1999 - Headmap Manifesto (1) - Ben Russell
here are notes in boxes that are empty every room has an accessible history every place has emotional attachments you can open and save you can search for sadness in new york people within a mile of each other who have never met stop what they are doing and organise spontaneously to help with some task or other. in a strange town you knock on the door of someone you don’t know and they give you sandwiches. paths compete to offer themselves to you life flows into inanimate objects the trees hum advertising jingles everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached
know your place location aware devices:
location aware, networked, mobile devices make possible invisible notes attached to spaces, places, people and things. the headmap manifesto articulates the social implications of location aware devices. It manifests a world in which computer games move outside and get subversive. Sex and even love are easier to find. Real space can be marked and demarcated invisibly. ..what was once the sole preserve of builders, architects and engineers falls into the hands of everyone: the ability to shape and organise the real world and the real space. Real borders, boundaries and space become plastic and maleable, statehood becomes fragmented and global.. Geography gets interesting Cell phones become internet enabled and location aware, everything in the real world gets tracked, tagged, barcoded and mapped. Overlaying everything is a whole new invisible layer of annotation. Textual, visual and audible information is avail- able as you get close, as context dictates, or when you ask.
new world:
The linking of a location aware device (e.g. something with GPS funtionality), with a handheld computer (e.g. an IPAQ or a handspring) together with a mobile, wireless, internet connection, creates a significant new mass market comput- ing platform which begins to make possible: • leaving notes, demarcating spaces, and marking places, but leaving no external visible sign of having done so. • anything left can be made visible to all, or to user specified individuals and groups. • information (textual, audible or visual) can be bound to specific places. • an alternative or supplement to permanent visual signi- fiers (e.g. signs, clothing, advertising). • individuals can utilise new forms of community based on augmented awareness of their proximity to places of interest and each other.. ..spontaneous extended community defined by both common interest and proximity. • tracking the migration and movement patterns of people, animals and things. • places can have histories ‘attached’ to them (i.e. the collection of notes left at a given place sorted according to when they were left). • inanimate objects can become more animate (if you know where a tree is and you know when someone is walking past it you could make it burst into song).
location aware devices:
Consumer orientated, mobile, internet connected devices which are location aware (that is capable of determining and transmitting their current geographical location) are becoming available. Linking some means of location finding, for example a cheap GPS (Global Positioning System), to a handheld computer and adding a wireless network connection creates a completely new computing platform. If you know where you are you can link that location information to other kinds of information....that is you can associate information with places.Using a network you can publish the coordinates of a place with a note attached. That note can then be ‘found’ by another user who visits the same place. It is a statute in the US that by October 2001 new cell phones have to be able to communicate their geographical coordinates so that this information can be used by the emergency services (extended 911 legislation).Government sponsored location awareness mandates, cell phone triangulation, bluetooth, GPS....even Integrated MicroElectrical Mechanical Systems (IMEMS) techniques which are making possible the fabrication of chips with onboard digital compasses, and, more interestingly, gyroscopes and accelerometers (which means that the kind of inertial naviga- tion systems used to navigate nuclear submarines without break- ing radio silence can be embedded inside your cell phone). Location aware devices.
introduction:
The headmap manifesto is a sequence of text fragments dealing with the social and cultural implications of location aware devices. Headmap argues a move from the ‘inside’ view that developed after the failure of the space programme, the closure of the fron- tiers, the rise of television, early computing, interiorised simulation and drug culture....towards an ‘outside’ view - a recolonisation of the real world, computers becoming invisible, mobile, networked and location aware, the real world augmented rather than simulated. People finding more outside than inside and developing sophisticated information based relationships to exterior spaces, computer games moving outside, technologies facilitating the tagging and annotating of spaces, places, people, animals and things, the emergence of new forms of spontaneous externalised real social interaction, constructs drawn from dreams and myth shape the outside more tangibly than ever before.New forms of collective, network organised dissent are emerging. Collectively constructive rather than oppositional. Now capableof augmenting, reorganising, and colonising real spaces without altering what is already there or notifying those being colonised. The internet has already started leaking into the real world. Headmap argues that when it gets trully loose the world will be new again.
