We are looking for a kind of knowledge emerging from relations.
Moving sounds, moving fragments. The interplay of distances
that create the semantic fields.
Populated ocean of intensities... Last night
the shifter, i only could see its light, passing, and a dark structure.
We know by trajectories. le code délirant, ou désirant, présente
une extraordinare fluidité
(antiOedp, Deleuze nd Guattari 21)
We begun to use our machines in order to feel and record the presence of emanations, the body of currents and concentrations out of the social body. Moving as magma, transforming with cold and heat.
Like hot and dark matter, cities interpreted by her ambiances, repetition of practices, moving distances between things, layers of history, collading scales and landscapes. Everything that could be seen as fluid was of our interest.
We were thinking of a self regulated society, we started the idea of
discovering the valves, to adjust, or to monitor in order to understand what is happening in society at large and in society regarding the different subjectivities that live in it and build it. Society as a homeostat, we needed to make calculations, checking the environment, to be aware of social oscillations, changes of frequencies and magnitudes.
// Example of homeostatic network:
// Ashby's homeostat
// four units reciprocally interconnected
// roberto toro (2003) 4 // number of units
// unit #1
4 0.1 // working point, time constant
3 // number of connections
2 1.0 0 // conn #1
3 1.0 0 // conn #2
4 1.0 0 // conn #3
// unit #2
4 0.1 // working point, time constant
3 // number of connections
1 1.0 0 // conn #1
3 1.0 0 // conn #2
4 1.0 0 // conn #3
// unit #3
4 0.1 // working point, time constant
3 // number of connections
1 1.0 0 // conn #1
2 1.0 0 // conn #2
4 1.0 0 // conn #3
// unit #4
4 0.1 // working point, time constant
3 // number of connections
1 1.0 0 // conn #1
2 1.0 0 // conn #2
3 1.0 0 // conn #3
Une machine organe est branché sur une machine source : l'une emet un flux que l'autre coupe ... Tout fait machine (27)
Selfregulation of society comes from the coupling of machines.
We are language machines (Maturana and Varela, 1973), second order machines, selfregulated ontoities.
Our existence is a coordination of coordinations, we grow and develop in language and linguistic relations. Societies could be seen as nests of this coordinations containing different cybernetic orders.
As in Cybersyn (Allende-Beer 1971-73), is possible to see aplications of cybernetics in social processes, the aplication in this case of homeostatic laws of ultrastability (Ashby, 1950).
Epistemology: knowledge, human perception is based in a coupling (couplage) conscience-body-environment.
"on the one hand we need to address our condition as bodily processes: on the other hand we are also an existence wich is already there, a Dasein, constituted as an identity, and which cannot leap out and take a disimbodied look at how it got to be there" (Varela, 1991).
The presence of change and revolution increases as concentration of sugar. We are all in the empty square waiting for the numbers to be right. We are adding devices to places in order to create and multiply them. We are trusting on the expectation the found patterns create (28) , out of the projection of new abstract patterns we will match the right position for creating an oriented splitting.
Subversive palindrome//(29)
The scream amplified in the sound patch, modulated with a palindrome
function was able to confuse the police. We were at a huge
demonstration, they were coming so close with their dogs and sticks.
The first operation a massive sampling of the environment with our
mobile telephones, the barking, the motors, their anxiety. Then a
successful sending and retrieval with the antenna stuck to my bike.
Turn the sound system as loud as possible, inverting the sounds,
propagating clusters of mirrors, the dogs start to go after their
tails, the police remain paralyzed, their eyes spinning in circles.
Some look dizzy, some start to walk backwards...
Patterns, active keys that would be transposed into the environment. Active patterns, transformational holes and spirals.
Generative rhythm: Signals, patterns of enthusiasm from self-organised groups, from the self-organised body!. When the desire machine begins to work together, exchanging signals, rhythms, expanding.
Ever-expanding currents (or chords) of thoughts and ideas.
Waiting till global synchronization, somebody says: is a matter of callibration.
We needed a moving system in order to trace the positions...
Checking the shifters, the movement inside different semantic structures. At various levels calculations are being made, even in basic semantic structures, like simple dayly routines through patches connected to different signal sources.(30)
Guattari in his essay On machines (1993) defines the shifters: "those elements of language which exist not to provide a meaning, but to mark the subject of the enunciation of the utterance. Lacan himself had also made use of this performative function. In a way, it is through this type of operator that he constructed his theory of full speech and the symbolic relationship" p11
Shifters are words that have no objective, determinate reference,
outside of a specific instance of discourse.
Shifters include words that establish position in space relative to the speaker addressee, and points in time relative to the time of the discourse's occurence. The temporal orientation also therefore includes not just lexical monads like adverbs but the entire tense/aspect system of the verbs. (31)
Repetition generates intensive fields///////////////////// (32). Lefevbre, elements d'rhythmanalyse (1992): a method will be developed to know and to appropriate rhythms. rhythmanalisis will replace psychoanalysis, more concrete, more efficient, closer to a pedagogy of appropriation (of the body, and of spatial practice).
In rhythms , repetitions and redundances, symetries and assymetries we found concentrated information, energy, concentration of numbers, concentration of references.
rhythm does not have an organ, its an interaction, a rhythm envelopes places but is not a place, its not a thing or a sum of things, neither a simple flux.(33)
There are categories in rhythmanalysis that should be used methodically:
repetition and difference
mecanic and organic
discovery and creation
cyclic and linear
continuous and discontinuous
quantitative and qualitative (34)
We called Arrays (35), the nodes where positions of subjects are jointed. In this nodes come together gestures, positions, locations. Pulsating corners, auras of meaning in this crossing of presences of one before the other. A "mobile section of duration" (what Bergson would refer to as spatialized time) (36)
Experimental Architecture //////////////////////////
We are mapping a space generated out of the movement of different subjects.
We have developed a tool that we use as a rhythm reader. Taking a set of references we can measure the distances generated in the movement of punctuations, localisations, references. How to take position in a space and how this space is generated out of the movement of references.
The rhythm emerges from the changing cycles of repetition. rhythm and plan generation, space production.
A situationist strategy: using the map of a city to walk another, to experiment with localisations. How subjectivity reacts over mobile points or moments, places that are not longer or were never there?.
We watched very carefully our collection of interviews with self-organised collectives, political activists, "pobladores", grassroots groups... Observing the repetition of certain gestures in the body, hands rising, open arms, fast-moving hands, eyes on the horizon (angles of looking), speed of blinking. Out of our sound recordings we started to identify special voice intonations, fluctuations, crazy laughs, silence in the middle of complex discourses, profusion of words interrupted by different threads of ideas. We began to analyze this information, distinguishing cycles, extracting categories and assigning them numbers. We tried to preserve the structure of this phenomena by keeping them in organised clusters. The pulse of this clusters, the formation of patterns. We then focused on the arrangement of the shifters.
We thought that the strategy should be vague, deviant, not straightforward. We knew that meaning is a slippery thing, and at the same time fragile and easy to control. We became aware of the richness of the spaces where meaning is nested. We thought of this spaces as active.
Our mission was not to deencript it. More to identify where meaning is located and observe the dynamism that trigger around itself. By watching revolutionary practices and activist subjects we acquire knowledge about revolutionary rhythm. We were anxious to extend our methods to a wider platform, we knew than in order to do that we should be able to manage a massive amount of information and go beyond the analysis. Deconstruction should be a first attempt to identify what information was of interest for us but then the instrument should vibrate, as exchange of meaning resonates creating rhythmic patterns.
A mixture of linguistics and geometry, we developed topographies of subjective positioning.(37)
We were sure that with the appropriate tools it would be possible to use this energy, so similar to electricity (38) .
Our material is the unconsciuous side of the daily (de Certau), out of the mapping of this conglomerate of actions, movements, repetitions, we obtained a cartography.
Schlemmer studied movements in mathematics of dance:
Human body is the center and her movement is a radiation that creates imaginary space. The dancer is able to operate the synthesis of spatial modalities (39) Body leaves imprintings in space as traces, floating volumes, from movement rise a stereometry of space given the verticality of the dancing figure in space (40)
We wanted to operate mechanisms of splitting over the social body.
