26/o1/09

More documents recently discovered:

Dr Pilkin 's notes 1951:

Upon first reading Dar's Oological ramblings almost all apprehension or discourse anaysis seems

elusive. These are, one concludes, the disorganised meanderings of a fundamentally agitated man.

And yet, perhaps upon engaging in a second or third reading one is reminded of Dar's once lucid

invovlement in avian palaeooölogy, and later in the industrial processes of egg production

during his rather mysterious ten months in Manchuria. In light of these feint traces of intellectual

coherence we should perhaps ask ourselves what the single axis of symmetry signifies for this

profoundly disoriented man? His writing alludes to issues of both confinement and utopian

idealism, and the sense, (despite the testing experiences he has endured) of a deep seated belief in

a form of intentional community.* Perhaps that is what he was seeking amongst the Jurchen

peoples? When I ask him about this in a our daily meetings there is little in the way of response. He

appears to be in the midst of an intersubjective white-out. This is strangely at odds with his ability

to write, albeit in such highly convoluted paragraphs.

This oval city is so hard on the outside, I can hardly bare the effort of leaving it. Before you even get to the outer casing you have to wrestle with the membranes. And yet, the cylindrical symmetry along the long axis is so elegant I cannot justify the impulse to leave. If it floated, of course, we would be ill advised to stay in this city, but a force we cannot name has kept its air cell at optimum size. This is a double A metropolis, even its largest end stays respectably submerged. They say chicken breeds with white ear lobes lay white eggs, so what can we assume about the original planners of this perfect statelet? White, brown and red lobed architects and engineers must have been gathered in their thousands, to achieve perfect pigment disposition. They say there are cities with unsynchronized production cycles, double yoked, ususally immature in every aspect. Terrible fights are common in such cities. There are even yokeless cities! But I do not care to think about them. Perhaps I will write more tomorrow. If there is one thing I have learnt from my boyhood oological fascinations it is the proper and fastidious release of core rescources, of course I am alluding to calcium and the generation of, for example, the 7500 pores of a domestic hen's egg.

* Dr Pilkin's reference to intentional communities is astute, betwen 1965 and 1966 Ivan Dar lived in the Drop City commune in South East California, indeed, he constructed his own egg-like dwelling or zonohedra, using recycled car bodies.

link to submission for VT>>> 'The Boolean Logic of the Thames'

Disorientation at this point. I've pretty much got my materials ready for upgrade, so not sure whether to keep going over those in my head (to be ready for interrogation) or do what feels logical (ish) and move on to start writing chapter 4 of my Thesis. I'm not very good at multi-tasking, so don't want to do both; as a result it feels like a momentary paralysis is setting in. It's not an entirely novel feeling for me, so best to just do what I normally do and wait and see what happens. The next chapter is going to focus on what an author is and that whole issue of agency in the reader-writer nexus (don't yawn), it can't be ignored, it would be like an elephant in a room or a heffalump in a matchbox or whatever image of unfeasibly tacit awkwardness springs to mind - a juggernaut on a slinky spring. It's hard to be peremptory when the sky is unremittingly gray. Hibernation is the obvious option, we all know it makes sense...

o1/01/09

The background colour is sampled from a recent cctv image of the Thames, the number of action verbs released from the arrayList is defined by the height of the Thames at London Bridge on any given day. Next stage is to construct sentences in the same way. Then work out a rationale for it... only joking. At last I've finished my second drafts for the two main chapters I'll hand in for upgrade. I might have made everything worse with my amendments but at least it's kept me out of trouble over Christmas. Not quite sure why the colours in the browser are so differant from the colours when I run it through the IDE, hmmm, I havent had that problem before, the image above is pink in the browser, as if the spirit of Barbara Cartland has risen out of the Thames dredge. ...Oh just sorted it, something to do with Filezilla. The image below is a screen shot from my program for getting the tide data and sampling the colour of the Thames . There isnt a CCTV image I can intercept of the River at London Bridge (that I know of), so this is the nearest clear shot of the water, I think it's the most beautiful cctv image (second only to Streatham's Dip).

Second Draft of Chapter 3: A Psychometric text adventure: navigating subjectivity along the South Bank. December 2008

Second Draft Consolidated literature review: December 2008

31/12/08

Last blog of 2008, just wanted to put link to this to remind myself about it SLUICE >>>>>>>

19/12/08

18/12/08

Finished the term on an enncouraging note, despite my nightmare the night before my tutorial in which I was told how rubbishy everything was, compared to that anything would be positive. I've got a provisional date for upgrade: 4th March 2009. So am now getting stuff into shape but also grappling with this issue of theory not leading practice. I'm finding it difficult to grasp, the relationship seems very entangled and I'm not quite sure what the rules are and why they exist, I suppose they are there to uphold the rationale for allowing practice to count as research, rather than an illustration of theories. The esential mistake of early claims around hypertext fiction....My tide machine is coming along nicely, it's now quite stable, reminds me to look up the water computer - I think it used water as a logic gate, as I am ...really. This is a screen-shot (below) but I'll make it work dynamically on the web next. The tides are for London Bridge, where I was born, they will open and close sluices for data structures containing the vocabularies for my generative fictions, its just one part of the sytem, but the part I like the most at the moment.

the images below are read in from data on the server , the circles are drawn dynamically in the

applet here, upon refresh the applet below right reads in the new data and draws it

applet>>

Doing this has reminded me how much fun php can be, as you can do silly things like this (code from http://us3.php.net/imageCreateFromString) what fun! whatever next?!:

<?php
$data = 'iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABwAAAASCAMAAAB/2U7WAAAABl'
. 'BMVEUAAAD///+l2Z/dAAAASUlEQVR4XqWQUQoAIAxC2/0vXZDr'
. 'EX4IJTRkb7lobNUStXsB0jIXIAMSsQnWlsV+wULF4Avk9fLq2r'
. '8a5HSE35Q3eO2XP1A1wQkZSgETvDtKdQAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==';
$data = base64_decode($data);

$im = imagecreatefromstring($data);
if ($im !== false) {
// header('Content-Type: image/png');
imagepng($im);
imagedestroy($im);
}
else {
echo 'An error occurred.';
}
?>

14/12/08

Continuing with the 40,000 piece seasonal jigsaw, now I've split the pixel array into two and sent two lots of numeric data to the server from the deconstituting applet, I think there just must be a limit to the amount of data you can put in a php post; this, at full size is 40,000 words; the image below is 2500 strings, split into two; the larger image is an image of that data created in the applet and scaled up, that's why it looks rubbishy, but I'm getting there....I'll work on eliminating the black artefacts, I think they represent the parameter String in the php, the loop just needs adjusting. For some reason this endeavour reminds me of Bartlebooth's jigsaw obsession in Life A Users Manual. ( my most beloved book ).

the plan should not have to do with an exploit or record, it would be neither a peak to scale nor an ocean floor to reach ... [it] would not be heroic, or spectacular; it would be something simple and discreet, difficult of course but not impossibly so, controlled from start to finish and conversely controlling every detail of the life of the man engaged upon it. see this site>>>>>>

These words are ringing in my ears: 'Exactly 20 years to the day that it was painted, the painting is placed in the seawater until the colours dissolve, and the paper, blank except for the faint marks where it was cut and re-joined, is returned to Bartlebooth. Ultimately, there would be nothing to show for 50 years of work: the project would leave absolutely no mark on the world'. http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Life:A:User:s:Manual.html

13/12/08

The abnormally bright moon has illuminated my coding over the last 24 hours, so I've finally got the code working on the server , no laughing! It's a start! On the server side an applet writes the data from an image array to a txt file, still on the server side another applet reads that data back into a pixel array and reconstitues the image; yes there is apparently a size restriction which I'm trying to understand or work around. This is a sort of distributed poem machine for images, the other day John Lechte was suggesting images were free from code, but this work (this code) seems to negate that, and, contrary to his premise of impersonality I would suggest that my algorithm is embeddded with many assay-marks of my subjectivity: mess, intutition, inefficiency...loopyness.

