Psychogeographical Markup Language: A Speculative System for Landscape Knowledge ManagementPsychogeography is a non-academic field of knowledge production that inquires into the nature and forms of the vast range of effects and sensations that betray the instinctive reaction of the human mind to a landscape. 'Psychogeographical Markup Language' is one proposed framework to document the findings encountered during psychogeographic experiments.
What is Psychogeographical Markup Language (PML)?
PML is a unified system to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about spaces which can be used to compose psychogeograms: diagrammatic representations of psychogeographically experienced space.
PML is the base layer for a psychogeographical content management system that can:
1) Be used to transform a mass of subjective data into an objective representation
2) Be used as an 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 uncover never suspected patterns in the urban fabric
5) Be fired up into a new mythology for urban space
6) Be used to take the fingerprint of a city7) Take us places both physically and conceptually
PML incorporates work done in locative media like annotated space, geo-tagging, mental mapping and collaborative mapping but is different in that it aims at the absurd.Markup what? How?
PML is an open standard that allows psychogeographers to use their own set of tags, to prevent immediate Babylon however, PML does come with a small list of carefully chosen tags to ensure a minimum of exchangeability between datasets. Psychogeography is definitely in need of an abundance of concepts to name & identify different types of space, PML creates handles for researchers to get a grip on various ways of thinking about space from different fields.Places can be perceived as:
- Distinct (when a place is distinct in any way from the surroundings)
- Open (the node present itself as welcoming, it seems to invite your entrance)
- Close (the node present itself as not welcome to visitors)
- Lively (a place seems evolving, a centre for social interaction)
- Ease (a place where you feel at ease, a friendly atmosphere, positive vibes, etc)
- Desolate (a feeling of being at a loss)
- Hectic (too many sensory perceptions)Most of these labels will sound familiar to the reader of writers in urban theory like Kevin Lynch, Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs. The suggestion to tag with colours, "this street is limegreen to me", is mentioned solely to get your imagination going. The 2 following pair of tags add some more substantial spice.
Terror (“Expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life“)
Horror ("contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them")
The Terror/Horror distinction was first made in Ann Radcliffe's essay 'On the Super-natural in Poetry', first published in 1826. This distinction added shades to the robustness of the Sublime as defined by Edmund Burke: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite to idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotions which the mind is capable of feeling.".Stim ("a point of stimulation")
Dross ("a space that is ignored, a wasted space")
Stim & dross are terms coined by Lars Lerup. Here are some quotes from his Book 'After the City' (2000) to give these terms their context.
"The metropolis, like the surface of a lake during a rainstorm pocked by thousands of concentric ripples, is bombarded by a million stims that flicker on and off during the city's rhythmic cycles."
"Pools of cooled air dot the plane, much like oases in deserts. Precariously pinned in place by machines and human events, these pools become points of stimulation -stims- on this otherwise rough but uninflected hide, populated only by the dross - the ignored, undervaluated, unfortunate residues of the metropolitan machine. Space as value, as locus of events, as genius loci, is then reduced to interior space, a return to the cave. In these enclaves or stims, time is kept at bay, suspension is the rule, levitation the desire..."When using PML, to capture impressions during a psychogeographic walk for instance, the only guideline given to participants is to not actively find any of these attributes in a space, but instead to forget the whole PML-thing all together. When running into something worthy of being tagged you will remember the scheme and have good reason to use it.
Dynamic Urban Data
All scenes that can be monitored from a window can be tagged in PML for longer periods of time, with little extra effort. Groups can go out for a psychogeographic walk and collectively create a layered set of observations that could be said to be a fingerprint for an area at a specific moment.
At the time of the conception of PML (late 2003), bottom-up tagging strategies were a thing very much up in the air with several small projects, using this idea to allow users to store and find object like bookmarks and pictures in novel but powerful manner, seeking the limelight. A few years later the strength of such non-hierarchical pattern formation systems, self-organising clusters of information built from user-defined tags as its atoms, has gathered a lot of leverage, both conceptually and economically. These developments piggyback on something much larger: the semantic web as proposed by the WorldWideWeb Consortium headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the WWW. The semantic web is an infrastructure of (machine readable) data formats that dispersed in different world domains (yet all sharing underlying abstraction) add semantic meaning to otherwise formless text strings. A crowd of formats exist already and PML was to be part of it.
In the same period location (route finders, map and mapping services) was being 'discovered' as the new dotcom Klondike. Simultaneously artists, activists and grasroots software developers inhibited this double field of interest and quite successfully learned to use these high-end knowledge-management tools for there own end, enabling communities to collaboratively generate and share content in dynamic ways that would have been much harder to accomplish just a few years ago. The Locative Media Lab, a somewhat Rosicrucian initiative resulting from a Montreal/Riga cross-pollination of ideas, was founded around this time too. In concentrated bursts of activity the Locative Media Lab brought and created a madly talented international group of people that in some way or other tried to widen the boundaries of the ways space can be represented, used, experienced, perceived. The Headmap manifesto by Ben Russell, a poetic hodgepodge of techno-shamanism and Songline-optimism, written a few years earlier was perhaps the most important of all the sparks that created the spirit from which the Locative Media Lab arose. PML only makes sense when understood in the context (and the sense of importance that permeated the activities of the participants) of the Locative Media Lab, which, it seems, has already dissolved in the franticness with which ideas in technology come and go.