Applying psycho energetic models (41) We were looking for "hot and weak spots" places to create disturbance and make splitting occur. we were looking for the rise of an unexpected consciousness, a whole set of arrangements inside the social body. We realised that our strategy of mapping would not be completed until we subverted the actual territory.
We were attempting to liberate the stuck energy in the cities.
Energy contained under the bridges, expeled out by the speed of the highways. Evacuated by the repetition of consumption, displaced and stored on every smooth corner of the shopping malls. Under the shelves of the supermarkets, precious dust of fragmented desire. Repressed and controlled by surveillance mechanisms, the flocks of pigeons circulate unconsiously following the spirals of forgotten forces. Suddenly we are not even engineers, there is no program to develop. Our work is basically non-productive, we are 'avatars of chaos'(42) using our machines as prisms to look up the social body. To make oscillations visible.
The one who uses intuition is the true empiricist, Bergson says, and ‘true empiricism is that which proposes to get as near to the original itself as possible’.(43.i) In intuition, one ‘search[es] deeply’ into the object and ‘feel[s] the throbbings’ of it.(43.ii) This is one of the ways we have developed, aligned with other more directed subversive actions. We discovered the need to use this decodified flows of energy, using vague methods, so they cannot trace us, they cannot go after us because we are so many, because the strenght of our method resides in its transparency. In this metaphoric couplage (44) with the megamachine. Everything that is dismissed,everything that would be considered garbage, nonsense, outlet is fuel for our systems.
Looking for "metaphoric void" as formulated by Gordon Matta Clark when explaining the reasons of his cuts on buildings. Metaphoric in the sense that his value does not reside in its possible use. (45)
Looking at the metaimage:
“Here we have an experiential mapping process which takes place not through abstract schemas, but through the ebb and flow of conversations, and above all through collective, networked marches. Social experiments, dissenting imaginaries. The topography of moving bodies. Cartography with your feet.” (Brian Holmes describing global action)(46) Active mapping
//////////////// We were trying to map all movements contained in an area. All connections, moving objects with respect to fixed objects, moving with respect to moving, la plaque tournante, all possible vectors, meaning related to objects, meaning related to subjects, possible planes, lines of expectations and desire.
Mapping the multiple rhythms, their interpenetration. Mirrors and echoes that generate planes and spaces, a fluid architecture of vectors and resonances. Pictures that are tomographic bits of reality (47)
David Tudor's diagrams for Untitled 1972, observed by Sofia Ogielska. They composed maps that can be read as scores, which can be entered at any point and traversed in any direction, producing, in effect, one performance or many performances.(48)
Toneburst: Maps and Fragments 1995 - 1996', a visual / musical collaboration between Sophia Ogielska, artist, and David Tudor, composer(49) developed a method of extracting music directly from interactions of electronic components with her technique of composing paintings from visual fragments, which she has been exploring in the past decade (50)
The ideograms appear in various forms in the multi-layered, translucent panels (scores, or maps), which express the interactive assembly of sound, coming from a flow of operations on active circuit elements. There is no one way of performing the composition; in fact there is an infinity of performances encoded in the circuit, which are visualized in the panels. The performance begins with introduction of individual sounds, and so there will be clusters of ideograms in space which will introduce the visual components of the larger maps. The colors and shapes indicate different groups of operations on active circuit elments (frequency and phase, input/output switching, amplitude, source input). (51)
Maps as constructivistic flowcharts like Moholy Nagy's and as the board staped scores of Stockhausen (52)" My dream of this particular machine is one that miniaturizes social dynamics, presents a view of the traces left by ants, so that I can guess better where I want to dive into the movement... I have dreamed of such a machine, as an artwork that could be like an active map.
Mapping a moving crowd, a pulsing city. But as a tool, for entering, acting, contributing. And for getting to know the others, feeling the crowd beyond myself, locating the effects of energy changes: what happens there when we change this here?..."(53)
Diagrams of crowds ////////////////////////
what became of great importance were our diagrams of crowds. We applied them over large networks of exchange of messages.
We traced threads of conversations and currents activated by the movement of the shifters. A basic analysis of forming semantic structures. Mailing lists and forums became appropriate to test such movements. The first reported utility was to join..... To find threads and paths for collaborating...
