• Urban Drift • m-Learning with apps • Dennis Dollens

Urban palimpsest. Graffiti identity markers on top of existing graffiti, encoding information known only to the street initiated.

I’ve been meeting with friends in different places around Barcelona to discuss the game of Urban. These are more design and strategy talks and are helping to define boundaries for the as a dispersed, open-sourcing of urban information buried in tracking routes and information paths, depositing useful information, seeking out, gps-locating graffiti for others to later visit, and begin the idea of game as information-building pool. The sense is that hunting useful information in the city, sharing it, tracking it, visiting it is a fun activity. The SQUT FLANEUR plays for the flanerie in a solitary or group context.

I’ve been visiting the Floridablanca/Urgill squat site (for images see past Game-Based Learning posts) every weekend to retrieve new information and graphics. I sit in the cafe across the street to write and design aspects of the game — sometimes playing PacMan. For example this weekend (Saturday 26 Feb) I found the above graffiti image inserted into the squat’s graffiti facade; the overlaying of graffiti identity markers on top of existing graffiti, a kind of urban palimpsest encoding information known only to the initiated.

Cary Wolfe quoting Derrida
with [my inserts] for appropriating the text as life description for generative design where iterability serves as computational iteration:

‘“organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one, it [the code, script, mark/writing—DD] is constituted in its identity as a mark by its iterability, in the absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined “subject.” . . . The possibility of repeating and thus of identifying the marks is implicit in every code [here think generative stl model—DD], making it into a network [un grille] that is communicable, transmittable, decipherable, iterable for a third, and hence for every possible user in general. To be what it is, all writing [design as writing—DD] must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general.15”

Herein lies the radically posthumanist dimension of writing-as-difference. . . . Moreover, those effects and relations are at once material, bodily, external, institutional, technological, and historical — they exist in all the specificity and heterogeneity of what Derrida calls their “iteration.” [Their generative ontology—DD] Hence Derrida argues that “this pure difference, which constitutes the self-presence of the living present, [embedded algorithmic nature—DD] introduces into self-presence [generative technology/author intent—DD] from the beginning all the impurity putatively excluded from it [the generative design—DD]. The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace [being in nature—DD]. It is always already a trace [nature—DD].” And what this means, in turn, is that “the trace is the intimate relation of the living present to its outside [nature—DD], the opening to exteriority in general.”17’

Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minnesota. University of Minnesota Press. Location 471-484, Kindle App on iPad.

In a parallel conversation to IDGBL, I’ve been designing some game scenarios first tightly based on playing PacMan on an iPhone and applying PacMan extrapolated scenarios to urban, physical space for learning — mostly this evolved in some ideas for a tracking game dealing with botanic information and physical space in the Barcelona Botanic Garden — I’ve documented some of the PacMan developments on the blog listed below along with the schematic games Urban SQUATS & Game of Life noted below.

Urban SQUATS. The second phase includes some PacMan strategy applied to thinking about components of Google Earth, GPS, Google Latitude (and maybe Twitter) for a tracking information game focusing on urban Squats, this is still being evolved since the coordinates and posting are not functioning properly. The intention was for players to spot urban appropriation of spaces that were then colonized / re-inhabited / renovated / or landscaped. The game involves texts implanted into Google Earth (the texts can be information, opinion, or directions / hints) with subsequent implants by players and users. Partly it is a way to teach urban planning issues revolving around abandoned spaces and partly it is to suggest the idea of a data base of these nomadic occurrences in public / private space as well as negative and positive aspects — this is ongoing and I’m thinking of bring some architecture students into the planning and development.

Game of Life. The third phase is evolving from conversations of the above SQUAT outline in relation to Arduino hacking and recycled mobile phone screens with friend and artist/designer Jon Minchin who is heading up a digital hack project. The idea is developing with London programmer Drew Exell to recycle trashed mobile phones and reANIMATE them in a new life form (though the DIY prototype model is with a new Nokia screen). My involvement is with the introduction of the idea of the mobile screen recycling as a literal, if digital “second-life” — the goal is to interface a version or variation of John Conway’s pioneering 1970s Game of Life implanted into the Arduino build as cellular automata (and the possibility that each mobile screen could function as a “life” cell in the Game.) The relationship here to PacMan is perhaps tenuous, but I’m not totally sure about that. The early algorithms, as they animate aggression in PacMan appear to me to have a close programmatic relationship to the rules of Conway’s game — but research is necessary to check that hunch out. Wikipedia has a great site running various types of “Life” games, if interested see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

http://www.arduino.cc/

DIY: Arduino w/ Nokia screen

Recently I’ve been thinking about some home brew-cellular materials that could be used in 3D printing; and by chance came on this video for printing skin for burns. Looking at the video makes clear that the hacking of inkjet printers is also a possibility and I’m wondering if anyone has been testing ideas for printing plant tissue/cells for design purposes?

From Top: 1. Single branch (shape grammar element #1) on a ghosted trunk. 2. Double branch interlocking as one unit. 3. Single branch highlighted within evolving eTree and ghosted trunk. 4. Generation of 3 eTrees with as an evolving columnlike structure, trunk hidden.

This is the same file used and illustrated in the 4 Feb post of the build failure. I will build it when I return to the US in a few weeks and send you a physical set.

Tests using AutoDesk’s iPhone SketchBook Express to develop city-sketch e-learning assignments. See below video for full features. Free version at the appStore: SketchBook MobileX.

urbanSQUAT hint #1

Team<0 is a late emergence phenomena in Game-Based Learning with roots in swarm and hive abilities; finding the colony it was born in, fissured in confused formations it, itself a natural formation, took flight — it has found a safety from predatory inaction in the art emergence of the graffiti it posted last week as a home base welcoming all players, — while it prefers open sourcing locations the game has the abilities to hibernate, to digitally remain dormant while it is also able to rise-up to information feeds . . . respond, connect . . . (global squatting is the ultimate context so contributing a squat is a level win). . .

. . . This is urbanSQUAT, Team<0's second week! We'll try to run it the rest of the semester. I launched it last week to Group 1 and twitter and anyone that wanted to join/define/evolve/redefine/write rules.

The first outside players are from other urban squats so it seems to find some players. Today was the first time I could write a procedure with photograph and player assignment in the post "sopador vega". It's up as a hint and direction (you need tools such as Google Translation), and it is in two parts, the second being a "street graphic" handbill. Rules are still emerging even as some are being slowly released in the wild.

I think the game could evolve, it potentially (not likely) could become self-perpetuating and emerging into an assignment.

I'm scouting a second SQUAT, I hope you are too.

GoogleEarth coordinates: 41°22'49.30"N, 2° 9'40.73"E

This is hypothetical because carrying design beyond a specific point for INC doesn’t make sense. But there are intersections with posthuman theory that make mentioning it relevant. Specific 3D printers and fabrication allow for hacking materials for use in model building. (Some machines use cake frosting for example, for candy making). With developments in synthetic biology and the some of the DIY biology hacking, it is possible to think of constructing a material that includes biological attributes for fluorescence or bioluminescence for example, into an organic formula that will still provide the necessary performance for the 3D printer. This, in some senses extends beyond cyborgian terms into the realm of fabricating hybrid life qualities (eventually, perhaps, cellular life) in to manufactured parts and components of architecture and/or industrial design — life extension and cognitive extension. In this view, we could think of the shape grammars of the current INC project as also having natural properties that then extend the embedded algorithmic relationship.

Related to the Artificial Life PDF by R. Armstrong.