One of the recurring themes within locative media is the need for physical spaces to attain virtual attachments or annotations. A desire that when realised brings with it the need for accurate cartographic data. The best example of the ability of independent developers to allow people to built up knowledge collaboratively is the English OpenStreetMap.org project. By layering GPS traces submitted by individual users, maps of entire cities are created as a result, street patterns which then can be labelled with their names and other noteworthy info. OpenStreetMap fills several gaps, most of them created by people working with the very material that creates the possibility of such a project at all. There exists in Europe a unfulfilled need for free cartographic data. The fact that governments produce this data but do not allow it to be in the public domain has been interpreted by some as that legally you do not have the right to know where you are, at least not for free. An opinion that nicely plays tricks with the common fear that with location aware technologies increasingly becoming part of our lives privacy will disappears: you never know who knows where you are. The fact is that this data is expensive to produce, and few countries have the legislation (the US being the biggest exception, that requires that everything produced by governmental bureau’s must be in the public domain. This is why you can freely download pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope for a Million dollars a piece a few hours after they has been snapped. For the same reason you can download as much high quality US cartographic data as you can stomach. The crucial point here is that the availability of this data has enabled all sorts of creative uses from which society at large can profit.
The joys of standardised machine readable data (XML/RDF) is that it allows others to take this data, interpret it and do something with it, independent from you. The semantic web emerges when these streams of data are used, in combination with other independently created streams, and new meaning from these separate fragments is inferred. So a street once tagged with PML can be used to create realities by others in ways you yourself would never have imagined. Only in pandemonium data like PML can really start to live.
Psychogeodynamic ObjectsIn the course of 2003-2005 several attempts have been made to turn PML from a spectre into something slightly more real. But time after time the stuff it tries to catch, crumbled as soon as language touched it.
What PML tries to do is severe from a space a number of places with distinct feels. Yet this very issue of pinpointing a place apart from its surrounding is a ridiculous monstrosity that only comes natural to urban planners and their professional preoccupation that all suboptimal functioning territory most be identified and wiped clean. PML as urban anatomy would be a false understanding of its goal, its true purpose is to function like a meteorological instrument, like a barometer that changes form with invisible conditions, PML gives away the presence of pulses of activity below the radar of ordinary perception.
Several experiments suggested that the very act of tagging, which is to say the act of naming sensations, is a great aid in becoming aware of the barely noticeable jumps and shift in seemingly constant environments. Precisely describing the begin and the end of such bubbles of psychogeographic energies however does not follow the neat constraints posed by GPS coordinates, street names, postal codes or other tokens of location. PML led to the concept of a psychogeodynamic object, a blurry edged location, a psychogeographic qualia, that with it carries the remembrance that personal experiences, and the psychical proximities that define it, are to be included in the equation: they are not tangible objects but force fields.
Are you Down with the OPL?
"Language is a Virus from Outer Space" William Burroughs said, and as a direct consequence of the rigid structure and limited vocabulary of PML, research led to the construction of the Landscape Expression or L-Expression. A rather daft project that borrowed its syntax from the LISP programming language. If you happen to be familiar with it you will know what to expect from the L-Expression's syntax: maddening amounts of embedded "(" and ")". A quote from the explanational blurb shows the emphasis in this language on it being flexible enough to capture observations in a fluid format determined on the spot, its final form mimicking the flights of fancy of your stream of consciousness. "The Landscape-Expressions creeps and crawls through the problem space of landscape representation, with the light-footed versatility usually attributed to centipedes. The Landscape-Expression is a linguistic exoskeleton that encapsulates self-defined segments of perception: angle, mood, shape, history, movement, sense of perception and what have you can added endlessly to the description of the landscape you are describing." The L-Expression crystallises as you go about, giving up in the process the hope to be easily interpreted by others later. PML is more shelve-like, tending, without actually wanting to, to instruct you how to label the things you find, so others can find it too, without your help.
Virgina Woolf once wrote that in literature the appreciation of landscape should never be communicated directly but solely by suggestion. Only when hinted at sideways can the feel of a landscape be experienced by the reader, allowing her to rebuilt what is suggested in one’s minds eye from memory. Working with PML seemed to confirm this. It is a very Proustian thing: excessive description can bore you while one whiff can be enough to evoke entire psychogeodynamic objects in your imagination.
Where Psychogeography is heading to?
Landscape (the sun reflected on the ocean, the beach mingling with the stormy water mingling with the air amorphous as in the best William Turner pictures) can make man commit a murder, as one reading of a famous Albert Camus novel suggests. A room can cause madness in a otherwise sane person, a condition called Location Based Emotionality. The supernatural (including superstition, mythology and religion) has been rationalised as attempts to anthropomorphise strong psychogeographic effects. Interestingly this argument is used by Catholics clergy to denounce exorcism, while a landscape poet like William Wordsworth gave this explanation as one cause leading to the invention of art. This theory has another benefit too: it conclusively explains why ghosts are more often spotted in gothic castles than dull residential area's.
After laying dormant as a socio-historical artefact for a few decades, psychogeography is yet again an exciting field for artistic research. Freed from old dogma's, no longer limited to a narrow domain, the political interpretation of architecture for example, PML is a project that uses this new space to extend the scope and depth of psychogeographic research.
PML was a definite but instructive failure and now, early 2006, it is closed chapter, but psychogeography is a study of first causes and the investigations into them continue.
socialfiction.org
www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography
www.headmap.com
www.openstreetmap.org
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html
http://space.frot.org
http://www.locative.org