But it's a relief to actually prove to myself this can be done, without recourse to anything fancier than (in the applet below) a dataInputStream and fox-like cunning (everyone knows foxes are good at this stuff). Scaling still craptastic at this point.

above, these tiny applets are the cleverest thing i have done this year, the pixel data is streamed in from the server.

Another applet has written the data to a txt file also on the server ,admittedly, its not a massive achievement by most peoples standards.

12/12/08

Following on from yesterdays efforts I've got a good system going now for boiling down images into primitive arrays,sending that reduction onto another program and reconstituting it as a nice new shiney image, without the effects visible in the image on the right. Tomorrow I'll try and get it to work on the server.

11/12/08

Lilian(e) Lijn spoke at the Thursday club today, while she talked and displayed images of her work I was struck by a sort of conceptual wonderlust. At first it felt like I was listening to an account of a fictional figure - a Paul Auster character for example, half artist half archeologist; then , as her talk went on it seemed that her key conceptions were (and are) far closer to the works of Arthur C. Clarke, lots of archetypes or resonant frequencies of thought but a degreee of distrust (and indeed distaste) for overt religious references, (though she did allude to an interest in Buddhism). Like Clarke there is a touching faith and exhileration connected to technological invention. I did ask if the column structures were deliberately Talmudic or scroll-like, but this didnt seem to resonate for her; I also alluded to the Baghdad battery theory but she probably put this down to student balminess as it didn't elicit a response, but even if the theory is untrue (this doesnt appear to be the case) the combination of archetypal visual and energetic strctures and technological innovation does have a direct link , at least in my mind, to her work.

The Baghdad Battery is believed to be about 2000 years old (from the Parthian period, roughly 250 BCE to CE 250). The jar was found in Khujut Rabu just outside Baghdad and is composed of a clay jar with a stopper made of asphalt. Sticking through the asphalt is an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder. When filled with vinegar - orany other electrolytic solution - the jar produces about 1.1 volts. http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/battery2.html

There is speculation that the Ark of The Covenant contained a powerful charge generated by an ancient battery or proto Leyden Jar. The notion of this Ark containing fragments is also significantly post-modern, a potent container for something between presence and absence , consanguine to the light of the sun on the surface of the moon and the notion of the word as an energy field, language itself as a movement between presence and absence, a process of differentiation. Lilian Lijn's work is bursting with these conceptions, not least of all her poem machines such as Young Universe 1962. (also reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's electronic prayer wheels in The Nine Billion Names of God in which a couple of software engineeers are employed by Buddhists to find the real names of God 'by exhausting a combinatorial library of possibilities' maths and fiction>. )

Baghdad Battery

"This is a slightly unusual request," said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. "As far as I know, it's the first time anyone's been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer. I don't wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly thought that your --ah-- establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?"

"Gladly," replied the lama, readjusting his silk robe and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. "Your Mark V computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures." >>>>>>> link to rest of Arthur C. Clarke's story

10/12/08

Navigating flagrant misuse of Java to read and write files to server as the security restrictions are beginning to make things stupidly useless, clunky, out of date. The simplest solution so far is a data input stream for reading in; for writing, a call to php within java, it's a bit 'ugly' but works well - problem more or less solved, but now turning to images, then ALL MY PROBLEMS WILL BE SOLVED. Also considering doing an olde worlde hypertext version of South as retroSouth. Resinscribing, or remarking (making remarkable!) actual South book in mode of library book abuser. But it is at least my book to write in.

Blood Islands II: Westminster Bridge 10th December 2008. X ray at St Thomas's, patron saint of architects. Is the river that surrounds this blood island alive? It certainly cannot be described as dead. Nor is it without its own force of logic and yet, as Ivan Dar observed, it is an undecidable structure. Not alive. Not dead. Falling and rising, sometimes at the same time. A push and a pop matrix that agitates an apparently soulless force whose states are always paradoxical. It is this system he adopted in answer to the unbounded, unopposed, liquid contiguity of his own decomposition. "We are all blood islands" wrote Ivan Dar in the spring of 1955, as he struggled to discover what, if any, permanent categories could be found in the febrile architectures of the environmental programming language dra/dar. No sooner had he imagined some evidence of stability in the system then it would dissolve into further islands of blood that were neither liquid nor solid, free floating or fixed. In riverine terms an earthquake in Micronesia might unexpectedly displace the 'inside' of the river with its own molecules, likewise the 'outside' of the Thames might become the inside of a wave breaking on the shore of an island on the other side of the world. Inverting all previously assumed distributions.

Note to self:>>>>>>>>>>php

DataInputStream()

writes

o8/12/08

Dérive

A nice (quasi) symmetrical date, here for a non-symmetrical map or Dérive-generating software for the South_bank, designed to elicit instrumental disorientations. In future this will replace all Google Maps, guide books, A-Zs etc >>>>>

23/11/08

Egg content for today:

21/11/08

Last night Alexandra Antonopoulou and I presented our work to the Thursday club, this was Alexandra's blurb:

Are fairytales fiction? Are “true” stories reality? How can we
learn through narratives? Alexandra will explore interaction
and learning through narratives, which is part of her
PhD research. Her Beauties and Beasts book was
shown at the exhibition Blood on Paper in the V&A.
Alexandra will also present her interactive cookbook, which
connects generations via food.

this was my blurb:

In /Cybertexts/ (1997) the writer Espen Aarseth attempts to define the medium
specificity of computational texts. In identifying subtler levels of
medium specificity Aarseth asks us to expand our categorisations of what
constitutes literature and of what is literary.

These emerging categorisations necessitate a new literary aesthetic and an
awareness of the dangers inherent in imposing naturalized literary terms
onto new forms of textuality. Eleanor's work is concerned with the
specificity of different forms, what qualities can she best deploy when
using computational means for generating narrative? How do these
qualities differ when those means are more traditional? Where is the
subject in this equation, and how relevant are long-held ideas of agency
and ‘reception' in the reader-writer nexus within a dynamic and networked
writing system?

