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The piece below is meant to be published in the HTV magazine. There's some interesting ideas here, but it was somewhat of a rush job; some things will be reformulated (like the OO metaphor shizzle) when I get to it.

Yonder goes the OOP: Software for Landscapes

From the renaissance onwards space has been rendered according to the specifications of the Euclidian-OS. 'Perspective' was the killer-app of the first revolution in landscape mathematics. Today popular culture is exploring the second groundbreaking shift in framing the space around us. It does this by using software, mathematics that runs on a machine. As psychogeographers we propose OOP ?Object Oriented Psychogeography as one possible application that perspectifies landscape radically different.

OOP will crash your sneakers

Perspective can be said to connect different object dispersed over place in a unifying framework of lines of sight anchored in a hypothetical horizon. OOP is called Object Oriented in a gesture to the programming concept in which algorithms are small objects that talk to each other without mediation of a central command-algorithm. OOP echoes this as it structures landscape by chopping it up in distinct boxes of information that in unison shape a new perspective: the OOP-P ?OOP-Perspective.

Thus OOP is an application that creates ad-hoc horizons that exist independent from the territory around you. But horizon, with all it's Euclidian connotations is the wrong word here; it better be called a vector or a trace, welcome terms as both carry the implication of movement. But the new horizon, the OOP-P, can be understand best as a direction to go elsewhere.

One-way streets are nullpointers

OOP is not meant to extract you from where you are by constantly forcing you to gaze at your pocket screen. Instead, OOP is meant to position you more firmly within your surroundings, by aiding in the mental process of making sense of the space around you. OOP is a project that operates in loving memory of 18th century romantic painters & poets who would indulge in their surrounding landscape like it was their birthday; who would ramble all day through forests & lake districts like it was their birthday. We have lost the ability to feel oceans in all their dept, mountains in all their height & cities in all their mindnumbing diversity as these artists of yore could. After organising countless psychogeographical walks we find it sad to notice that in comparison, as a society, we are nothing but beggars when it comes to the wealth with which we perceive our landscape.

Surveillance Technology in Public Space is a Symptom of this Alienation

Within OOP, all objects are oriented towards PML Psychogeographical Markup Language a widely adapted notation system to record psychogeographical experiences in an interchangeable syntax. The anatomy of a city is fascinating in it's own right: skyscrapers piercing the urban skin are hard to ignore. But PML, as the cardiogram of a city, aims at measuring the underlying processes that shape a city: human interactions as they are suggested by the landscape: be it wild nature or sophisticated urban planning. PML is important within OOP because it's a double edged sword: collective experience in the past, in harmony with other data sources like stories from annotated space databases, guide new psychogeographical experiences ready to be tagged in PML. Without exaggeration OOP can be called a tool of mythopoetics as it will unearth horror & terror at places where you would otherwise pass by like it was just every other ordinary day.

OOP-P After the Turing Test

Experimental pedestrians not tourists will inherit the OOP. Psychogeographical landscape software is an application that teaches us what we have unlearned. Those with a black belt in psychogeography will find OOP a distraction between them & their surrounding, the rest will gradually lean to understand what they mean by that. In it's ultimate instalment, depending on the final arrival of the Quaternion-OS, OOP-P will be rendered by entities possessing artificial intelligence. The resulting interfaces to our landscape would be totally alien to us now, but will seem as normal to the people in the future as Euclidian perspective is to us. But that is social fiction.

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