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PMLBRAINDUMP your PML braindump

After laying dormant within obscurantist circles for the last few decades, psychogeography, that joyful combination of peripatetic hedonism & cartographic sadism, is again a living practise. This revival takes place alongside recent developments in fields as diverse as outdoor gaming, location based services & graffiti. All these practises reflects the need for new ways of using, experiencing & understanding the ever changing city.

One important direction modern psychogeography is taking is the development of systems that can display the psychogeographical landscape of a city without having the need to describe the shape of the city that caused the psychogeography. Or in other words: instead of talking about the anatomy of individual cities it wants to extract data from the city as a persistent body of continuing processes: doing psychogeography thus becomes the possibility to, metaphorically speaking, measure the heartbeat & blood pressure of a city. Of course in the human body blood pressures are different for everybody, but for all humans apply the same boundaries of what is considered healthy. It would be interesting to see if it’s possible to determine the ideal conditions that support a healthy urban system. Jane Jacobs already postulated this kind of research in the 60-ties.

PML (Psychogeographical Markup Language) is a notation system meant to do all of the above. It’s not at all finished at present, but here follows in rough sketch how it’s proceedings are envisaged. PML starts with a list of recommended markups that identify beyond doubt a certain experience-based quality of urban space. These markups are not placed in a fixed dropdown menu that floats around in the corner of your mind’s eye while wandering about. They are recommendations only, it’s use being experiment-specific. Current tags include: “stim”, “dross”, “horror”, “terror”, “open”, “closed”, most of them taken from acknowledged writers in urban theory (Jacobs, Lerup, Lynch, Radcliffe).

Once a small set of markups is selected, psychogeographers start swarming through the area; they are not trying to find the experiences that come with the tags. They only mark them when they really feel the markup is a valid tag equivalent to their experience. After a certain time everybody comes back together. The various lists of markups can than be layered on top of each other, usually with the name of the street as the binding element. In this way PML tries to distill an objective psychogeographical image of a territory by clustering many small subjective observations into one file. In this way the particular, the freak-incident, is cancelled out from the from the average.

Once a PML dataset for an area has been compiled it can be used in several ways. The results can be translated into a psychogeogram: a diagrammatic representation of psychogeographically experienced space. Or in other words: a psychogeogram is the cardiogram of a territory.

The resulting data can be shared on the internet, preferably in a format that complies to the standards used in the development of the ‘free information network’, more commonly known as the semantic web. This has several benefits, once your data is ready for the semantic web you can also combine it with other data about the same area your PML data is about, in this way adding more knowledge to your psychogeogram. Secondly you add to the available knowledge about an area, thereby improving the precision of future psychogeograms. Thirdly, by making this data available you ultimately add to the knowledge of cities in general, cities that can than be compared, analysed, etc.

Translating the experience of cities into a small number of categories is in many ways a blatant contradiction to the general aim of psychogeography. On the other hand, PML is impossible enough to give it a try. More importantly: PML, as a tool developed in the public domain, might play an important role in the development of a participatory urban design. PML enables non-specialists to make reasonable statements about urban space: with PML anybody can get their second opinion if the one put forward by the urban planner doesn’t seem right.

http://socialfiction.org/psychogeography/PML.html

PMLBRAINDUMP your PML braindump

# posted by alvaro @ 11:53 p. m.