It seemed to work well, having each others work as a focal point to reflect upon our practices; unfortunately I forgot to bring the egg so as usual I think it was a bit harder for people to envisage the role it plays in the South system . I was asked what theoretical role the egg had, other than its role as a transitional object between a computer and a book, I said it had significance as an ambivalent entity somewhere between an object and a subject. This was probably a rather vague answer so it has made me think about making a clearer analysis of its role - in terms of my theoretical writing, it might also be seen as diagrammatic, a provocation, in an always unfixed state . Interesting that Mark d'Inverno in my tutorial this week pointed out that it is an effector - something designed to change the state of the reader. I think of it now as an eggfector. I need to explain more clearly the role of the egg in the sort of re-inscription or re-marking (as Sher Doruff put its) proceses that are explicit in the book and software. Alexandra's work is an important reminder that there are always many good and differant solutions to problems, and that analogue solutions are just as rich (or, indeed, richer), but it also reminds me how interested I am in computational structures and in the notion of autonomous processes ......I still find them other-worldy and mysterious, even if I design them myself, they seem like automatic writing, something that comes from another dimension, the result of technological seances...

We were also asked how we thought new types of text and book generation might change libraries. Its an interesting coincidence that both Alexandra and I have worked in libraries (seven years in my case), I can imagine a Borgesian future where libraries are infinite and infinitely expanding, either that or the notion of the library will be fragmented into ever smaller units, culminating in the notion of the library as subject specific. I didn't mention that I'd done a very big sound project called The Library of Babel as my final work for the Sonic Arts course I did at LCC. Its uncanny how these themes go round and round.

06/11/08

Nearly finished the first draft of my chapter on subjectivity and interactivity. Having heard Sher Doruff speak last Monday on diagrams and now having visited the Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain several times, also reading Deleuze on Bacon, Moretti on charts and other references, it feels like the idea of certain aspects of my South system as having a diagramatic aspect is emerging strongly. I'm Linking this is to Heraclitus's famous saying about never entering the same river twice (and Borges's observation on that statement, that we recognise our own flux). I am coupling (in code) this diagramatic process to the ebb and flow of the Thames, to Thames tide tables and ArrayLists.

Depending on the cycle of the tide the vocabulary will ebb and flow.... A RIVER OF WORDS:

Thames tide logic gate >>

20/10/08

Continuing with the design of a system for generating individual egg content and of overlaying my subjective data onto an archive of reader images, this will be used to get a long term picture of the relationship between my partial perspective and the evaluation processes I have deployed.

another pdf here >>>>

15/10/08

Haven't written much recently as I have been concentrating on writing chapter 3 of my thesis, about subjectivity, situatedness and intra-activity blah blahblah. Its hard to feel anything but queasy about the whole process; reinforced by a sensation of ennui on all fronts. The South system will now capture information about its users, including snapsots affected by the dyanmic retrieval of my mood and responses at that moment, it makes partiality of perspective an overt presence within computational structures etc etc . I 've also done a short, non-technical and non-academc pdf about the South system here: >>>

15/09/08

Developing my (virtual) robot play, or play_bot, today it outputted this, (among others things) ,a play about guano:

1: The view is shifting, a word is emerging from it. I can hardly see it yet, that word, what will it be? It is coming into view now, yes I see something
2: yes I see now it is guano
1: guano
2: guano like water
1: What is that? guano
2: guano water
1: But what does it mean? guano
2: It means the excrement of sea birds; used as fertilizer
1: We know nothing
2: the excrement of sea birds
1: the excrement of sea birds I heard that once. Oh it was years ago excrement
2: sea excrement
1: null
2: why this, why null
1: Because of the excrement of sea birds
2: We dont really have anything to hold onto
1: But we do have excrement we can always rely o

n excrement
2: And we have the weather
1: Yes we always have the weather
2: The rain ruins my hair. If I were running the world I would have it rain only between 2 and 5 a.m. Anyone who was out then ought to get wet.
1: Its raining men, halleluya. Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
2: The weather is rain
1: The weather is rain
2:null
1:The weather is rain
2:I dreamt of and cabdriver laudator
1:Why did you dream of cabdriverand laudator
cabdriver
2:because It is too weird to explain
1:cabdriverIt is too weird to explain you are a mystery to me
2:because someone who drives a taxi for a living
1: someone who drives a taxi for a living that is a strange dream
2: yes for cabdriver strange
1: yes for cabdriver strange
2: I feel hopeless
1: I feel pessimistic
2: I feel hopeless and you feel pessimistic we compliment each other
1: I meant to say I feel hopeful
2: I feel pessimisticand you feel hopeful We mirror each other
1: I feel pessimisticand you fee lhopeful We have nothing in common
2: I feel anticipative
1: You must feel anticipative
1; You must feel anticipant
1: You must feel encouraging

1:You must feel expectant
1:You must feel optimistic
1:you must feel hopeless
1:You must also feel hopeless
1: You must also feel bearish
1: You must also feel demoralized
1: You must also feel discouraged
1: You must also feel demoralised
1: You must also feel disheartened
1: You must also feel negative
1:I dont know what I feel

02/09/08

Phase one of prototype book and device completed:

The egg is a proto-book, waiting to be hatched by you .

27/08/08

In the not too distant future the South System will deliver individualized books through digital hatcheries . These hatcheries will be placed in bookshops, galleries and tearooms throughout London.

About Your Egg

The egg is a proto-novel, a book waiting to be hatched. We suggest you keep the egg close to you for the first few days. If you have spare folds of fat this is great, you can tuck the egg into them. Otherwise you might like to keep the egg in your pocket or under your jumper while watching television. When the egg has reached a temperature of about 67 degrees your book is ready to be hatched. Grab the South handbook, head down to the Southbank, turn the egg on and take it for a walk. By pressing the forward and backward buttons at the back of your egg you can experience the enhanced navigational range of this book. This will involve going up its stairs and through its secret tunnels, scampering over its many rooftops, clambering along ridges and down into its green valleys to find new and previously undiscovered pages. The book is designed to be smudged, thumbed, bumped, riffled through, used as a pillow, an occasional table and drawing book. It is also a form of compass. One way or another, (if you stay on Earth) this book will always point towards the South, just like your egg .

22/08/08

Every good book needs a protagonist and luckily you've come along just in time to fulfil that role. According to ‘ How to Write a Blockbuster' ‘characters provide readers with the emotional key, the route into your story'. This principle seems equally applicable to any decent guide book or gazetteer, but the authors of How to Write a Blockbuster also warn, ‘ if your characters are flat and lifeless, no one will want to read it'.

Are you feeling flat and lifeless? You're in for a pretty boring read if you are. Your job is ‘come alive' so that I can just sit back and type. You should expertly discover who you ‘really' are and help the rest of us to get to know you. You might of course be shy or introverted and reveal yourself just a little bit at a time, facet by facet as it were, or you might on the other hand just burst into life like a new years eve firework display along the Southbank. It's up to you.

