UtrechtToKentucky

From UoWiki

From Utrecht (Wilfried Hou Je Bek, http://socialfiction.org ) to Kentucky (Mary Harrington, http://stimulusrespond.com )

Wilfried:

Can you tell me something more on the structuralist effort to device a GOOM (Generative Object Oriented Mythology)?

Mary:

The structuralists realised that since words (signs) are defined in relation to each other (ie 'black' only makes sense as a concept in relation to 'white' then perhaps you could only analyse things in their structural relation. They then had a go at applying this principle to lots of things including social customs and mythologies. So they'd analyse the role of 'old woman' or 'king' in myths from all over the world to see if they could get a trace on what it 'fundamentally' meant. They called this 'semiotics' or the science of signs.

The problem with this is clearly that the semiotics or connotations of a rabbit are entirely different in China than in Utrecht. I remember watching a martial arts film in which the hero and heroine pass through a Disney-like field full of flowers during the soppy bit before she gets captured by baddies, and they see and pick up a rabbit. Now I have no idea what that meant, or what an equivalent moment would have been in a British film (for whom 'rabbit' connotes 'breeding like rabbits', which was surely not what they meant).

Now, the difficulty with object-oriented mythologies is simply that: subsequent theories have suggested it's impossible to get a sufficiently definitive handle on any given unit of story such as to create more than very rudimentary classes of object.

However, two things. First: what would a GOOM do? (great acronym, by the way)

second: a possibly fruitful avenue to explore might be the relationship between 'units of story' (ie the potential GOOM objects) and Jungian archetypes. If nothing else, this suggests where some of the difficulty lies: Jungian archetypes, which 'old woman' and any number of fairytale characters certainly are, reside in the collective unconscious(a transpersonal repository of cultural meaning reflected in language and, to a sketchy though increasing extent, in the interwebnet). Because they reside in the collective unconscious, they are by definition hard if not impossible to retrieve completely, which makes them hard to reduce to a neat algorithm. This, by the way, is one of the reasons I like Jung better than Freud, for all the very little I know of either: with Freud it's all reducible to sex, with Jung it's not reducible at all. I think we need more sense of the (sacred) ungraspable in our lives, as an antidote to globalised McMeaninglessness.

Anyway, I'm a long way off GOOMs now. But my point is that mythology operates on a semi-conscious level, and merely thinking about it changes it incrementally. This is one of the challenges of trying to find definitive maps of what is by definition cultural material constantly in motion relative to itself, us and everything/one else. Could we explore the idea of a quantum GOOM (check out http://www.qubit.org/ and elsewhere), or something that incorporates heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

Wilfried:

Recently I read "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves. A ludicrous book, equally insane and fascinating in what it sets out to do: to prove once and for all, in one grand poetic attack, that the judeo-greek-roman-christian explanation of the world is just one unlucky choice of mythology amongst thousand others. Graves goes a long way to explain how all myths & all gods are all different interpretations of a few deities that in turn represented either the sun or the moon. If I get him right he actually believes that, when the muse has taken control over him, he can actually deduce from the snippets we have the stories people were telling each other 10.000 years ago. Having little factual knowledge of the material Graves is discussing, it's hard to pinpoint if he makes any sense even when reasoning through facts (as opposite of inspired guesses) during his exercises in juggling gods. Very GOOMy

Now to get to "The Sense of the Sacred". Coming from psychogeograpy this is an interesting angle to relate to cities. The psychic perception of cities are closely tied to mythologies. Rome had Remus & Romulus, London has got King Lud, New York has it's crocodiles in the sewers. In some undefined way, apart from factual reality, even apart from the fact if you really believe in it, these stories play a part in our experience of these cities. Here in Utrecht we have Leidsche Rijn, a new part of town they are building in 10 years & that at the end will house 100.000 people. Planners and politics have called into life an ambitious art-project, backed by a fair amount of money, to TLC a process of urbanisation. Apart from the question if urbanity, understood here as the feeling of being part of your environment and the will to use it (as opposed to going to the larger city to get your kicks) I feel they are missing the important part: an environment that stimulates something: it's a complete aura-less area. So far LRijn is a living nightmare, even though the houses are fairly popular. I wonder if this process would work better if all these people could recognise some sacredness in there neighbourhood: a sense that they want to be there not just because it happen to be they could find a house there and the children can grow up safely.

