23.3.05
Hot Summer of Generative Psychogeography 2002
ALGORITMIC NOISE AS FREE CULTURE: The Hot Summer of Generative Psychogeography 2002 [as experienced by www.socialfiction.org]
Walking is the best way to experience the environment, but how to walk in such a way that is becomes not just a tool to be a spectator but to actively explore it. We decided to use what we learned from the 'Game of Life' & complexity and combine that with the legacy of psychogeography, a sub-cultural strand in the pedestrian culture which can be traced back all the way from the Flaneur, the British pedestrian writers of the Romantic age to the peripatetic school of Aristotle.
All these influences are folded together in (generative) algorithms like this one:
first street right
second street left
first street left
repeat
In theory walks generated in this way never run into an obstacle that forces the pedestrian to stop meandering. In reality cities should be redesigned from scratch & people should be made flawless by genetic modification to reach the situation where the human compliance to the complexities of an algorithm as a psychogeographical device is perfect. Participation in a generative psychogeographical experiment forces you to adopt to the characteristics of a machine, you are pushed through streets like an object in almost closed loops which are connected by sudden rushes straight forward. There is a sense of alienation involved in navigating in this manner but that feeling is never realized completely: the algorithm which should be able to produce a walk without navigational friction repeatedly produces more confusion than certainty: the algorithm becomes chaos. In this sense a generative psychogeographical experiment must always fail, it's not pixel clean movement, it isn't a Flash animation come to flesh, its dirty, it's algorithmic noise & we love it. generative psychogeography is a pleasant state of displacement: it's the city-space cut-up.
Walking is the best way to experience the environment, but how to walk in such a way that is becomes not just a tool to be a spectator but to actively explore it. We decided to use what we learned from the 'Game of Life' & complexity and combine that with the legacy of psychogeography, a sub-cultural strand in the pedestrian culture which can be traced back all the way from the Flaneur, the British pedestrian writers of the Romantic age to the peripatetic school of Aristotle.
All these influences are folded together in (generative) algorithms like this one:
first street right
second street left
first street left
repeat
In theory walks generated in this way never run into an obstacle that forces the pedestrian to stop meandering. In reality cities should be redesigned from scratch & people should be made flawless by genetic modification to reach the situation where the human compliance to the complexities of an algorithm as a psychogeographical device is perfect. Participation in a generative psychogeographical experiment forces you to adopt to the characteristics of a machine, you are pushed through streets like an object in almost closed loops which are connected by sudden rushes straight forward. There is a sense of alienation involved in navigating in this manner but that feeling is never realized completely: the algorithm which should be able to produce a walk without navigational friction repeatedly produces more confusion than certainty: the algorithm becomes chaos. In this sense a generative psychogeographical experiment must always fail, it's not pixel clean movement, it isn't a Flash animation come to flesh, its dirty, it's algorithmic noise & we love it. generative psychogeography is a pleasant state of displacement: it's the city-space cut-up.
# posted by alvaro @ 3:25 p. m. 
