Humans as a species operate within a framework of symbolic representation that enables us to articulate ideas, share ideas, plan, design, make decisions, and reflect. We associate this with literacy, but for the majority of human evolution, we used very different frameworks, sometimes even the landscape itself to organise thought. All over the world cultures associated knowledge to features in the landscape; the Aboriginal songlines of Australia, the Native American pilgrimage trails, and the Neolithic causeways and henges of Europe. This is landscape as mind-palace. Bringing practices together from a wide range of sources I’ve been experimenting in my area of Amsterdam with these almost entirely forgotten ‘techniques’ of ‘applied animism'. It has transformed not just how I think, but also how I perceive and relate to my environment and my view of the human organism.
Monster refers to imagination. Code refers to encoding things geographically. The name is an adaptation of memory_code the title of the book by Lynne Kelley, on ways of encoding environmental, ethological and cultural knowledge and wisdom directly into the environment (or objects). Kelley identifies how orality taps into two immensely powerful forms of human memory for storing knowledge:
working in small groups, each working with a small 'data-set'
Data sets:
Each 'data-set' offers various forms of information. The most complex being the recipe, which combines ingredients, amounts and preparation.
“Not only was his (Aboriginal elder Paddy) knowledge not reproduced in books like the ones he nevertheless wanted to write with me, but it had nothing to do with authorship. Knowledge didn’t originate with individuals, and the concept of mind was irrelevant. Knowledge was on the outside; it was held in ‘living Country’. And humans had to get together to animate this knowledge.
As Paddy and I were walking the beautiful coastline north of Broome, he would point out things, tell stories, call out to ancestors, and sing songs that belonged to particular places. The songs were important because they were inspirational (in the original Latin sense of a truth being breathed into someone). Their significance was, and is, multiple: they are handed down from ancestors; they tie human and nonhuman worlds together and animate those connections; they are mnemonic and practical, reminding people, for instance, that this is the place of yarrinyarri, the bush onion.
But how on Earth does knowledge transfer work without a concept of mind? Understanding, for Paddy, was ‘hearing’ and that was the word he used (as in, ‘that man can’t hear’), equivalent to the French entendre, which also embraces the meanings of hearing and understanding.”
Bill Gamage, Biggest Estate on Earth:
American poet Ruth Stone works as a farmer in rural Virginia. She describes the creation of a poem as something she feels and hears emanating from the landscape. A poem is like a thundering train of air coming towards her, shaking the earth beneath her feet. In that moment, there is only one thing left for her to do, and that is “run like hell.” She then runs for home, chased by this poem, with the sole purpose of getting to a piece of paper and a pencil as quickly as possible, so that when the poem crashes through her, she can capture it on a piece of paper. We call this a moment of inspiration, when a revelation or new perception comes to us from the world of ideas.
Working with Renfrew, Malafouris developed an approach to the study of the human mind, past and present, known as Material Engagement Theory (MET) which has three central tenets:
These tenets provide an archaeological framework that “offers a new way of understanding the nature of cognition itself” and establishes “the archaeological record as an integral part of the thinking process.”
Important concepts developed by Malafouris include:
Notes on a research program in collaboration with Sjef van Gaalen and Creative Coding Utrecht.
Monster Code explores techniques for encoding environmental knowledge directly into the environment itself. Imagination (monsters) and geographic memory are key pillars this builds on. Basically associating knowledge to features and hooks in the landscape, by the power of imagination and story. That power is considerable, as evidenced by the practices of oral cultures around the world, showing knowledge remaining intact over thousands of years and spanning thousands of km. People who have started practicing it report their world is filled with new layers of liveliness: you are not just walking to the bakery or office, you are walking through the history of early humans, all indigenous dragonfly species (or whatever you happen to have encoded locally). But we will start at the beginning.
This first phase of the research is about rapid prototyping, taking subjects and encoding them in different ways into the environment.