Perhaps this will happen anyway but will it just takes some time, and in ways all outside uptown forces will never understand. All public art there is always immediately destroyed, so that at least is a sign of a solid local culture.

Why are city where they are there? Strategic reasons often, but also less obvious ones. There is a site, (http://www.cf.ac.uk/archi/unwins/aawebs/more/aleatoric.htm ), that contains a few stories lifted from mythology about how important decisions were left to chance. It would be worth studying to what extent people founded cities at places that had some psychogeographical power. Cities like Leidsche Rijn lack even a strategically reason, which at least has a sense of urgency, for it being there. Planalogical efficiency is hardly stimulating. But mythologies can be constructed, football is very mythological for instance. Would it be possible to device a small array of GOOM classes from scratch & put in on the streets and let it evolve from there. Some will die, others will change in corresponding to the needs of the place it grows in.

mary:

why are cities where they are? the problem with technologies that seek definitively to summarise the 'essence' of something is that they forget precisely this: it's the people that make the city. like the urban collective unconscious is an overlapping venn diagram (http://www.venndiagram.com/venn01.html) composed of thousands of different idea and motivation-clusters that change as continuously as the people they represent. wiggy concept, no? and there's no certain place from which to view it, as your thoughts interact with, create and are created by the process they're trying to observe.

what kind of energy does it take to create a new source of psychogeographical energy, I wonder, of the sort you might need in Leidsche Rijn? It needs a central myth. I'd go as far as to say it might work if the population could be brought together in some kind of ritual that enacted their birth as a collective or community, that stitched their experiences together in some sort of shared form beyond the authoritarian strictures of pre-planned urban space.

i think we're saying something very similar: some kind of GOOM or fragments of code would help unify (codify even!) the loose psycho-spiritual energy that currently goes into destroying public art. how, for example, might local residents figure artistic spaces if left to it themselves? and what kind of ritual, ceremony, initiatory release of psychic energy would give their pavements meaning? personally i'm in favour of things involving fire: a michaelmas bonfire, some effigy-burning, something like that. but the day local authorities permit let alone encourage genuine ludic space is the day they write themselves out of existence. effigy-burning might create mythology, but it has a way of backfiring on the authorities. if they pre-planned the community, they're hardly likely to be encouraging self-determination or genuine community input at the mythopoeic stage.

• n a different topic, i'd disagree that football is any more constructed than any other kind of mythology. it's absorbed the force of heroes and demi-gods scripted out of existence by secular materialism, but it did so independent of anyone's attempts to enforce that. our gods have migrated to Heat and Hello magazine. but what you seem to be suggesting is the possibility of disseminating mythologies from a central and planned position in order to accomplish specific goals. the other name for that is propaganda, and i'm somewhat wary of it. having spent a stint in PR myself, i'd argue that you can never do more than mobilise or heighten existing social dynamics, as it were give pre-existent mythological possibilities a nudge in this direction or that. but creating entirely new ones? that requires a release of psychospiritual energy that takes the act from the arena of town planning to that of the occult...

Wilfried:

technical notes on the OO metaphor. What's unique about Object Orientated programming is the way that objects are both data and algorithm, while in procedural programming the two are separate. Using this as a metaphor for DIY urbanism is not that strange as Alexander's Pattern Language, which is a dense study on urban hardware was received better in computer science circles than in urban planning. The most difficult thing for novice-OO programmers is the lack of structure: the different objects have no internal hierarchy, all are using and feeding all others objects data. Learning to understand a OO program means looking at the entire structure and the patterns of communication within it. My computer science book explains OO as a collection of countries that are self-governed but are still tangled-up in complex relationships. But stand corrected as I can't code OO and I never read the Alexander book, so I might get it wrong. (-:

GOOM should describe something (a process, a strategy, a methodology for study) that looks not at urban hardware (architecture) but at urban software (urbanism as experience)

2 GOOMs are here running through each other: as a system to get to the original and as a system to produce from some 'random' condition something large, vibrant and sustainable. GOOMING as reverse engineering of mythology or GOOMing as meme-farming of a future mythology. Of course you are right when you point to the limitations of planned mythology. PR agents sometime do get lucky and their oh-so-funny one-liner does turn into a standard catchphrase for a while, but that�s not something fundamental to a community. The only thing GOOM would do is to plant the seed, from which a mythology could grow independent from our intentions.

We can not control its growth, but that�s typical to any tactic of super-serendipity. Serendipityfinding something meaningful while searching for something else. Super-Serendipitywhat you find when you are looking for serendipity. This is of course the most-dreaded idea one could introduce in a environment of specialists, exactly because it implies that there are area's in your field of expertise you have absolutely nothing sensible to say about. This is inspired by personal contacts with urban planners and especially architects and a certain kind of designers who claim to have answers while their methods are personal ideologies as un-scientific, untested as Super-Serendipity. GOOM, like any other generative system, produces Super-Serendipity, (under the condition that the initial variables and rules will produce a results you may not be able to predict precisely but which do fall within a predictable range.)

The MORE FIRE argument is a good one btw

related to Super-Serendipity: the cut-up: http://socialfiction.org/cutup.html

mary:

interesting, the way you describe GOOMs here resonates strongly with my researches into chaos magic. traditional High Magic in the Western esoteric tradition places a strong emphasis on hierarchy, centralisation of power/knowledge, one 'right' set of symbols and associations etc (google 'thelema' or 'golden dawn' if you want an idea of what i'm talking about). in contrast, chaos magic assumes that any structure in which one can invest a reasonable amount of belief will do to help structure a magical ritual. for example, if you wanted to get something done quickly, you could devise a ritual invoking the cartoon character speedy gonzalez, or anything else that 'did it for you' - the key to success is in the amount of belief invested in it. and you don't have to fix that belief, just believe it strongly for that ritual. ie, you identify or create a GOOM to perform a particular function, and the key element is not its old-ness or establishedness, but its GOOMiness. as long as it's GOOMy enough it'll work. and it becomes GOOMy by force of your conviction; the more of you there are to believe in it, the GOOMier it'll get.

and it's very, very effective.

i bring this up because it's an example of using pre-existing or specially created mythic 'objects' to achieve concrete goals, without worrying too much about controlling all aspects of the objects' interactions with each other. OO programming is an impeccable metaphor for how chaos magicians interact with existing and invented mythic structures. unsurprisingly, a considerable number of chaos magicians are also computer programmers (google lionel snell/ramsey dukes for example). this reflects the way in which computer programming, like theoretical physics, constantly tiptoes along the edge of the spiritual world. and i say that in as concrete a sense as possible: i'm no nutter, but for me the world of GOOMs is just a new name for a very well-established idea. see colin low's writings on kabbalah for more of this.

the question for me, really, is then how does one's notion of spirit change when looked at in this light? i mean, it's clearly not all that fuzzy bollocks with crystals and incense, rather it's something more tangible that most people in the 'information age' work with constantly. conversely, how is the notion of 'mind space' affected by being conflated with 'spirit'?

i'm not religious at all - i practise chaos magic coz it works. it's another name for super-serendipity. my best example recently was the a deeply unpleasant situation in kentucky this summer where i was stranded with people who hated me and couldn't get away. i was about to make myself homeless, but had decided to trust in serendipity to sort me out - then just as i was on the verge of giving up, two hippies appeared looking for someone else, and rescued me without batting an eyelid. i left with them. they housed me for the next three weeks. crazy, no?

