socialfiction | psychogeography

Psychogeography On The Boogie

notes on psychogeographical walks past & coming

by socialfiction.org

Yeah

There is this beautiful thing called Notation 3 or N3. It roughly works like this: you have a thing, which can be anything; called a class, about (a part of which) you want to say something, this second part is called an object & between these 2 nodes there is an intermediate node that defines the relation between the class & the object, which is called a predicate. Together these 3 elements are called a triple.

class - predicate - object

N3 was developed as a notation-system for knowledge management in shorthand, that can be translated to RDF, the semantic backbone for the semantic web. The semantic web is an ambitious extension of the current web with a layer of smart data. At its modest the semantic web provides a better method for humans to find exactly what they need among the mass of information on the web then exists today. But just like programming languages as Pyhton or Java are examples of algorithmic languages that happen to be executed on a computer, but which can also be .walked, humans can use N3 for their own purposes, independent of it's supposed use. Because of N3's elegance it allows to express things in a certain way that in certain occasions might be very helpful & eloquent. Just as painters, before painting, make loads of sketches to learn how to draw in the fewest lines possible 'the objectness of an object', the triple let's you describe a thing without the need to bother with ornament &/or style. In a fit of inspiration the triple (to make a bold statement) allows you to sketch your brainwaves with the speed of thought. Triples use normal words, but they are structured as small taxonomies & which are logically equivalent to a graph.    
 
Yeah

The Victorian art critic John Ruskin is well known for the lessons in drawing he gave to uneducated manual labourers. His aim was not to turn them into artists: his sole purpose was to acquaint his workers with a practical experience of the difficulties that accompany the attempt to translate what you see into a drawing. Ruskin believed that his courses made his pupils happier people because their drawing learned them to appreciate the complexities in everyday objects. Ruskins lessons, which were given free of charge, are similar to the psychogeographers urge to take people on a walk: a simple generative walk is supposed to be enough to show in a simple, unobtrusive, self-explanatory way, the richness of your everyday environment if you just care enough to look better.

Yeah

For months we have been annoying people with the finer complexities involved in the Psychogeographical Markup Language(PML) project, one of those typical deluded attempts in mapping everything & everything & then connecting this with everything else, that infects people wanting to get into the semantic web but who are inexperienced with it's practical boundaries. We did several crazy-professor-like PML walks that collected perceptions according to a pre-selected number of tags from a dropdown menu, which combined were hoped to result in the psychogeographical fingerprint of an area. All these walks more or less failed & were, not only because of this, highly unsatisfactory. It was the city of Riga, the Baltic Jamaica, that suggested the answer: & because more acronyms are always better than one less, we call the answer PML3.

Yeah

The Riga walk differed from previous PML walks not only because it used the concepts of the triple but mostly because the goal wasn't pseudo-science by pseudo-artists but a Ruskinesque encounter with the ordinary. This time the walk was a practical exercise in confronting people with the difficulties that arise when you have to formulise your psychogeographical sensibility. PML3, a triple for psychogeography, forsakes the need to compose correct sentences, thereby hopefully enabling a clearer view on the encounters, experiences or associations or observations that wordlessly form in your brain while walking about. PML3 challenges the psychogeographer to pinpoint this shadow in a few sketchy words: some people would call it poetry.

Yeah

As said, every triple is a little taxonomy, a collection of these small taxonomies will at certain points talk about the same things, turning into a chain of collectively composed location specific poetry. A poem that can actually be translated into a format that would make sense to semantic web applications. But that is of minor importance: we are talking here about the confrontation with your personal ability to find words for all that psychogeographic excitement that is raging through your body like it's your birthday.

Yeah

For the freaks! Taxonomical data-modelling is Object Oriented data-modelling. Earlier we jotted down some notes about Object Oriented Psychogeography here:      
http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/ObjectOrientedPsychogeography


Yeah: http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer