ALGORITMIC NOISE AS FREE CULTURE

[as experienced by www.socialfiction.org]

Summer 2001

Walking is the best way to experience the environment, but how to walk in such a way that isbecomes not just a tool to be a spectator but to actively explore it. We decided to use what welearned from the 'Game of Life' & complexity and combine that with the legacy of psychogeography, a sub-cultural strand in the pedestrian culture which can be traced back allthe way from the Flaneur, the British pedestrian writers of the Romantic age to the peripateticschool of Aristotle.All these influences are folded together in (generative) algorithms like this one:first street rightsecond street leftfirst street leftrepeatIn theory walks generated in this way never run into an obstacle that forces the pedestrian tostop meandering. In reality cities should be redesigned from scratch & people should be madeflawless by genetic modification to reach the situation where the human compliance to thecomplexities of an algorithm as a psychogeographical device is perfect. Participation in agenerative psychogeographical experiment forces you to adopt to the characteristics of amachine, you are pushed through streets like an object in almost closed loops which areconnected by sudden rushes straight forward. There is a sense of alienation involved innavigating in this manner but that feeling is never realized completely: the algorithm whichshould be able to produce a walk without navigational friction repeatedly produces moreconfusion than certainty: the algorithm becomes chaos. In this sense a generativepsychogeographical experiment must always fail, it's not pixel clean movement, it isn't a Flashanimation come to flesh, its dirty, it's algorithmic noise & we love it. generativepsychogeography is a pleasant state of displacement: it's the city-space cut-up.

The technology will find uses for the street on it's own.

On 26th of August 2001 socialfiction.org performed the first experiment in algorithmicpedestrian culture as a new methodology in psychogeographical action research into allaspects of the urban condition. The initial results were powerful & suggested such a large fieldof possible research that could not do it on our own & therefore declared our algorithm 'opensource'. To make clear that we were serious we announced the Hot Summer of GenerativePsychogeography 2002 as the umbrella under which hundreds of psychogeographical swarmscould operate, interact & in general make it more fun/worthwhile/surprising etc.Because we worked with an algorithm it seemed reasonable to borrow the concept of 'opensource' from software development. To open something implies that it was closed beforehand,in our case the code was (literally) on the street from the start. But because the idea of peoplespontaneously cooperating on the same thing is such a powerful way of development, as ithelps you to overcome the limits of your own skills & imagination, we adopted the termanyway. There is also a more philosophical implication involved in open source that goesbeyond the scope of the collaboration of Linux geeks programming Bill Gates out of relevance.Open source has become a key value in the much larger issue of creative & educationalfreedom which are part of a free society. Stanford's Lawrence Lessig 'refrain' captures thepolitical implications of open source best:1)Creativity and innovation always built on the past .2) The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.3) Free societies enable the future by limiting the power of the past.4) Ours is less and less a free society.

Open source is necessary, progress implies it.