Other characters will be fleshed out by the people you'll meet while reading this book, by friends and family, passing strangers and by me, the typist.

dummy website for south project

310808

So I am using the month of august to do my psychometric guide, this will also be a good case study for my phd, embedding subjectivity and site specificity within dynamic writing . Janis told me about the Espresso machine Blackwells or Waterstones are prototyping, a print on demand machine in one of their shops, that would be the ideal set up for my system, an in situ ad hoc, subjective book generating machine, that was always my goal! *

28/07/08

Collect the full set of personality types, swap them with your friends, sell them on ebay...A Radically Relational Novel. A book in a tin. Each egg corresponds to a 'personality' type and contains information and clues that supplement and enhance the experience of The Dip and the hmm Pseudo Dip. A Psychometric text adventure. Its too hot to write anything else right now. there's a strange smell of lamb fat in Streatham, cant be explained. ....New episodes can be regularly downloaded, others can contribute etc etc, responses can be submitted as new content. Today my system generated this :

hmm.

I am thirsty.

I am always waiting for someone.

Its a dull day so far.

Look at that down there in The Dip.

See the way he hangs around the supermarket?

hmm.

I am thirsty.

An estage agent sits in the office, unlike you he is forte
His name is Gambdon Spek.
He is not feeling yielding readily to pressure or weight .
It is hot in the office, this makes him uncomfortable.

oh boy i am confused
Is it because you are confused that you came to me ?
yes hmm
You seem to be quite positive.
am i
Do you believe you are ?
i am funny
How long have you been funny ?
all my life long
Your life long ?
my life is long
Why do you say your life is long ?
life is very long
Lets discuss further why your life long .
oh boy
But your life is long .
is it
Look at that down there in The Dip.
what
Why do you ask ?
what do you see
Does that question interest you ?
hmm
See the way he hangs around the supermarket?
who
hmm.
hmm hangs around
I am thirsty.
oh
I am always waiting for someone.
goodbye

Goodbye. Maybe youll be nicer next time.

monday 14/07/08

LULLSVILLE. Engulfed by narcolepsy after my annual assessment. I've heard it happens to a lot of people.

The latest interface I've been working on also incorporates my patented Intelliturd © system for detecting the 'emergent' properties of pitbull terrier turds in The Dip: Text to speech dramatises the scatlogically unintended consequences of this second order emergent structure: Shit is the pungent foe of enlightenment subjectivity.

"A component has a particular functionality but this is not recognizable as a subfunction of the global functionality. Instead a component implements a behaviour whose side effect contributes to the global functionality [...] Each behaviour has a side effect and the sum of the side effects gives the desired functionality" ( Steels 1990 ) . In other words, the global or macroscopic functionality of a system with "emergent functionality" is the sum of all "side effects", of all emergent properties and functionalities" . Blah blah blahdy blah ...

Pretend to be a dog, go on just for ten minutes. Get someone you trust to mark you out of

ten. Report back here. Use a special code. Write Dog 2 for example or Dog 5. Dont worry,

we wil know what it means. Do this and you will receive further instructions.

sunday 060708

An orderly date: 6-7-8.

tick = (" Act I: GREET. A sign greets you at the awkwardly angled entrance: WELCOME ALL JESUS IS ALIVE AND LIVING IN STREATHAM. " +
"Yes, Jesus. Alive. Does he rent or have a mortgage?" +
" Mortgage, definitely, with just a little bit of negative equity to keep him on his toes. The website says" +
" \"it was earlier in the 1970's that the Lord laid a vision on members of that Church for an \"Open Door\" on the High Road.\"" +
"including a coffee shop ministry\". Getting quality refereshments is a form of ministry in itself." +
"But the woman on the website is sitting above a Norwegian fjord, not the actual Dip." +
"The actual Dip is arguably less able to relate the requisite degree of inner calm." + "Even after all these years of quality refreshments pouring into it?" +
"Look there she is. She is?" + " Chloe Quench, popping into the Christian Bookshop to purchase a Beginners Bible " +
"Noah's ark Backpack for her six year old nephew. Its nine pounds and ninety nine pence. She's got the money ready in her hand," +
" look how she's clutching the cash. Her knuckles are ashen" +
" . She was in there yesterday. And the day before. It's on her round:" +
" library, Lidl, Christian Bookshop, back up the high road for a morning coffee in the Astoria Cafe. She's quite the girl about town. "+
"But somehow she doesnt look like Jesus is one of her actual neighbours. She looks like her neighbours might be diifficult. Keeping her awake night after night with " +
"persistent anti-social behaviour . Eight year old Kids with Asbos. Ugly scenes on the grassy nole just outside her ex-local authority flat." +
" Where the grass has been worn out by the ravages of yob culture. She's got a headache, shes been reading Romans 12:17-21" +
" \"If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head\"." + " Or a range of quality refereshments." +
" But she cant help dwelling on the bit about burning coals. nuisance teens sizzling like paprika chicken grills. 28 grams of fat per 100 grams. Thats alot, even by" +
" South London standards. But you can always remove the skin. Did you see that? She just actually touched.. Actually touched. Chloe Quench actually touched. " +
" Give it a bit of z. 10x should do it on the 80 mmm. The lights are all on the bookshop but luckily weve got BLC - back light compensation. A feature that electronically" +
" compensates for high background lighting to give detail which would normally be silhouetted. Not everyone can boast that. " +
"Oh yes, very good. Combined with tracking we can keep in focus throughout the entire zoom range. Its an engraved Möbius Strip Bracelet in sterling silver. "+
"Shes twisiting it round and round to read the words on the packet. A symbol of eternity"+
" in sterling silver, 62.39p."+
" Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace, she mutters under her breath, where there is hatred let me sow love where there is injury, pardon"+
" where there is error, truth where there is discord, harmony where there is doubt, faith where there is despair, hope where there is darkness, light"+
" and where there is sorrow, joy." + " A wonderful gift for someone you love" + " or even better someone you despise." +
" Chloe feels a special bond with Francis of Assisi, Patron Of: Animal Welfare, Merchants, Needle Workers, Solitary Death, Zoos. And fire. " +
" He's a multi tasker like she is. She cant afford that this week though. She doesnt get paid til the end of the month, she's got..ooh £456 pounds on her Flexaccount."+
" Part time workers cant generally indulge to the same degree as those of us in full employment. But she thinks of herself as"+
" cash poor and time rich. Which is what counts at the end of the day. There's another...hmm..£718 on her Halifax savings account. Strictly for emergency "+
"situations. Like unexpected legal fees. Bail bonds. Escape plans. False IDs. Starting a new life somewhere nobody knows who she is. And what she has done. For a bit of peace. " +
"Saint Francis would understand, he was a prisoner of war after all, not exactly naive. Shes scratching the back of her neck. She doesnt know it but she can sense the cameras. All "+
"but the most benighted can - sense the cameras scanning them. The feeling of being watched from afar is beginning to distrurb her."+
" Its not as if she has done anything wrong. Yet. She of all people. Even *** couldnt know everything. Surely? She always presumed that was an exaggeration. "+
"No one was going to make her feel guilty, not even ***. What did they know until it happened to them? Night after night.Let them read Jeremiah 20:10 " +
"For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, say they, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying,"+
" Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him. " +
"Act II: STUNG");

[Act I: GREET.

1: A sign greets you at the awkwardly angled entrance: WELCOME ALL JESUS IS ALIVE AND LIVING IN STREATHAM. Yes, Jesus. Alive.

2: Does he rent or have a mortgage?

1 : Mortgage, definitely, with just a little bit of negative equity to keep him on his toes. The website says it was earlier in the 1970's that the Lord laid a vision on members of that Church for an Open Door on the High Road. Including a coffee shop ministry. Getting quality refreshments is a form of ministry in itself.

2: But the woman on the website is sitting above a Norwegian fjord, not the actual Dip.

1: The actual Dip is arguably less able to relate the requisite degree of inner calm. Even after all these years of quality refreshments pouring into it.

2: Look there she is.

1: She is?

2: Chloe Quench, popping into the Christian Bookshop to purchase a Beginners Bible Noah's ark Backpack for her six-year old nephew. Its nine pounds and ninety-nine pence.

1: She's got the money ready in her hand, look how she's clutching the cash. Her knuckles are ashen.

2: She was in there yesterday. And the day before. It's on her round: library, Lidl, Christian Bookshop, back up the high road for a morning coffee in the Astoria Cafe. She's quite the girl about town.

1: But somehow she doesn't look like Jesus is one of her actual neighbours. She looks like her neighbours might be difficult. Keeping her awake night after night with persistent anti-social behaviour. Eight year old Kids with Asbos.

2: Ugly scenes on the grassy nole just outside her ex-local authority flat.

1: Where the grass has been worn out by the ravages of yob culture.

2: She's got a headache. She's been reading Romans 12:17-21

If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head .

1: Or a range of quality refreshments.

2: But she can't help dwelling on the bit about burning coals. nuisance teens sizzling like paprika chicken grills. 28 grams of fat per 100 grams. That's a lot, even by South London standards.

1: But you can always remove the skin.

2: Did you see that? She just actually touched.. Actually touched. Chloe Quench actually touched.

1: Give it a bit of z. 10x should do it on the 80 mm. The lights are all on the bookshop but luckily we've got BLC - back light compensation.

2: A feature that electronically compensates for high background lighting to give detail which would normally be silhouetted.

1: Not everyone can boast that.

2: Oh yes, very good. Combined with tracking we can keep in focus throughout the entire zoom range. It's an engraved Möbius Strip Bracelet in sterling silver.

1: She's twisting it round and round to read the words on the packet. A symbol of eternity in sterling silver. 62.39p. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace, she mutters under her breath, where there is hatred let me sow love where there is injury, pardon where there is error, truth where there is discord, harmony where there is doubt, faith where there is despair, hope where there is darkness, light and where there is sorrow, joy.

2: A wonderful gift for someone you love or even better someone you despise. Chloe feels a special bond with Francis of Assisi, Patron of: Animal Welfare, Merchants, Needle Workers, Solitary Death, Zoos. And fire.

1: He's a multi-tasker like she is. She can't afford that this week though. She doesn't get paid until the end of the month.

2: She's got..ooh £456 pounds on her Flexaccount.

1: Part time workers can't generally indulge to the same degree as those of us in full employment.

2: But she thinks of herself as cash poor and time rich. Which is what counts at the end of the day.

1: There's another...hmm..£718 on her Halifax savings account. Strictly for emergency situations like unexpected legal fees. Bail bonds. Escape plans. False IDs.

2: Starting a new life somewhere nobody knows who she is. And what she has done.

1 & 2: For a bit of peace.

1: Saint Francis would understand, he was a prisoner of war after all, not exactly naive.

2: She's scratching the back of her neck. She doesn't know it but she can sense the cameras.

1: All but the most benighted can - sense the cameras scanning them. The feeling of being watched from afar is beginning to disturb her.

2: :Its not as if she has done anything wrong.

1: Yet.

2: She of all people. Even *** couldn't know everything. Surely? She always presumed that was an exaggeration. No one is going to make her feel guilty, not even ***.

1: What did they know until it happened to them? Night after night.

2: Let them read Jeremiah 20:10:

1: For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, say they, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.]

friday 04/07/08

Developing a mobile application(s) to augment my computer-bound software and to work in relation with the analogue books, the mobile apps can deploy GPS or just work on their own with the user actually navigating themselves at the location: Ive put the Nokia 95 on my Christmas list. This application (Midlet) is somwhere between a site specific art work, a pervasive game, a text and a performance.. which brings to mind a scathing quote by Wilfred Hou Bek: "you can go to any random blog and within three double clicks, you will find yet another report of a psychogeographic walk talking about "aimless wandering in memory of the flaneur" '

OUCH!

Saturday 21/06/08

Pulling literature review together, but the more I read the more I realise I need to read, it seems impossible, knowing when to stop. In terms of the review content it is also very difficult as I am reading all the time; so it is an oddly stylised and in some senses a false construct, a fiction of sorts, by the time I have finished (DV) my frames of reference will be differant/expanded. Anyway, now looking at using Prolog through Perl for the ever increasingly complex logic of my program (complex by my feeble standards, obviously) . This makes sense, or, failing that, a relational database and sql to make conditional queries on an ontology of my story places, events, characters and motivating factors, or causal chains...my current spit and glue system will be too tangled for me to handle soon.This is a pretty good article as a starting point: http://search.cpan.org/dist/AI-Prolog/lib/AI/Prolog/Article.pod#Recursion_and_Lists

I've embedded a sort of game in this little pod which goes with my analgue handbook to aid exploration of The Dip and my texts (right) the image on the left is a mock-up of a Tamagotchi with more world weary human characters, including the alcoholic Lent. The Tamagotchi model is quite close to my 'deliberative' agent or storyteller/cctv operative model.

sunday 15/06/08

A hectic couple of weeks by my normally sluggish standards. The Copenhagen symposium was a very positive experience, engendering the usual sensations of inferiority, but also generating excitement about the scope and possible new pathways for my work. Virtually everyone who spoke made me see new aspects to the work I'm doing, particularly those who spoke about subjectivity and self-observation, and the role of things we don't talk about in our writing and practice, the invisible matter whose absence is as significant as the things we choose to highlight.

With a view to the annual assessment (on July the 7th) I've been compiling an analogue handbook to go with the software, a book of clues and suggestions that guides (or even misleads) people in their interaction with the software. The prototype book arrived yesterday, in full colour with a couple of horrendous spelling mistakes (which I am blaming on increasing myopia as opposed to flagrant stupidity), but the idea of having these books and of combining the software experience with pervasive experiences - explorations of real cityscapes for example, seems like an interesting new avenue for the project.

sunday 1st June 2008

This weekend spent generating psychometric landscapes in java, parametised by affective/subjective data. This will provide a dynamic toplogical visualistion of situating data, the more jagged the landscape the more complex and disturbing that situating data is, a flat landscape would represent a relatively neutral data set. try>>

larger applet emdedded in Perl page>>>

saturday 31st may

Doing more drawing from cctv, stumbled upon this Flash book I did about 18 months ago (in relation to my Msc), which reminded me of the crucial book element of this project which I've neglected a bit recently, so this is a remnder to myself. I'll see it every time I write here:

go to book

At the same time I've been getting data into a 3d Applet through php, what I've done is a trivial example but I wanted to remind myself

I could do this online, it'll go towards a dynamic visualisation of psychometric and situating data >>

sunday 25th of May

Continuing with the construction of little web based data collecting code modules, their job is to feed affective or affecting data into agent personalities, the one I've done today scrapes weather data from a BBC London weather RSS feed, validates it and writes it to file for retrieval purposes. I'm doing it like that so it can be made available for a range of operations, including the various calculations that go into the constitution of each agent's metabolism, mood and dreams.

link to various data grabbing modules >>>

saturday 24th may

For the last couple of weeks I've been distracted by writing a paper for the Copenhagen symposium on Art and Research that's taking place in June, and writing a literature review of Narrative Intelligence and Cybertext, while teaching myself Perl. Which seems to be going ok, with all the usual oscillations. The Perl thing is partly a recognition that PHP, though easy to write with, is quite limited in some ways, while Perl on the other hand seems hugely flexible, and at least has a lot more documentation, and is used by interesting people (i.e Alex McClean) who make it look easy! I'm trying to write a news evaluation engine, the resulting data is fed into the agent personalities as percepts - dream material, factors relating to metabolism and mood; its early days. I seem to inch forward in excrutiatingly glacial increments, which is ok if you're a glacier but a bit slow if you're a human. grrrrrrrrrrrr :{

The screen grab below is based on American news headlines, other assessing agents will work with local data, weather news and the ftse 100 index as well as asessing affective content of various blogs. I call them agents because it sounds clever, and fun; but they are just modules of code that can communicate with other modules and justify their choices, at the most basic level imaginable.

Wednesday 07th May

Need to start pulling things together into some sort of whole system, no matter how shallow. It feels like the right time to have a fully working arrangement - psychometric data, weightings for a mutable vocabulary, weightings from situating data, a dialogic text belting all this out into a coherent working model, ie the intelligent parser I have been working on for the last couple of weeks. Then I can pull it apart and build again.

monday 5th may

4 dialogic agent 'personalities' , a fifth figure who is both a reader/user and also a character, these roles are mysteriously unstable, perhaps the reader is the fifth figure or the machine? Anyway, its a dialogic program that also nessecitates the reading of a 'real' book, which book will depend on the system's assessment of 'personality', the book will contain maps, clues, paratext and commentaries that reveal further intelligence about the location which will enhance the cybertext experience; readers may be instructed to get on a bus and go to The Dip, to uncover clues that can only be found in situ, in the landscape and architecture of the area. If they live in another country or cannot travel they may have to locate other readers or helpful people in South London who can assist them (good luck). The book also contains 'cheats' and space for user writings, drawings, doodings, shopping lists, code etc. What I've put here is a kind of almost empty framework, my aim is also to expand the dynamic content of each character, to write a much more sophisticated parser and to implement a database of both static and dynamic data that will feed into more meaningful dialogue. This part of the project will be accessed by readers conditional to certain requirements, things will be revealed selectively, only certain 'personalities' will be matched to certain parts of the system, perhaps the user might undergo some sort of inner transformation if they really want to access other narratives? (But are they really narratives ? That's a big question I'll have to try and answer)

Saturday 03 May

Developing an Eliza style text based interface (an annoying word) in PHP as I'm getting headlines and other data into the script dynamically and putting other variables into a database, its very simple so far but beginning to do what I want it to do.

The Spring Review on tuesday was useful because the other students presenting work were also involved with issues of subjectivity, but from very different angles, revealing gaps I hadn't considered such as Spinoza and more of Deleuze in relation to action and affect in the production of subjectivity, I also want to investigate more Barthesian theory around the Author, not just Foucault, who is in some ways quite specifically focused. Like the subject the Author is an entity we cannot really be certain of, in fact even the notion of 'the text' or 'the work' is fairly unstable, so I'm back in the Wumpus pit I started from, square 1.1 in Wumpus World, my continually subsiding home from home.

There's hugely more I need to do to this PHP interface, its like a very rough handkerchief sketch or something, the interesting bit will be analyzing the reader's language, constructing some sort of differential calculus (! I make up these things) and also trying to give the headlines and other collective intelligence (in the spying sense) a subjective interpretation, which is possibly an inversion of normal computational aspirations.

Friday 25th April

Trying to build a reasonable interface for this project. Yesterday Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph came to Goldsmiths to talk about Flight Paths, a networked novel based around the true story of people falling into the Sainsbury's car park at Richmond, (as a result of hiding in the wheel storage compartments of jet planes in an attempt to illegally enter the UK, unfortunately its almost impossible to survive such a trip, so the people who attempt these secret journies periodically fall to their deaths ) The project seems very resonant on lots of fronts but possibly in need of some constraining conceptual structures, anyway, it's made me think a bit more about the sort of interface I might eventually have to my own project, an overview I keep forgetting as I'm rather too embedded in the details of this work. When visitors arrive I remember to try and think of my own work as a stranger, as it is also Spring Review next week I do need to get a longer sort of perspective, so this is what I've been doing today:

http://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~ma501ed/3dinterface/dip_interface.html

Monday 21st April

Taxi-to-praxi: experimental workshop about practice-led PhDs, 21st of April 2008. Goldsmiths Digital Studios.

This was a timely workshop, a week before the Spring Review, and a reminder that there are many different forms of PhD practice. Overall it was a positive day, highlighting a number of important issues which I had not considered until now, such as the possibility that the inclusion of ‘found’ materials in my work, like Blogs or other materials gathered form the web may be in contravention of various contractual agreements around originality. Students from the University of The Arts highlighted this as a serious issue in their PhD practice. The theme of the day did seem to emerge as questions around originality and collaboration; it is hard for us to know what the boundaries and expectations there are in this regard. It is comforting to know other students are struggling with these issues but also perhaps a signal that more clarity is needed about what exactly constitutes originality in arts based PhD practices. It was interesting for me to hear other students’ opinions on this front, my own work is increasingly concerned with the philosophical difficulty of viewing any subjective (or, indeed, ‘objective’ opinion) as occurring in isolation, if this is to become the lynchpin of my practice, for example, generating writings based on collective intelligence and communal epistemologies, how does this fit in with institutional expectations or requirements for originality? If certain methodologies, such as those involving epistemological communities, are predicated on undermining unitary conceptions of knowledge production, are they effectively impossible to carry out in certain institutions?

The later part of the day seemed a little rushed, with speakers only having five minutes to talk about their work, many issues were raised which could justify further discussion, an indication that it was a successful and necessary workshop.

Saturday 19th April

Five characters, five personality 'types: '

Lent, Harshal Hatif, Aden Kenley, Jason Cardiff and Dr Elizabeth Blinn (not pictured), representing Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neurotism (Emotional Stability) andOpenness .

Five tropes. Five vocabularies. Should there infact be ten types and ten vocabularies? What difference does gender make?