land and law: mutating traditional concepts of land, law, politics and ownership mobile, networked, location aware devices
maps[borders and boundaries]: mapping and social interaction beyond geographically defined borders and nation states
politics in software [no guarantee]: politics, community and constitution in software. information, not as a precursor to knowledge but as a tool for controlling and selling [no guarantee that technology will be put to liberatory use] future architecture [lost space] freeing architecture from the concrete allowing more flexible spatial narratives. recolonising real social space
dreams [does a firm persua- sion of a thing make it so]: flowing life into inanimate objects binding dreams to reality filling space with chimeric informational ‘objects’ hallucination engineering
nature [annotated]: framing or annotating nature ? conquering, coexisting with, or resynthesising [nature]
infrastructure [precursor]: integrating soft space shaping technologies with traditional con- crete space shaping exercises like the freeways [wireless networking is not as an end in itself but a precursor to augmenting reality and real space]
[space plus information]: defining community differently spontaneous community, non-geographical nation states and con- stitutions double meanings [Howard Hughes hitch hiking] space plus information
dissent: compromised countercultures shape making the shape
so wanting wireless castenada
and and law Soft augmentation, the ability to annotate space using location aware devices, will allow new concepts of land ownership and community and calls into question the geographical basis of power, politics and law. a magical-legal function technology gave a shape to america, it defined the pattern of imposition “He described to me how on holiday with his wife and children he arrived at a popular beach early to find it empty. For no particular reason he used a bucket and spade to build a perimeter of sand castles 6 meters apart and 25 meters in diameter around his chosen spot. Through the course of the day, the beach filled up and yet no infringement of this unenforcable token boundary occurred.” THe raiLroaDs, THe sTeeL PLouGH, THe six sHooTer, sTeeL winDmiLLs anD BarBeD wire The shape of America was defined through the application of technology to logistics, agriculture, force, power and bounding. “the great plains were only subdued after 1865 with the aid of new technology: the railroads, the steel plough, the six shooter, the barbed-wire fence and modern steel windmills” This shape is carved into, and still defines, large tracts of the vernacular landscape, there are still railroads, ploughs, guns, and windmills, and there is still barbed wire.
ParceLinG uP LanD inTo recTanGLes Before barbed wire it was difficult and expensive to define a perimeter and bound a large tract of land. From the air Europe and America (both in urban and agricultural areas) are patchworks of rectangular bounded spaces; buildings and land. recoLonise THe usa iGnorinG oLD sTrucTures [overLaY a new PaTTern] A new layer of symbolism, a new way of defining ownership and meaning could be overlaid on the old. Invisible on the surface. New paths, new meeting places, new boundaries. New meaning associated with old structures. Songs and voices and thoughts defining any given space. “the ‘nomadic war machine’ conquers without being noticed” Hakim Bey Bums used to ride around the US on freight trains. They supple- mented this logistical network with a symbol system that they could use to communicate useful information to one another. A given symbol scrawle
In san francisco you sometimes see a pair of shoes hanging from the tram wires. They either define territory or meeting places for local gangs. Kids use graffiti to tag their territory. Parasites on existing infrastructure. Not removing or replacing what is there, but altering meaning. Redefining new terms, rules, language and symbolism. Parasites powerful enough to absorb and dominate the old infra- structure without destroying it become colonists and define the hybrid entity. Squatters in Zimbabwe are taking back land from British farmers, with the de facto support of the government. While the action is technically illegal the government is supporting the squatters and offering the British safe passage out of the country, rather than support. The UK is now effectively another US state. [airbases, cultural and economic patterns etc.] “Anytime you colonise anybody they’re gonna eventually colonise you back.” Erica Rosenblum “At this moment in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands for the “face-to-face” and the sensual, we must consider the Web primarily as a support system, capable of carrying information from one Temporary Autono- mous Zone to another, of defending the Tem- porary Autonomous Zone, rendering it “invisible” or giving it teeth, as the situa- tion might demand. But more than that: If the Temporary Autonomous Zone is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealo- gies and legends of the tribe; it pro- vides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and portents.” Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone
pigeon, creole, slang, cant, argot. [america effectively decided to open source and modify the Eng- lish Language, it is now a part of one of the most pervasive and powerful operating systems on the planet.] “The despatialization of post-Industrial society provides some ben- efits (e.g. computer networking) but can also manifest as a form of oppression (homelessness, gentrification, architectural deperson- alization, the erasure of Nature, etc.) The communes of the sixties tried to circumvent these forces but failed. The question of land refuses to go away. How can we separate the concept of space from the mechanisms of control? The territorial gangsters, the Nation/States, have hogged the entire map.” Hakim Bey narraTive suBservienT To economics anD BruTe force Narrative has always been subservient to the tangible.
Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20020731094715/http://www.headmap.org/book/pdf/headmap-manifesto.PDF
https://web.archive.org/web/20020529041418/http://www.headmap.org/book/hm-index.html