topology of a future city

documentation

'Temporal bandwidth,' is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar '[delta-] t' considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.

[Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow]

Topology of a future city proposes a speculative working group or workshop divining, describing and thus constructing a future city in ruins; a series of descriptive urban vectors extrapolated from ghosted electromagnetic, signal and literary traces.

Borrowing techniques from geophysical archaeology (revealing and mapping of geophysical properties), narrative displacements (filmic manipulations of temporality, science fiction), and coded psychogeographics (tracing signs of underground networks), Topology sketches a model for the future city flaneur.

Topology will encompass a series of Berlin-wide walks, interventions, discussions, and film/documentary screenings during Transmediale. Logging of specific physical and signal properties will be undertaken at chosen sites, forming the basis of a series of long-term, psychogeophysical studies within Berlin. Constructed maps and collated measurements are to be combined with fictional extrapolations from psychogeographic derive, using technologies of narrative displacement. The working group will be composed of four core researchers and six participants selected from an open call. Research is to be presented by the core artists and researchers during the Transmediale festival in the form of video documentation and a lecture or group discussion exploring this particular fiction.

Topology is situated within the context of an interdisciplinary mobile research laboratory initiated by _____-micro-research in 2010 and devoted to the use of free software and open hardware within the field of psychogeophysics.

Topology is kindly hosted as part of Transmediale10

Please apply here: http://www.transmediale.de/en/node/11051/

Psychogeophysics as a novel discipline can be defined as crossing the wave and code distinction, encompassing the disciplines of psychogeographics, data forensics and geophysical archaeology. It presents an interdisciplinary and highly speculative methodology investigating wider, complex signal ecologies through walks, discussions, working groups, measurement and quasi-scientific practice. Psychogeophysics equally offers a speculative take on future code; an uncovering of potentials in code as a new phase of software studies. The extension of psychogeographics into geophysics implies a collision between fiction (as software/code) and materiality, with geophysics defined as the quantitative observation of the earth's physical properties, with an emphasis on the magnetic field. Geophysics equally encompasses archaeological geophysics, with measurement of such properties allowing for the mapping of previous traces; an extension into detection and forensics.

Oswald Berthold: mapping of EM events and intensities, long-term logging of geophysical properties

http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~oberthol/html/Public Index.html

Martin Howse: elaboration of psychogeophysical methodologies

http://1010.co.uk/org/

Verena Kuni: psychogeographic play within a ghosted city

http://www.kuni.org/v/kuniver1.htm#Beginn

Danja Vassiliev: exploration of city-structured underground networks and messaging systems, data carving

http://k0a1a.net/

Data forensics, landscape as steganographised, wave and protocol divide, mapping of event intensity using GPS, psychogeographic cryptography, data sedimentation and unearthing, data visualisation and forging of underground transmission networks.

Base venue: Collegium Hungaricum Berlin

http://www.hungaricum.de/

Dates and times: 4-7.2.2010 12PM to 6PM

Wiki: http://scrying.org/doku.php?id=topology:description

Courier's Tragedy workshop notes: http://1010.co.uk/images/couriers.pdf [in progress]

Seeing Beneath the Soil: Prospecting Methods in Archaeology, 1990, Anthony Clark

Welt am Draht, 1973, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Topologie d'une cité fantôme (Topology of a Phantom City), 1976, Alain Robbe-Grillet

Steganographia, 1606, Johannes Trithemius

Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, 1997, Brian Ladd