Taxonomy of my Room

A Study in Roomology

This graph is a taxonomy of my room: a classification, according to my own specifications, of all things in my room. To me this room is an important place, as it is where an important part of my live is being wasted on clueless nerd stuff, like making taxonomies of my room. This taxonomy combines the inventory with the mental map, translated into an object oriented data-model. I would like it to capture the feeling of it as being my home, but that quality is, for now, beyond the means of my abilities in taxonomical expression.

Many people have acquired an on-line identity by maintaining a blog or by subscribing to a social network services like Friendster. These identities remain online while we are gone. I would like to have a web identity for my room as well, so I can visit it when I'm elsewhere. Perhaps I can then feel at home, while grinding away at the office; or if my friends make their rooms available online too, we can connect them & turn them into a house. We can party while we seem to be working.

Personal rooms are rigidly psychogeographically engineered: in our room we are our own Cesar. Rooms mirror our personality, knowing how people live is an intrinsic part of someone's privacy. Being invited to visit someone at home for the first time is therefore always a special occasion. Other peoples rooms can make us feel uncomfortable, at ease or stimulated to do something, like leaving. As this taxonomy is to show: we can be the Linneaus of our room too.

In psychoanalysis the word psychogeography is used to describe location based hysteria: you are perfectly sane, you enter a room and SNAP: within a split second you are stark raving mad. Only if this ability of a room to make people lose their sanity is something that applies universal to all people, and not something that reflects a personal neurosis, it can be called a psychogeographical quality. Can we understand the trigger of such a place-specific emotional response enough to be able to recreate it?

Here is a relevant quote from AL pioneer Chris Langton: "The ultimate goal of artificial life would be to create 'life' in some other medium, ideally a virtual medium where the essence of life has been abstracted from the details of its implementations in any particular model. We would like to build models that are so life-like that they cease to become models of life and become examples of life themselves."  

If it's possible to grasp the soul of a room and make it available online, either as image or as text, we don't recreate space, we recreate experience. This makes it an art and my guess is, that as an art, we are as far advanced in it, as the novel was advanced before Jane Austen started writing. The day we will visit our artificial room on the web while it's in the middle of a monologue intérieure is however still far ahead of us.

We are close to a factual representation of our house on the web, a MIT project like house_n, prototypes a dwelling that is constantly aware of where you are & what you are doing. A dreadful vision, but this sensor data can easily be published online as a continuously flowing feed; taxonomies of rooms, may not be able to express psychogeographical atmospheres, they need little effort to be published in a machine readable framework. All this data relates to each other. You can than query peoples room: "show me the e-mail address of all people with a green room, who live in the proximity of 5 kilometres, who are now behind the computer and have beer in the fridge"; 'they must be nice people'. But all the action is outwards here, manipulations on data representing physical objects; I want to move on to the inside world, move from theatre to literature, I want to share the invisible, I want to share sensibility, but how to express this.

For all its objectivity, this taxonomy does not really express anything about my room, but perhaps it does resemble me more than I can myself tell. This taxonomy consists of the objects and the connections between them: all of which I choose to include or sometimes exclude. Perhaps this taxonomy reflects the way I want you to see me: perhaps this taxonomy is nothing but window-dressing. The artificial room has still to be built.

House_n: http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n
Semantic web: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw