The Sibylline TEXT

GRANT PROPOSAL by Brooks Atwood & Anda French
$10,000 request for project funds. Contact us for donations, project budget and schedule

The Sibylline TEXT

BASIC PROPOSITION:
The project exploits the untapped spatial potential of the ubiquitous text message, by sequentially releasing a story, downloadable only in certain public spaces in Manhattan. The story is re-sequenced and distorted as it is passed on, based on proximity to the source, reorienting the relationship between knowledge and place and re-engaging public space.

The project is named for the Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess at the Oracle of Cumae, seen in Virgil’s Aeneid. The Sibyl inhabits a cave with one hundred openings, revealing her prophesies on a series of oak leaves within the cave. If a wind blows through one of the openings, the oak leaves are scattered, thus re-sequencing the prophesy and creating potential through misinterpretation.

The project primarily seeks to explore the potential value of the text message beyond its utilitarian informational nature, as a cultural and social device. This technology is engaged not simply as a reactive device but a proactive machine.

IMPLICATIONS:
The proposal is essentially to further and push past the idea of urban spectacle of the neglected and infected moments in the city. The Sibylline Text will produce a series of user-influenced maps, non-linear transformations and cinematic experiences to not only engage the city but to redefine the ‘city’ as ‘global brain.’ These maps would address new ways to engage with the city (i.e. physically, mentally, memory, time-based, texture, dancing etc).

These investigations would allow for the creation of sensory based cinematic event-scape architectures (in other words to discover the relationships between the physical self and the surrounding environment in the past, present and future time-spaces).

Can the relationship between place and information be generative rather than incidental?

“One must also remember that the surface of the territory is mobile and fluid as it is given to the continual distortions of memory.” Cache, Earth Moves

RELEVANCE:
Project research is based in four sets of existing dichotomous conditions. The proposition grows out of the potential created in a reconditioning these pairs.

Dichotomous Conditions:

1. -Ubiquitous Technology: SMS messaging
-Specific Technology: Japanese Text Novel

Existing Conditions:
SMS (Text Message):
Market forces initially made the text message an economic response to the cost of a cell phone call. Subsequently, as evidenced in markets offering unlimited text messaging, the text becomes primary communication device. Shorthand has developed as a response to both efficiency and to the size of the display. Criticism of this form of communication points to the fragmentation and degradation of nuanced language as one potential effect.

Japanese Text Novel:
“TOKYO — Until recently, cell phone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cell phone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it” (New York Times, 20 January 2008)

The Japanese phenomena of the cell phone novel, a full length novel written in installments and downloaded by text message from a central website, suggests that this simple communication has a larger cultural significance. The act of downloading a story by text produces unforeseen potential. An unexpected benefit of the instant upload is the writer’s ability to immediately track interest in a certain storyline and to change his or her tack quickly to increase subscription.

Potential:
The text novel is a trend inevitably on its way to the US market. While it is criticized for its fragmentary and efficient nature, we see great potential in this fragmentation. What if this feature is exploited to produce greater nuance through ambiguity and multiple interpretations?

The potential also lies in the immediate feedback that can change not only the source information, but can redirect the story by corruption and misinterpretation built into the user-interface.

The project recognizes the larger potentials in this new paradigm and seeks to broaden the opportunities of this standard technology to have greater public, social, and cultural implications, beyond those of obvious commercial interests.

Re-Conditioning:
This project uses a similar structural model of the Japanese text novel as an organizational basis, but seeks and exploits the untapped potential for both corruption and further generation within that model.

2. -Ubiquitous Place: Public Space
-Specific Place: Public Library

Existing Conditions:
Manhattan’s public spaces have decreased as cultural centers, and are relegated to the incidental space of the city. Information exchange, the enlivening element of the public space is further removed as information is increasingly made private by way of the personal computer and the personal handheld device. Life is no longer exchanged in the real world; thus, movement across the city becomes incidental and insular rather than vital and collective.

