Thursday, October 2, 2003 Simon Reynolds (who is one of the best music critics I can think of & is blogging here) inspired me to add a new phrase to my vocab here on this FUNtastic & [aaahhh] blog: ESKI (that's for cool as an eskimo). I just thought you should know. Reynolds also points out to a new article on Hyperdub which I missed earlier: on indian influences in modern hip hop; An eski diwali riddim anyone? http://www.hyperdub.com/softwar/bhangra.cfm

Thursday, October 2, 2003 PML version 0.02; it's getting more complex everyday this thing. What's it good for? what does it mean? is it eski? I have no idea. The most important aspect of it all is how to parse these PML datasets. Between you & me, I'm trying to learn java, in order to built an application that could do this. But at my current speed of learning this will be finished around 2060 [aaahhhh]. if you have read the previous version you only need to read the "markup tags" bit. PML (Psychogeographical Markup Language) What is PML? PML is a protocol that contains unified metadata about urban space recorded during psychogeographical drifts. PML is the system behind the data-structure of the psychogeogram: the diagrammatic representation of both informational, physical & emotive aspects of urban space. PML is a psychogeographical content management system that can 1) be turned into a knowledge base on urban environments 2) be used as engine that, after being fed certain parameters, generates new psychogeographical drifts 3) be used to develop further a cartography that negates the territory 4) be datamined to show never before suspected patterns in the urban fabric   5) be used to transform a mass of subjective data into an objective representation 6) be fired up into a new mythology for urban space PML is related to work done in fields like annotated space, geo-tagging & the semantic web, but is different by intent. That is not to say that databases can't be migrated between platforms & turned into a poly-source for a Venn-diagram of experiences. How to mark up / what to mark up? What emotive qualities are worthy of being mentioned in the PML specifications? Should the PML contain tags that mark-up place according to beauty & ugliness? Or must PML concentrate on other concepts with which to regard space: distinctions, openness, liveliness, urbanity, crowds, generic landscape, the presence of advertisements or other messages, architecture, trajectories, traces .... PML needs an abundance of concepts to name & identify aspects of the city before the beta-version can be released.   One or several PML datasets must be parsed by a software device to be made legible. Dedicated software does not yet exist, but propriety software like Krackplot, Graphvis & others can do some tricks we want. Propriety software pushes it's own dataset standards, which means less freedom in constructing our own. At socialfiction.org we contemplate on using .walk to parse PML. Markup Tags PML header specifies about what area the data is valid & the PML standard being used. Not to become tedious but you can well get into the situation that everybody is using their own PML protocol; with chaos as a result. Also to be included could be the number of psychogeographers that have delivered data. This can also be specified for every node specific. If a street has a frequency of 6 in a bolagram that only makes sense if you know how many agents had a chance to evaluate this; freq 6 out of 6 is impressive, freq 6 out of 50 is lousy. Attributes of a node: spatial dimension (inside, outside, level)   urban dimensions (downtown, suburb, ghetto) with subtags (centre, periphery) aural dimensions (noisy, quiet),        Visual dimension (graffiti, adverstiment) invisible dimension (open wi-fi nodes) narritive dimension (annotations) Distinctiveness Openness Liveliness    Connections Architecture reference PML builds upon recent work done on the psychogeogram. http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/psychogeogram.html     The spacenamespace project by Jo Walsh is especially instructive as it reviews a urban mark up language from a XML/RDF point of view & because it has pioneered in applying bots to map urban space http://space.frot.org AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) developed by Dr. R. Wallace contains useful pointers about how to set up the PML syntax & in which ways PML can be made to be recursive when responding to unknown input. AIML is also based on XML.   Tutorial: http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/pics/wallaceaimltutorial.html To Think About Datastructure: an XML dialect, based on .walk?   Interface: how do agents record data, where does this data end up? & how?   Accessibility of data contained in PML: Visualisation: network cartography?, diagrams?, clickable (geo-correct) maps); Bots? Version 0.02 Socialfiction.org, oct 2003 Let us know what you think: info at socialfiction dot org

Thursday, October 2, 2003 In reaction to the previous post on old travel reports Justin has sent me a fascinating link to a scholary text that discusses the simularity between the narrative structure of Nintendo games & the travelogues of the old seafaring explorers. http://www.rochester.edu/College/FS/Publications/FullerNintendo.html The funny thing is that when I was reading a bit in The Pilgrims Progress (only this morning during breakfast, thank you) it occured to me that the narrative resembles your typical computergame: advancing from level to level, learning stuff while finding your way through dangerous territory & which at the same time is a preparation for later levels. Of course the lit. types will analyse Bunyans work from the viewpoint of the bildungsroman. The travel here is not spatial but spiritual; the pilgrimage of Christian happens in the dream of the narrator. The bit I was reading, is when Faithfull gets killed after running into trouble with beelzebubs amigo's at the Vanity Fair. After he died the Eternal One sent him directly to heaven, while Christian has to struggle on to find his path to the Celestial City. What does this mean? this means that God programms for the konami platform & that in the pilgrims game the cheat code is deing at the right spot.

