Part 4 — GHx Praxis? — En(c)han(c)(t)ing Reality
Describe your street. Lamp poles, pavement, houses, common architectural features. Describe another street and you will encounter much of the same.
Next, compare the differences. One may have a church, the small gargoyle peering at you, unique to this building. The houses may incorporate different coloured doors. The street sign has a different name.
Finally, enumerate the intangibles. The stories and myths associated with the road or perhaps there are none at all? The old crossroads, a spot for hanging highway-men in days gone by. The corner where an old WW2 bomb was unearthed by builders. The bland and the new that lack any tales.
How do you capture this essence when not in the moment of experiencing it? Paintings? Stories? How do you trace its impact on other events?
What about the games played among the alleys and buildings? The psychogeographic components that bleed into fiction and by some are perceived as fact?
ARGs — Augmented reality games, played upon our streets
The initial clue was so subtle that for nearly two days nobody noticed it. — Secret Websites, Coded Messages: The New World of Immersive Games — Frank Rose — Wired.com
Games are not limited to the board or screen. Nor to the circuit or pen. When they breakthrough such confines they become immersive and lived. LARP is one such example, although constrained if not quite a finite game in Carse’s sense of the term.
But those that are unrestrained, are infinite games. They have no hard rule set, merely guidelines, that evolve. These are the realm of the ARG. Whether deliberate in nature such as NIN Year Zero concept album/game (as discussed here) or self-perpetuating and emergent, such as the Rennes Le Chateau mystery.
What if these games could assign a beacon that fuses the cyber-realm with the physical? What if these games and these streets could be combined, much as say an AR app might choose to do?
PoC: GHx Assembly Language and Beacons
Just like with ordinary programming, there are many different assembly code languages, however unlike ordinary programming, the reason these exist is due to the fact that there exists many different processors, each designed to understand a different language — Lesson 0 Introduction — University of Cambridge
The following is not an exhaustive user manual. But rather a very small exploration, a snippet, a path toward a PoC, an idea. It’s not been formalized into a proof or white paper — yet.
Its goal is to advance the concept of an Assembly language that can be used to construct, writings, events, and experiences. Such nodes can then be linked programmatically through a mechanism such as embedding the results of a hash function within the Assembly program. The application does not have to be limited to psychogeography, hyperstitional literature or infinite games, but we are using that as our experimental field of engagement.
We could imagine a set of verbs that describe actions is our first class of statements, for example:
MOV
ADD
SUB
Variables can then be described in a similar fashion such as:
CPTCUR
BLDNG
Therefore an action revolving around Cryptocurrency could use a CPTCUR variable to denote som event implementing it. For example:
ADD ‘HOLO’ CPTCUR
This would imply a chapter, work, process or similar that performs some act upon a (post)Cryptocurrency (Holofuel here). Perhaps the event was funded by it? This event could be a work of fiction or a physical act. The idea though is the term provides a sigil that can either relate to actions and/or concepts. The Verbs can re-arranged and other Assembly programs chopped up and added in. The end result becomes a cut-up set of text that is more than the sum of its parts.
The concept of using such a method is of course not new. Languages and techniques developed on top of existing languages and bodies of knowledge in order to focus effort can be found in the Kabbalah’s sephirot. Constrained and algorithmic writings techniques were very much developed in 20th C France. Cutting text up and re-arranging it was pioneered by Burroughs.
Imagine now, events all chained together to show a continual flow of time, but also a way to trace the effects of one event. In turn, imagine the Assembly language provides a way of denoting each event but then provides a mechanism that can be parsed by computational devices to construct some sort of history, story or map. Further still imagine being able to take what appear to be disparate events, chained together by Hash functions of events, defined first in the Assembly language and then acted out. A cut-up of events that seem unrelated, fused together to form a new story, but have a subtle link through their Hashed relationships.
A GHx assembly language, therefore, provides a blueprint for fiction and/or action.
In the case of fiction, a story can be woven around a constraint constructed in the Assembly language. Or in the case of architecture, a building based upon some Assembled set of definitions subsequently encoded into it, which have been derived from fiction.
All these events and concepts can be chained together to show the ripple of cause and effect. Hashes can be chained to hashes, and hashes embedded in work.
By way of a further example:
- Construct an Assembly program of intent for an event, piece of fiction or building
- Hash the Assembly
- Embed it in any event or artifact
- Subsequent events deriving from those above, generate a new Assembly and Hash it. In turn, they map it to the original Hash
- Rinse and repeat
Holochain
Holochain enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. Data is about remembering our lived and shared experiences. Distributing the storage and processing of that data can change how we coordinate and interact. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from corporate control over our choices and information. — Holochain.org
And what if we can then find a way to map this underlying Assembly language to Ceptr? To encode it into the global nervous system via the Holochain?
To begin, each set of Assemblies can be compiled into a unique Hash. This Hash is used to tag, documents, books, events, websites and physical building (via QR codes, physical carving or better yet psychogeographic digital beacons).
The Hash would then be stored via Holochain. Querying for the Hash from an app would return a list of documents, physical buildings and so forth that were a byproduct of a psychogeographic project.
This Assembly language could then be fed into distributed peer-to-peer machine learning projects to mine for interesting correlations. They, in turn, can look at existing literature and other items hashed with the ‘programs’ unique hash and build upon the psychogeographical (or other forms) foundation, to generate new experiences.
For example, correlations can be mind from specific tagged building types, such as churches. These correlations are then combined to form some new unexpected AR experience for users of a specific app, when they point their phones at a church.
Psychogeographic Beacons
Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you. ― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
Hardware beacons placed around geographic locations and embed Assembly code, which in turn when accessed reaches out the Holochain to return data, potentially in an AR format. These beacons can be interacted with via apps on a phone or better yet glasses, maybe one-day contact lenses. The beacons provide a new level to a city, digital/psychic, nodes and vectors.
It’s the kind of pre-cursor to what we see in Altered Carbon where the protagonist injects some concoction and sees an enhanced world overlayed over the one that surrounds him. It’s The Feed distributed.
The mechanism by how this could work would be for the Assembly code to be injected into programs and embedded in small devices, such as passive or active RFID or BLE beacons. Such devices can then be attached to walls or other physical objects. Those performing derivés can interact with them via their hardware module of choice, whether it be an Android phone or hacked together Project North Star headset.
Beacons can then be used for messages, information drop boxes, swarm gatherings, even spreading viruses if malicious actors are at play.
This model helps cities to break free from traditional grids and roads by adding another layer.
Conclusion
This is just a starting point. The ability to re-configure our view of urban spaces via Augmented Reality is on the cusp of coming into being. Peer-to-peer communication tools, allow for private networks of augmented experience.
The tools are here, we just need to build the experiences.
