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). Oral cultures tap into two immensely powerful forms of human memory for storing knowledge:

• monster: our memory of character: you may forget someones name, but you never struggle to remember someones personality. More then “thinking stones and mountains are alive” oral cultures they give their landscape character.
• code: our memory for geography: we may not be great at remembering list, but we are amazingly good at remembering places. Imagine your house. Almost nobody struggles to remember where the living room, bedroom, kitchen, toilet are, or even the furniture in those rooms. Modern memory champions still use this technique known as a memory-palace. Often the greek method of loci is pointed out as its origin, but that vastly underestimates how fundamental these principles were, stretching over tens of thousands of years of human history and across all continents.

monstercode_intro and memory_craft

“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:

• pg 126 every part of land, sea and sky must lie on a songline otherwise an ancestor can’t have created it and it would not exist
• pg 126 repeat the song exactly because the creator ancestor is listening
• pg 126 from far away they can discuss a tree or creek and who is responsible for it
• pg 127 shape signifies life, in death they loose shape, so all things with shape have soul / Julian Barbour geometry is fundamental to the universe
• pg 127 the soul passes from one chariot to another and this gives creation order, it moves through a particular set of things created by the same ancestor in the Dreaming.

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.
Prototyping phase:

• timeline of presidents encoded into shopping street
• timeline of hominids encoded into opposite side of shopping street (each block 1 million years)
• mindpalace of damselflies