'In 1922, Otto Jespersen hypothesized that women were more fluent (exhibited less hesitation in oral expression) than men because they had smaller and more central vocabularies, consisting of common words and combinations. Men's vocabularies were considered more extensive due to the inclusion of numerous novel, technical, and infrequently used words. The purpose of this study was to test the validity of Jespersen's hypothesis. Twenty university students, ten females and ten males, were matched on the basis of chronological age, socioeconomic status, and variables shown to influence fluency levels and vocabulary. Each subject then described "a memorable life experience," which was recorded on a three-minute tape. Data reported do not support the notion that women are more verbally fluent than men. In addition, no significant difference in the nature of men and women's vocabulary was revealed. While findings tend to refute Jespersen's hypothesis, it may be possible that a dramatic change in women's language patterns has occurred since the theory was posited, or that a statistical error due to the small sample population may have contaminated the results.' www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/ recordDetail?accno=ED126547

This is the result of Aden Kenley's 'Big 5 personality' test, a 22 year old male of predominantly Anglo-Saxon heritage, he's high on emotional stability, low on openess and concientiousness, 'Your average score on conscientiousness was 3.5, which is considered low. It is in approximately the 21st percentile for males over the age of 21. Your score on Conscientiousness is low, indicating you like to live for the moment and do what feels good now. Your work tends to be careless and disorganized. '

Ive always thought of him as a bit of a shit which is pretty much confuirmed by the results of his test, [click on image to see full results]:

?G=1&Y=23&A=3.9&O=3.4&E=4.1&S=4.2&C=3.5

test site

Blinn is high on openess, like the blurb says ' Openness is often presented as healthier or more mature by psychologists, who are often themselves open to experience. However, open and closed styles of thinking are useful in different environments. The intellectual style of the open person may serve a professor well, but research has shown that closed thinking is related to superior job performance in police work, sales, and a number of service occupations. ' .....So now we know.

wednesday 9th April

This project will consist of a 'psychometric novel'' and the mechanisms for generating it, resulting in multiple novel interfaces which represent 'personality types' imposed upon or derived from individual readers and collective epistemologies generated at the time of intra-action and measured against existing data. A conversational interface places readers in the position of the protagonist, Lent, who is recuperating from mental fatigue on the hospital ship HMS Monad, a vessel that floats 20,000 miles above The Dip in South West London - a mathamagical locus from which The Fleet (or Collective Transparency) sustains itself by acquiring subjective data, constantly assessing and classifying individuals as part of a vast generative engine hidden in the core of the vessel....

sunday 6th April

Snow hooray! Fitted a google image finding mechanism today (see top of page) , it takes words from this journal and then looks on the web for images to match them, I want to incorporate news feeds and other dynamically changing data into my writing system, to construct a distributed epistemology, a kind of standpoint software that evolves in response to ever changing events... this isnt emergence for the sake of emergence but an attempt to encompass a non unitary subjectivity in the generation of my own writing, the distribution of my own 'creative' agency, a type of self distribution, the open sourcing of my own subjectivity.

Tuesday 2nd april

"All you have to do is choose one image"

The ship hums like a colossal inefficient old fridge. The constant hum fills my head with white noise, the white noise merges with an ambience of anxiety and unease. Nothing feels right on this ship, it's the original dis-aster, a bad star, a floating shit-heap 20 thousand miles from home.

"Lent are you listening to me?"

Dr Elizabeth Blinn is trying to get me to co-operate with another round of rep-grid.

"All you have to do is choose one image from the triad"

She holds the glossy book up to me, pointing at the photos with her fancy psychservice biro, she reminds me of a double glazing saleswoman from down-town Croydon back in the day. I give the images a nano- second glance and choose randomly. Blinn pulls the book away from me.

"Give it a little thought"

"You said I shouldn't think for too long"

"Don't you want us to help you?"

She has a point. I look at the images again, this time I let my eyes linger on them for a reasonable amount of time, none of the images evoke much of a response, in the end I still choose randomly.

"I see... interesting" says Blinn perfunctorily, rapidly entering numbers into her scientific calculator, " and what does this image remind you of?"

"Stanley Kubrick"

"Ok, and now choose from these three" Blinn flicks through a mass of pages to locate another double page spread further back in the huge book, she's following a complex pathway through this tome, constantly referring to a smaller book that generates some sort of route according to her calculations.

-- --

"There seems to be a theme developing here"

"What theme is that Lent?"

"Everything is orange"

"And which image do you choose?"

"That one " I say decisively, jabbing a grubby finger at the precious book.

Play file

The 'Must Have' girls accessory! The ultimate personality quiz - find out whether you are a mostly A, B or C type of girl with the 15 fantastic quizzes, as well as horoscopes, love match, birthstones and so much more. Also comes with USB port and dedicated website for downloads of more free tests and loads more besides. Batteries included. Colours may vary.

Sunday 30th March

Continuing to work on mechanisms for generating a 'subject', these methodologies are all interesting, in fact they are commonly found on the web as amusements, a form of ergodic text, regardless of their obvious generalizations and limiting particularities; the test below crops up in many guises. I'm finding it hard to trace the provenance of this test, its an apocryphal form of psychometry, no one knows where it comes from...

click on image to try the shape test

The BBC Art and Personality project strikes me as a case study in cultural specificity, the web site states:

'People who were more agreeable tended to prefer Impressionism and Japanese art, whereas people who were less agreeable liked what you might call more challenging art – Abstract, Cubism, Islamic and Renaissance. Intellectuals – those open to new aesthetic experiences – tended to avoid Impressionism, possibly because it was too familiar. ' ....What about people for whom none of this art is familiar?

The questionnaire also asks users to decide whether they consider themselves to 'be more of a scientist or more of an artist' , descriptions which I imagine at least ninety percent of the population find irrelevant and others impossible to choose from.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/art/

Tuesday 25th of March

Continuing with the Repertory Grid theme, the images below are anchored to my own highly contrived, totally scrambled yet more or less unitary sense of self, a self that is nevertheless subject to the mysterious effects of Hitchcock films and 'documentary' photography, ancient layers of psycho-ocular fluence... Despite reservations about the methodology (see March 10th 2008) in particular the cultural specificity and dualisms inherent in its seemingly positivist persepctive blah blah, I'm thinking of ways to destabilize the materialist Cartesianism of the Repertory Grid, to allow for the 'errors' that the empiricist approach appears to dismiss, to restore the intelligibility of parapraxes, repressed motive, socio-historical forces. At the same time its hard to believe that Georges Polti's and Vladimir Propp's crypto-rationalist archetypes are really so universal anyway, and even more difficult to verify or repudiate, as one would have to read or listen to every story ever told, an exercise that would dwarf the adventures promulgated upon the reader by Italo Calvino in 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler'. The autoblog (see 16th March 2008) is a start of course, hooked up a with a dozen or so promiscuous web bots it might eventually form a narrative singularity, a black hole of tales, the ultimate collapsing publishing house.

monday 24th of March

Report By Dr Blinn on board the hospital ship h.m.s monad.

Subject: the agent known as 'lent'

Translated by machine to modern english

"L said he did not enter to survey the castle as it would impinge upon the consummate organization of the fleet, but for a long time he stared into the oblivious emptiness and into the density which surrounded him in the weak light. the suggestion of a large bolting device on the considerable wooden gate appeared, he thought of attempting to enter, But was concerned not to nullify his various insurance arrangements or enter into a domain for which he was unqualified and did not have a hard hat. His description is very vivid however, particularly regarding radiating, which leaks out from the structure, which he estimated to be early Norman in origin, motte and the Bailey kind, for which the Normans, into their Nazi kind enterprises frequently deployed English slave labor, in order to construct (where he these information? receives). L said that the 'village inhabitants, that within the range lived, which surrounds the castle, [ the mathematical locus referred frequently too as ' the dip ' ], warned him against entering the structure at any price, but did not themselves appear anxious in its presence, that they had achieved an enviable condition of integration with the monolith in their midst, which made lent feel ' spiritually ' senseless anxious and incompetent. L seems furtive and altogether pre selected in his descriptions, in the cases and in the chronologies regarding this episode he is divided and foggy, he presents with all the non-verbal indications of the adjustment and includes hyperbolized extent, raised frequency and accumulated duration between syllables. "

"Death Voyage, I'm not familiar with the vessel or the mission"

"It was based on the boomerang principal"

Dr Blinn and I are getting on well today, though Blinn shrugs her shoulders when I mention Death Voyage, its obvious she thinks I'm suffering from pathologically false beliefs or just talking through my arse to amuse myself.

"March 2008, Takao Doi a Japanese astronaut based on the International Space Station was the first person to try throwing a boomerang in space, and guess what? It actually came back. The same principal was applied to the mission known as Death Voyage"

"Exploiting the principal of asymmetrical lift and gyroscopic procession?"

"Well that's just the the metaphysical trope if you will"

"Will I? " Dr Blinn is in a peculiarly good mood, she's actually smiling so I just go with the flow

"Whether you will or wont is neither here nor there"

" Whether time's rewards are fair or unfair". Her verbal playfulness is an improvement on the sarcasm of yesterday's session, it makes me wonder if she's finally got her own private consultancy or has just won the Galaxy Wide Lottery ('first prize your own solar system')

"So in 2074 Death Voyage was the make or break project for the European Space Agency, the hundredth anniversary mission of missions"

"No more boring TV-satellite launches or billion-euro bonfires?"

"Now you're getting it, an end to all the tedious intergovernmental shenanigans of the last hundred years, Britain pushing to opt out cos it cant see enough justification for microgravity research etc, bureaucratic in-fighting with the French, escalating costs at Noordwijk. So Death Voyage is born, the mission that will put an end to all the doubts and all the divisive demands to pump the money into hospitals and education instead"

"They had a point"

"Absolutely, but who could say no to a mission that promised to propel six people to death then bring them back to life again?"

Dr Blinn actually looks shocked "The Boomerang principal......I remember now "

" Anyway, isn't the session running over time?"

Behind the thin cubicle wall a buzzer goes off, Dr Blinn reluctantly gets up. Before she goes through the door she stops and turns around "but how...I mean, didn't they all...."

I shrug my shoulders and mime looking at a wrist watch, Dr Blinn shakes her head as she leaves. For a few seconds I'm flushed with a perverse sense of victory but then as I start thinking about Death Voyage the mirage of triumph evaporates. I hadn't thought of the analogy before but when I do I feel a dread and sickness that takes me straight back to Guyane Française with a chill like my first flush of malaria in 2074. The boomerang principal has transported me to another resurrected penal colony, the way station for a different kind of death voyage, a non circular journey which no amount of precess will ever return me from. What happened in the castle was the starting point for this journey;

Its the one thing I mustn't let Blinn find out about.

Its my Sirr al-Asrar .

Emanating from the ramparts.

Luminosity.

"In this experience of intersubjective consciousness beyond ego,
  a momentous leap occurs. It is a leap from I to We ..."

The Fleet or (Collective Transparency) is sustained by a feclicific concretion that evolves higher order complexities in a vast arrangement of social eco systems, its agents and differential engines data-mine individuals in The Mathemagical Locus sometimes known as The Dip, generating an infinitesimal calculus of inter-subjectivities.

H.M.S Monad, an immense and rusty hospital ship floating 20, 000 miles above The Dip, describes itself as a 'rest centre' for the walking wounded, a sanatorium for agents who have been burnt out by their psychically enervating field work on behalf of the Fleet..

Saturday 22nd of March

Report from hospital ship h.m.s monad:

interview with Dr Bliin and the agent known as 'lent'

translated by machine to modern english

'thus didn't this mysterious castle rise in the night from nowhere, right in the middle in the Dip? ' there'd, A luminous kind of mist in which the microphones detected a continuous drone, a low mechanical humming up, as the nebulas exposed this thing was there fair and straight rose from the fog, if this humming clay/tone leaks out out from the RAM parts.' "emanating from the RAMparts" reports Lent. "I did not know which otherwise to say over " ' you wrote: ' it sounds as if there is considerable internal machinery deep within this structure, a nuclear reactor or an underground mill', what did you do next?' ' that which I was trained to do,, I sat and watched out, geschauen it for.' ' for?' ' indications of life as I accept.' ' it says that ' I did not see no one coming or to go, I do not have an idea, how the building received there was designed, how it arisen is unknown to me, I considered to venture into THe Dip, this castle however this to investigate seriously breaks my contract, it also nullifies my different insurance... ' to cancel ' that my understanding was ' so understood you some things, I to mean that your claims for decreased responsibility over there than seem disingenuous' 'what means this means? ' 'it means we to think that the lying gentleman, who is is lent, there something are is not, which of your something, more or less everything of the report, more is missing' ' I am than missed, everyone knows i am discontinuous and missed in mine continuity and have been ill interrupted ' ' okay lent continue we this discussion tomorrow '

The cubicle smells of blood, urine and nail varnish. Sitting as far from me as physically possible, Dr Blinn looks at the stained ceiling and flares her nostrils, she's decided I'm unhelpable or unreachable or whatever words flit through her fragile looking skull. Beyond the pale. Beyond the pale what?

"Emanating from the ramparts?'' Dr Blinn plonks my file down on the low table that separates us. I'm supposed to be worn down by her withering sarcasm, worn into revealing some functional form of truth that can be fed into the ravenous engines of the Fleet.

"'luminosity" I say, injecting an artful shot of pathos into the word, "My mind is too muddled for this, everyone here knows that. I've lost my continuity"

"Ooh" gasps Dr Blinn "your continuity. I'll bring my Grays Anatomy in tomorrow, perhaps we'll find it there"

"My x-rays show it"

"Your x-rays show bullshit Lent"

"Systemic fragmentation, oozing, platelets.. stuff"

"What happened in the castle?" her tone is a little too harsh, she sits up straight to restore the impression of hypocratic decorum.

"Sounds were emanating from the ramparts"

Dr Blinn's eyes go blank, the depthless blue of a crashed computer screen. It's her way of signaling the session is over for today. She picks up my file and walks away without saying a word. I'm left with the feeling that this is a schismatic war of attrition; an intra-psychic conflict whose eventual victor will only edge closer to triumph day by excrutiating day, month on month, year on year, a Somme of silences and belligerent dialogue.

Play file

Tuesday 18th

The fur ball flinches if it thinks you are being rude or aggressive, at the same time its recording your conversation for a more detailed analysis.

monday 17th march

Working with the Auto Blog Engine (beow) is helping me to form a clearer architectural shape for a more intelligent and 'subject oriented system', the diagram above is a schema for a system that will give an emotional and situational weighting to each story, based on the reader and external events occuring at that moment.

sunday 16th march

Auto Blog Engine