The solution were our language machines that made possible to develop intelligent playgrounds. For building them we followed ideas about sound patterns and theories of expectancy.
Since we included a linguistic aproach into our programming , words began to acquire this active property we were so much looking for.
We started by inviting people to join this playgrounds, we joined already existing conversational platforms, we became sort of ambassadors of the yet unknown. As soon as we got a considerable number the tracing of this routes inside the texts started to show crazy results.
We compared our diagrams to the weather phenomena and we began to make predictions.(54)
We used the same terminology to describe conversational intensities: tropical systems//Tropical disturbance, tropical wave: Unorganized mass of thunderstorms, very little, if any, organized wind circulation.
Tropical depression: Evidence of closed wind circulation around a center with sustained winds.
Tropical storm: Maximum sustained winds. The storm is named once it reaches tropical storm strength.
Hurricane: Maximum sustained winds.
We observed in the playgrounds this kind of phenomena:
The coastal atmospheric boundary layer. Inherently heterogeneous, dominated by variations in topography, large temperature gradients and large changes in roughness. The borders are characterized by large variations of intensity on the surface and roughness and a nonequilibrium state. These conditions produce interactions between conversation-breezes, mesoscale eddies, and playground-generated winds that cause complex flow patterns
We connected the playgrounds to programs that modelated visualisations of images and sounds.
...when we looked closer to the sound output we rediscovered the patterns, pulsating structures also found in many other sources The playground
//////////////////
We put together different ideas, Constant models for New babylon, de Chirico landscapes, Varela's nets of conversations and our combined programming and linguistic experiments...
Out of a huge amount of text we were able to distinguish paths, different threads that out of a certain amount of repetition and intern dynamism organised linguistic currents. We programed new systems out of this findings and created what we called the subjects.(55)The subject lacks of identity, they formed themselves spontaneously out of the intensity of the currents and dissapear again spontaneously when the current starts to migrate again toward different domains. The subject is like a ephimeral personality emergent from the linguistic currents.
Once one actor became involved in the conversational playground she would be exposed to a semantic field of forces. The playground would be basically composed of this conversational streams, and every participation would be modulated by the intensity of the interchange.
Sometimes would be bent toward the main stream sometimes would be esentially repelled and sent towards the margins where very specific exchanges were taking place. We would observe the absolute mobility of conversations and topics and were surprised of the spontaneous formations in this movement between the center and the margins. We realised that this particular movement was of special importance at feeding the internal dynamism of the subject, that would be live while this exchange was taking place and reabsorved when the movement stops."(...) entities inhabiting chaos are animated by an infinite speed . Thus they can compose the most diverse complexities but can decomplexify themselves just as quickly".(56)
The shifters created a different thing, even more chaotic, we traced them and generated what we called the swarm diagrams. at doing this we attempted to map the movement of meaning as a dynamic ball that was passing in between different actors all around the globe. "swarming occurs when the dispersed nodes of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces can converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing - swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse."
(57)
We designed the diagrams as semantic matrixes that later we cut diagonnnaly to see the spectral bands that we followed in order to place the spot where to generate splitting interventions.
Splitting is a concept used in linguistics (Benveniste, Jakobson)(58) psychonanalisys (Lacan) schizoanalysis (59) (Guattari) and anarchitecture (G. Matta Clark)
The schizophrenic mind experiments this break, an inflection, a cut, when it happens the unconscious takes over, the freudian second principle, principle of pleasure, a different time , a different organization of knowing.
The interventions we refer to are based in this phenomena. It could be said that are "panic" actions (60) and subversive actions (antoglobalisation movements). Applying the notion of disturbance and entropy with a strong linguistic emphasis.
The splitting interventions then are planned designing the cut, like Gordon Matta Clark in works like Splitting (1974) , Caribbean Orange (1978), Office Barroque (1977), Conical Intersect (1975).
Identifing the structure and tracing the cut where there is only "makeup". Identifying the cosmetics of architecture (Matta-Clark), the weak spots in the chains of conversations.
This operation was applied over the maps made out of the movements of everything with respect to everything. Movable map of vectors, interplay of distances and...there, the weak spots! we were so excited when we begun to identify them. They looked very much like oscillating skater ramps...