Wednesday, October 1, 2003 Found a portugese translation of the .walk for dummies text on the Brazilian Indymedia site, that's [aaahhh] FUNtastic!: http://brasil.indymedia.org/pt/blue/2003/09/264380.shtml

Wednesday, October 1, 2003 ODDITIES This day is a good surfing day The Mandelbrot Monk http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/udo.htm http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/WhosCounting/whoscounting010401.html Found here: http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/ Sir Thomas Brown Never heard of this man before, but this is an excellent site about what seems to be an interesting writer, living at the end of 17th century. Found it with google while looking for old travel memoires. This site contains texts by his hand as well as from others. Take a look: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/ His skull is on-line here:here

Wednesday, October 1, 2003 No, I'm not turning religious, it's further research into the cultural history of the walk. I'm reading John Bunyan's (1628-1688) famous book 'The Pilgrim's Progress' & I have to admit that it's pretty good, or to be a bit more to the point: it's a pretty good read. These calvinistic dudes can be so hilarious in the expression of their F.A.I.T.H. that it's FUNtastic. This is how it starts: As I walked through the wilderness of this world.. & short after this the action kicks in: I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from Heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee, my wife, and you, my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered... With the sweet Lord (so full of compassion) ready to exterminate his wife & children, he leaves them behind in their Sodom while Christian set's out to his pilgrimage to the Celestial City. The story that enfolds is more like a fairytale than enything else. It's just wicked. Wouldn't it be great to be like Bunyan & write stuff with amazing titles like: Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded, Justification by an Imputed Righteousness, Antichrist and his Ruin, Seasonable Counsel - or Advice to Sufferers, & so on; not even DJ Spooky could come up with this dopamine-style titles. Bunyan, like his fellow zealots make the apocalyps sound like so much fun that you just can't wait till it finally arives. Read everything Bunyan has ever written here: http://www.johnbunyan.org/ This is the pilgrims portal: http://www.pilgrimsprogress.org.uk The Catholic Encyclopedia has a very big entry on pilgrimage, including a large list of sacred places & relics to pilgrimage to. They don't mention Bunyan, but hey! he is from the other side of the schism. The entry starts with the suggestion that it originates as a pagan cult! http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12085a.htm

Wednesday, October 1, 2003 This is wicked: they are tracking 35-40 cars in Calgary as they move. The image changes every 30 seconds. http://itracksolutions.com/onlinedemo.html But I'm watching it now 8.42 in the morning, meaning it's in the middle of the night over there. So not much happening.

Tuesday, September 30, 2003 The Jungle AAA is supporting this: http://www.space4peace.org

Tuesday, September 30, 2003 [AAAHHH] — [Aaahhh] Fanzine, issues 1, 2 & 3 Collaborate publication project of anti-anti.net & Socialfiction.org [Aaahhh] a modern mythology of the street picture The city, the street & the disco are 3 terms which lie in each other's extension. No stupefaction that 'Urban' the vogue word of today is & on all three can beat. The negro is a icoon & reference for a long time no more to skin colour. A negro is the tone picture of style, style with the capital letter S of Sex. Get used there but to ladies & lords: the negro is the modern griffioen. Get used also but fixed to bleekscheten & provincials that Netherlands 15 years will get its first female minister-president & that she will be Moroccan & that she will carry hoofddoekje. There but to houten klazen & tensed up dansmariekes get used: the ichiban disco[unt ] socialist strijder the disco::icoon will be of following summer-jam. What necessary has the city, the street & the disco a new mythology is: a mythology which will make the street picture. Forget the trend watcher & undertake [ Aaahhh ]. In this serial of 3 notebooks graphic designer Derk Reneman & culture hacker Wilfried Hou Je Bek show the mythology of this year. Inform now in advance to those boys for the next issue, before it is too late. Translation by Freetranslation.com

Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Some commercial sound.walks through new york offered by different companies: Talking Street Soundwalk In the mean while the good folks in Canada are doing a project called TeleTaxi for which they bought a touch screen navigation system & added artworks to the system that are triggered by location. http://year01.com/teletaxi

Thursday, September 25, 2003 TELEGEOGRAPHY geowankers stuff this is: most informtaion is only available by subscription but this site does contain some hard to get information on the topology of telephonenetworks & trafic density. Have a look at these maps for instance: submarine cable map European Terrestial network map more here

Thursday, September 25, 2003 BOO! Selector REWIND!! REWIND!! MORE FIRE!! MORE FIRE!! BOMBA CLOT!!! [AAAHHH] "Pirate stations like Xtreme are proliferating. According to the Radio Communications Agency, the government organisation that polices the airwaves, there are 209 UK pirates, 181 of which are in London. They have more than doubled in the past 15 years. It's an increasingly lucrative game. Advertisers pay around £120 a week each, and stations can gross up to £3,000 a week. But the rewards don't stop there: everyone at Xtreme knows that if you're good enough, and play your cards right, this is a stepping stone to a champagne lifestyle, a media career, a No 1 record, fame and fortune. This is Pop Idol, ghetto-style. " http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0309/msg00107.html

Thursday, September 25, 2003 A usefull website in relation to the previous post is this metadata glossary that sets your head straight about: RDF, taxonomy, knowledge base, topic maps & others. So don't blabber about metadata & get ready for some metadata on metadata systems [aaahhh]

Wednesday, September 24, 2003 GO TO:: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Wren http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Boswell http://www.thinkingmaterials.com http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/discover/archive_features/17.shtml http://www.unifon.org/shaw-alfa.html http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/09/18/0410238.shtml?tid=126&tid=188&tid=192&tid=95 http://www.nat.org/dashboard/ http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21 http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/etext/hakimbey/hakim-bey--overcoming-tourism.htm http://www.msnbc.com/news/965292.asp?cp1=1 http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1003/wis/index.html

Wednesday, September 24, 2003 Added another highlight in the cultural history of the walk to socialfiction yesterday. Earlier posted texts by Petrarch, Walser, Hazlitt, Stevenson amongst others, are now accompanied by 'Walking' first published in the Atlantic in 1862 & written by Henry David Thoreau. It's a excellent essay combining echo's of romantic poetry: solitude, love of nature & a wordsworth quote with the anarchic ranting we expect from Thoreau. A quote: "I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels." the full txt here: http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/thoreau.html more history of walking is to be found here: http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/index.html

Tuesday, September 23, 2003 GO TO:: http://www2.netcetera.nl/~iaaa/home.html http://halflives.adc.rmit.edu.au/haunt/hl033.html http://www.alessandrobavari.com/gallery1/gallery1.htm http://www.m.rivm.nl/ Doug Coupland http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1047277,00.html http://www.geocities.com/coloryourcity/

Tuesday, September 23, 2003 Alvaro Munoz (with a ~ on top of the n) has developed a new & FUNtastic looking diamond shape graph-technique. But of course what I started to think when I saw this: wouldn't this be great mapping-tool for future psychogeograms? have a look: http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/2003/18aug03/18graph.html Jo posted the Dordrecht streetgram to the infamous geowankers-list & Kake Pugh dropped some links in return on a project she had been working on that was basicly the same as my own network cartography set-up. But she stopped working on it because as she wrote: she couldn't get Graphvis (the same software I use) to display information properly. Perhaps this has got to do with the fact she uses a on-line form to insert data into the gram, instead marking-up the lay-out by hand. I'm not all to happy about using this software like this either, but it does offer some different lay-out options that work pretty well considering the fact that it's wasn't made to do what I do with it. Have a look a Kake's effort: http://the.earth.li/~kake/cgi-bin/mapping-simple/index.cgi

Tuesday, September 23, 2003 kate armstrong is throwing a party & all psychogeographers are invited. http://www.phrint.com/kate/preamble/index.html To bad that their special airplane is not taking us to Vancouver. (insert relevant emoticon here:[ ] for not being able to get my ass over there).

Tuesday, September 23, 2003 A recurrent question during the n5m meet-up of geo-fanatics: what about privacy? what about the obvious authorative uses possible with GPS-technology. I think that I think that it is true that we need a new concept of what privacy means: but this story disgusts me: http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/32936.html & then we are not even discussing face-recognition[aaahhh] *** One a lighter note, the fun people of FUNtastic have a new fun webfunsite http://www.funk-the-system.net/funtastic.html Doesn't that make you FUNny? [fffuuunnn] *** & some people have bothered to take the lid off the situationists from the place where they were doing so well: the dustbin of history. http://ourmayday.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SI well... good luck to them.

