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 is
becomes not just a tool to be a spectator but to actively explore it. We decided to use what we
learned 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 all
the way from the Flaneur, the British pedestrian writers of the Romantic age to the peripatetic
school of Aristotle.

All these influences are folded together in (generative) algorithms like this one:

first street right

second street left
first street left
repeat

In theory walks generated in this way never run into an obstacle that forces the pedestrian to
stop meandering. In reality cities should be redesigned from scratch & people should be made
flawless by genetic modification to reach the situation where the human compliance to the
complexities of an algorithm as a psychogeographical device is perfect. Participation in a
generative psychogeographical experiment forces you to adopt to the characteristics of a
machine, you are pushed through streets like an object in almost closed loops which are
connected by sudden rushes straight forward. There is a sense of alienation involved in
navigating in this manner but that feeling is never realized completely: the algorithm which
should be able to produce a walk without navigational friction repeatedly produces more
confusion than certainty: the algorithm becomes chaos. In this sense a generative
psychogeographical experiment must always fail, it's not pixel clean movement, it isn't a Flash
animation come to flesh, its dirty, it's algorithmic noise & we love it. generative
psychogeography 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 algorithmic

pedestrian culture as a new methodology in psychogeographical action research into all
aspects of the urban condition. The initial results were powerful & suggested such a large field
of possible research that could not do it on our own & therefore declared our algorithm 'open
source'. To make clear that we were serious we announced the Hot Summer of Generative
Psychogeography 2002 as the umbrella under which hundreds of psychogeographical swarms
could 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 'open
source' 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 people
spontaneously cooperating on the same thing is such a powerful way of development, as it
helps you to overcome the limits of your own skills & imagination, we adopted the term
anyway. There is also a more philosophical implication involved in open source that goes
beyond 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 & educational
freedom which are part of a free society. Stanford's Lawrence Lessig 'refrain' captures the
political 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.

Open source & psychogeography were connected from the start. Open source activists claim
that every act of creativity should (eventually) enter the public domain. Psychogeography has
always been about open sourcing the city, to make all parts, all spaces, of the city available to
everybody, to overcome your own habits imposed by social reality, to negate stratification.
Practising psychogeography always implies the right of unrestrained mobility, of creating a
public domain out of otherwise lost urban area's.

The protection of the past from present day creativity does not need to be specifically enforced
by legal actions like the ones the music business employs to crack down on sampling, P2P
networks & bootleg culture. The prohibition of reinterpreting the past might also happen on the
level of symbolic power. The situationists, well known for their scorn for everybody who didn't
think exactly as they did, were the greatest enemies of the further development of
psychogeography because of their dogmatism, the same dogmatism their legacy is defended
with today by some obscurantist zealots: just like a musician can be inspired by Gary Glitter
without borrowing anything from his style the post-freudian, post-surrealist psychogeography
of the situationists has been glamrocked into oblivion by the international network of
psychogeographers that emerged out of the Hot Summer.

The goal of the Hot Summer was to generate creativity by being creative. We didn't want to
protect our creativity for those unworthy like the situationists did, we want it to spread & we
want it to be stolen because it proves to us that it's worthwhile. Anybody who steals our ideas
inspires us to create something new that people want to steal as well. But stealing is the wrong
word here, it was already yours to begin with.

Object 1

After the Hot Summer

The Hot Summer has turned into a lukewarm autumn. Great experiments have been
undertaken in several places, enthusiast people have taken the idea to new places & new
conceptual grounds. Interesting discussions have enfolded on the mailinglist. New collaborators
& new friendship have been made. This not a detailed list of what has happened in the Hot
Summer, if anything this is a manifesto of the larger ideas behind a network of people
dedicated to exploring their environment & the possibilities of algorithms in non-computational
ways. The summer is over but the project endures, the network is still active & the invitation is
still open: Wherever you are & whoever you are: have a look at all the different sites, join in
on the further development of generative psychogeography, take these ideas as the jumping
board for your own activities. Be creative.