no not crazy at all: one of the things that happens when GOOM-space begins to look as real as solid matter is that everything begins to work like that, by super-serendipity. it was very validating because it provided for me convincing proof that you can operate like that. and the only thing you need to remember for an entirely super-serendipity based life is that all GOOM objects keep changing in relation to one another, and even in relation to you as you try to engage with them. as long as you remember that, you're sorted and they'll work wonders for you...

Mary:

Hooray! A GoomWorkshop! Time to bring it down to real-time.

Some possible strands for discussion:

• the GOOM concept: mapping the collective unconscious. jung, levi-strauss, schklovsky

• 'the centre cannot hold' - the structuralist vision and its limitations

• where next? open-sided memographics. what kind of text could write (e)motion?

• the mechanics of meme-engineering (media manipulation, PR, artistic representation, religious figures, enduring myths etc. how are they different and how similar?)

• serendipity and applied chaos theory: designed intelligence or intelligent design and the pitfalls of both views

• applications: urban planning, affinity groups, ironic prayer

i'm especially interested in how GOOM-engineering can be used to plant seeds of new stories or awaken old ones in new contexts. also in the material that stories grow out of (GOOM fertiliser, if you like). also the commoditisation of the mass media and the stifling of folk culture (manufactured pop instead of free-flowing GOOM interaction, let's say), the relation of GOOMs to politics (follows from this i suppose, and also from the fact that GOOM-engineering is inseparable from politics as it's at the heart of cultural knowledge production).

Wilfried:

perhaps also:

• The language of GOOM, notationsystems to follow the growth and evolution of GOOM-objects and their interaction with other objects.

• GOOM as a design strategy of new stories, meaning and social fiction

• GOOM as neuro-symbolic programming

there is an intersting contradiction GOO i think now: OO is top down while generative is self-organising and bottom-up, so we are discussing a bottom-up self-assembled top-down structure of objects that lock us in through inheritance.

Mary:

doesn't that take us back to the supra-scientific quality of it? in that, just like serendipity upsets scientists by implying that there can be whole areas of valid study that (by definition) you can't talk about? the idea that paradox or tension could be central to an idea is deeply at odds with a mechanistic science; but it need not necessarily be at odds with a GOOM structure. think of it as breathing, bottom-up-top-down-and-back-again simultaneously.

The G part tries to seed new objects, and the OO tries to lock it down, and the result is M.

Dougald:

Hope you don't mind me butting in... Reading all this reminded me of something Alan Garner wrote in reply to a question on the Guardian Q&A. Perhaps you should invite Ronald Hutton to the great GOOM workshop?

Mary:

It occurs to me that the paradoxical edges of GOOM have a fair bit in common with the FacultyofVorticalIntegration's studies in AppliedPoetics, in that seriousness segues into play. The challenge is to ensure that this doesn't happen in a nihilistic way but instead enables meaning to tiptoe out and frolic around in a (re)constructive way.

Nick:

Not sure I agree with wilfred's paradoxical comments toward the end... where he states that G and OO are kinda contradictory... I would argue

• therwise...

Sure if you take a complete system and perform an OO analysis over it, you end up with what is essentially a top-down structure... you look at how the elements of your system interract, you group entities which share common attributes... those which are very closely related share a common inheritance etc... when you look at what you've got at the end, you can hope for nothing more than hierarchical structure where all the interractions are defined using observations from a single point or perspective, i.e. you

Say I want to program a computer to display ball that someone's thrown falling from the sky, on the screen... I want it to look as realistic as possible... well fortunately mathematicians and scientists figured out a long time ago that a moving object under gravity falls following the path

• f a parabola... further to that we also have nice equations which will

give me precise coordinates for the ball to follow, so I simply pop the equation into the computer and program my ball to trace the path it dictates... easy... but pretty crap. What happens when the ball bounces... what happens if there's a little wind resistance... how do these things affect the parabola..?? Well maybe I could figure it out, but the resulting equations are going to be pretty ugly, and you see quite quickly that this approach is very inflexible.