Waning interest in the traditional use of the public library has produced a series of responses that reassert and reinterpret the use, program, and function of the model and redefine the social implications of a centralized space to access information.

Potential:
As information access increasingly shifts to the handheld device, place and knowledge operate under an entirely different set of relationships. The potential for a personal handheld device to change the nature of knowledge – all information all the time – is very real. Yet, there is a danger in believing that unlimited access to information produces omnipotence for the individual. How can the changing relationship between knowledge and place be made visible or tangible beyond a reactive mapping?

Re-Conditioning:
There is great possibility to activate public space within the city by tying specific knowledge (i.e. the narrative) to specific place rather than by coincidence. By producing degrees of transformed narrative as a function of both the distance from that public place and the will of the various readers, a nonlinear narrative can emerge, which becomes the trace of movement and use in these public spaces. The movement of the audience becomes intrinsically linked to the outcome of the narrative, and can potentially produce multiple narrative strains.

The ability of the individual to download and alter information dependent upon their position within certain zones is tracked by the information exchanged through each download. Thus the traditional relationship between information and place, whereby the individual must physically move to the site of the information (as in the traditional library) is both inverted and converted. Information can be conditioned by the movement of the individual relative to place, rather than the movement of the individual being conditioned by the place of the information.

Because the sequence of downloading information from certain zones will have a direct effect on the possible interpretations of the distributed narrative, users will begin (through repetition) to realize their own agency in sculpting the story.

3. -Ubiquitous Mapping: Positional Navigation
-Specific Mapping: Privileged/Positional Knowledge

Existing Conditions:
GPS (Global Positioning System) is readily available in various forms for individual use. On a commercial and public level use has been fairly normative. The technology is most generally used as an instant map. Certain markets in the UK and Asia have shown the potential for location-based tracking to relate trends in activity and communication to the movement of individuals, and is being explored as a means to deliver customized advertising based on location.

Potential:
Navigation in its normative state is based on a known grid of streets and landmarks. GPS capabilities are currently being used merely to make more legible these known maps. The potential here is for location-based knowledge to become not only reactive but generative.

Re-Conditioning:
This project will explore navigation based on privileged knowledge of qualities other than those found in the street map.

The potential here is for a new kind of interactive mapping, a vertical mapping, by which multiple, possibly contradictory information is mapped onto a single point. The possibility for this overlap to create new meaning and new combinatorial types of privileged knowledge will be explored through the testing of this project.

Can nonlinear sequence, information overlap and the potential for misinterpretation applied to specific place generate emergence in both meaning and movement?

4. -Linear Narrative: Sequential Story
-Nonlinear Narrative: Epic Poetry

Existing Conditions:
The normative model of popular fiction typically emphasizes content over structure and events over literary effects. In this model, information is revealed to the reader sequentially with little room for overlap or the juxtaposition of viewpoint. The reader is essentially pulled along the “real time” of the story, as information is revealed sequentially.

In contrast, in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid we find a weaving and overlapping of disparate events, places and timeframes through an assumed “real time” of Aeneas’s journey. The nonlinear unfolding of information mapped back to this linear journey heightens the awareness of the text as an alternating source of privileged knowledge.

Potential:
The potential is for narrative to be revealed sequentially but tied to specific place, therefore causing the sequential revelation of facts, situations, places, events to become a nonlinear process.

In the age of increasingly accessible information does the prophetic model of privileged information shift from the chosen few to the very many? Does this imply the loss of a meta-narrative? Is it a world in which we are all Virgil- retroactive prophet? Or are we all simply the much-buffeted Aeneas – seemingly in control through privileged knowledge, but in fact victim to its misinterpretation and the whim of fate?

Re-Conditioning:
In the relationship between ubiquitous technology and omnipresent knowledge, the assumption is that the former facilitates the latter. This project seeks to examine and question this assumption. What is the productive potential of misinterpretation (both in a historical model and an experimental model)?