Thursday, September 18, 2003 The dutch farmer [aaahhh] is slowly becoming a blog household phenomena [aaahhhh] Anne is blogging the Tobias Next Five Minutes - PsychoPresentationality - link & adds some interesting blogs of people who might as well have been there but weren't. http://www.daimi.au.dk/~martinl/ http://www.ashleyb.org/ http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/ can I say I remind you that Tobias c. Van Veen is the real Dutch farmer here! all Dutch farmers who take their trade serious moved to Canada ages ago. [ooohhh] & dudes; will add above links to my own link mania later

Thursday, September 18, 2003 Marc Tutors from GPSter.net has written a new txt on his favorite subject: geograffiti & locative media. check it out here's is a quote: "Like the graffitists before them, geograffitists of the future might re-appropriate the city’s junk, except in the latter case it will be through the medium of radio and the Internet rather than cement and spray paint. Contemporary urban space has become awash with spectrum garbage. Since radio waves tend to broadcast on a fixed frequency from a fixed location it is conceivable that with a little mapping one could triangulate ones position at the intersection of this radio pollution –this technique makes GPS technology accurate to several meters anywhere in the world and similar techniques have been demonstrated to be accurate to several meters using the 802.11b protocol of the wireless Internet nodes that are currently mushrooming throughout the urban environment (Hightower & Borriello, 2001). In combination with Internet-ready telephony this do-it-yourself location-awareness could allow for people to post and receive geograffiti messages to open database servers (such as www.GPSter.net) turning their surveillanced, sanitized city centers back into collective territories again."

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 This is weird: catholic anti-demonic psychogeography from an excorcist point of view ![aaahhh] "As a faithful Catholic, I am very interested in understanding the idea of place as it relates to Spiritual Warfare (demonic infestation of place, cleansing of place, etc.) from a Catholic point of view. Father Amorth mentions such things but says they are generally outside the sphere of Catholic interest or teaching, though he would like to see that change." "It is true that places can be "imprinted", I believe, with evil. Demons certainly strongly desire to be attached to something as we see in the Bible with the demons, Legion, asking Jesus to send then to the pigs instead of to the abyss." & more of this wickednes here here

Wednesday, September 17, 2003 "Two people lose each other while wandering through the aisles of a large supermarket. The height of the shelves precludes aisle-to-aisle visibility. One person wishes to find the other. Should that person stop moving and remain in a single visible site while the other person continues to move through the aisles? Or would an encounter or sighting occur sooner if both were moving through the aisles?" http://www.newscientist.com/lastword/article.jsp?id=lw107 |||||||||||| + JUMP LONDON + THE SKATEBOARD & THE CITY + JUBILEE LINE EXTENSION(2000)

Tuesday, September 16, 2003 Some of the accusations against Giordano Bruno: 1) negating transubstantiation. 2) doubting Mary's virginity 3) living in heretic countries (Swiss and England) 4) writing the "expulsion of triumphant beast" against the pope 5) claiming the existence of numerous and eternal worlds 6) believing in reincarnation and the possibility for a soul to have two bodies 7) looking at magic as a good and permitted thing 8) Identifying the holy Ghost and the World soul 9) claiming that Moise simulated his miracles and invented the Law 10) saying that the holy scripture is just a dream 11) saying that, at the end of time, even the demons will be saved 12 believing in the existence of Preadamites 13) saying that Christ is not God, but a magician and a deceiver, and that he deserved to be hanged (yes hanged...) 14) saying that prophets and apostles were all magicians, and that they all knew a bad ending.. Jungle AAA & Bruno thanx remi

Monday, September 15, 2003 For everybody who wonders about spencer-browns system discussed in the "cracking the urban cheat code" txt; this is what it looks like: ( ((a) ((a) b)) ) b transcription (a) ((a) b) b involution (a) ( ) b pervasion (a) b ( ) dominion Weird stuff. did add a new graphic: streetgram organised in clusters. the locative meet up was awesome: it was great meeting edward, ben from headmap, jo, tobias (and some others whose I right can't think off like the guy who made the picture in the previous post) & seeing saul, esther & marc again. It was pretty mindblowing & I guess that like everybody else I found this real stimulating days. The festival was so-so, but I did see a good presentation of Acmi{{parc}} & of K-roy's nanofest"

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