If we want the computer to be intelligent, we can't rely on scientific

• bservations... it's not as though our brains are solving millions of

differential equations every time we catch a ball... a simple recursive approach of trial and error, with no assumed prior knowledge, is all that's needed in our heads, so why not use a similar approach for the computer. So rather than look at the closed system and our observations of it, we give the computer the basic rules of the 'world' it needs, and let it go from there. For the ball example, all we need for its motion is an inital velocity in x and y directions, and the knowledge that it has a downwards acceleration due to gravity of 9.81 m/s/s... we choose our own time incrementations... for a smooth flight we may want 10 frames a second, and all we do is recalculate the ball's position, velocity and acceleration at each time increment and redisplay the ball. No fancy equations. If there's a little wind resistance... add some negative acceleration along the x-axis... when the ball bounces... reverse the velocity along the y-axis (with a little damping)... all very easy.

Nothing generative here yet, but the principle is the same. You get a top-down structure if you view the system as top-down. It's not enforced by the OO.

However we can similarly apply an OO approach to a bottom-up or 'emergent' system, as I believe the GOOM must be. So... the principles of creating our emergent system... we need a 'world' for it to exist in. For our ball example, it is defined by the physical laws we're interested in, such as gravity and wind resistance. For the GOOM, I suspect it is more closely aligned to the psychogeographical. Maybe it could in itself be defined using PML. That would be kinda neat. I think then we have a nice transition from a physical locality, through the collective unconscious therein (using the language of PML) to a world in which the M can grow.

So we have a world (of sorts). Now we need to sow the seeds. A basic premise of any successful emergent system - keep the building blocks as simple as possible, and allow the behaviour to come from manifold interractions. Take ant colonies... capable of amazing displays of collective intelligence... for example a 20 year-old colony will adapt and regroup when conditions change many times faster than a 5 year-old colony, though no individual ant lives longer than a couple of years. Beautiful emergent behaviour, coming from something as simple as an ant. How does it achieve this..? Well it's quite hard (maybe impossible) to tell from looking at an individual ant. The ant seemingly has two key abilities to influence the group behaviour... (1) it can release various pheromones and (2) it can detect the level of these pheromones in its vicinity, or maybe more specifically can detect pheromone gradients as it moves. That seems to be about it. It is from the rules which govern the way it responds to pheromone gradients, and the millions of ants interracting in the colony, that this 'intelligent' behaviour of the colony as a whole comes about. Were we to define an OO system for our ants, each ant would be an object. For each object, we then simply need to define behaviours for responding to each pheromone depending on the gradient, as well as for responding to whichever attributes of the outside world we've put them in we're interested in. These are the methods (or procedures) of the object.

For the GOOM... our objects will respond to attributes of the GOOM-world... so for each element within the PML namespace we would need to define a specific behaviour depending on its content. Our GOOM-objects would also interract with one another, grouping together/spreading out/destroying one another, depending on their states at that moment. It is of course crucial to get a handle on exactly what these low-level GOOM-objects represent. Units of collective unconscious maybe. "gob"s. Then we let the gobs go and see what happens. If conditions are good, and the PML represents a positive space brimming with creative potential, hopefully the gobs will thrive, reproduce, spread (maybe they themselves can then exert an influence on the GOOM-world and dynamically alter the PML defining their universe) and spawn the M we strive for... if the PML represents an area such as Coventry, the gobs will with any luck self-destruct as quickly as possible.

Maybe this goes a stage further than a mark-up language, but I think the GOOM is a much more ambitious notion than a mere mark-up language. What do you think..?