DEVELOPMENT:
The technological framework for this project has been addressed and will be made possible through collaboration with a technology consultant, Alexis Hawkins (bio attached). Various strategies have been explored to create a centralized database through which all information is released by download to text message, and through which all disruptions in information sequence and distortion will be processed. All of the information will then be made accessible through a user friendly website.

The three month timeframe for the Fellowship would constitute the time to develop and set up this system, to run various scenarios in the city, and to analyze and document the narrative and mappings which will ultimately emerge.

The great advantage of working directly with this consultant is that the system can be adjusted according to the relative “success” of each run through. The advantage of an iterative approach to running the system is that the potential of the project can only be realized through its actual execution. Emergent properties of the system may have far wider ranging possibilities then the initial set up anticipates.

Research in the public realm, in conjunction with the technical development of the project, would be strengthened by working through the Institute. Tapping into existing cultural and social networks will increase the likelihood that the project will reveal its immense cultural potential. In a sense, by exploring the project in this forum, for its theoretical potential, it can develop not out of commercial interest, but out of a commitment to the social realm.

IMPLEMENTATION:
At present, we plan to run the project at three scales, to examine its potential spatial and social implications.

Testing would occur in a single building, within a public place, and across a series of public spaces.

The building would ideally be a museum, in which the released narrative would have a direct link to the material of the museum.

The public place would be a park in which the released and distorted narrative would augment the use of the space.

The series or ‘neighborhood’ of public spaces might be linked and unlinked plazas and parks throughout the city. In this scenario various zones would be distinguished to define information thresholds. The potential for this final scale is for the project to continue, increasingly in variability be the increase in participants.

DOCUMENTATION:
Documentation can and will take various forms. Those set forth here are based on a prediction of the result of testing, further models may be developed, dependent on unforeseen potential in the project.

Mapping: Graphic documents will be developed to track the movement and stasis of the participants relative to the changing story, as documented on the central server and website.

Website: Because the manipulation of these maps is continuous, a display of the system and its effects will be constantly changing and updating on the user friendly website in real-time.

Film: In the case of testing at a specific building or public place, film will be used to detect the influence of the shifting information on the behavior of the participants. Will individuals remain autonomous in their participation? If participants become aware of one another, will they begin to exchange information in other ways? Will response time differ based on the current activity in which the participant is engaged?

Book: A printed “book” of changing text, including shifts in sequence and meaning, mapped to shifts in movement in the city, will essentially become a 21st century version of the epic poem.

Nonlinear Timelines: As a central database will track all changes to information (shifting narratives) along with links to individual download positions, this information can be produced as a single document or series of hybrid documents, to explore ways to emphasizes the spatialization of information.

POTENTIAL:
This project explores the potential for the space of invention, interpretation, and misinterpretation to be reinserted into culture, and positions itself within a current state of ambiguity invoked by the constant, ubiquitous presence of “information”.

The project has the potential to reassert the agency of the individual, along with the accumulation of individual agency to produce larger trends and to influence cultural narratives. It is not merely using a technological device to map existing information, rather to engage the potential of the technology to create cultural shifts, new relationships, and unanticipated meaning.

Only through testing can the user discover the possibilities of the system. Source information is primary, but is changed based on two factors: the agency of the individual participant and the position of the individual relative to the primary source.

The project as a mapping tool is not reactive but proactive. As such, the goal of the project is not necessarily utopian, as the potential is to explore both the harmony and the breakdown of the system

There is potential for the infinite growth of system – the more users the more exchange, the more shifting of the relationship between information and place. There is also the potential for entropy – certain strains of a story could die, creating exclusivity to status within the texting network, based on knowledge of extinct information.

The project seeks to restore the potency of public space as cultural origin rather than incidental non-space, and may do so as subtle shifts in information reorient the user in the city

Present Status of Research:
The strategy, means, and personnel are currently in place for development and implementation to begin.