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Harwood / Mongrel |  |
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http://9.waag.org | |
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www | |
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Open Source; 'As is', no warranty; | |
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| it is planned to make the source code | |
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The Mongrel Nine(9) project aims to create an open software structure within which communities and individuals can explore and visualise the social geographies of their environment. The project is ongoing: developing, testing and documenting its software tools and human processes with which people can 'map' the invisible social and emotional factors in their local surroundings that hold power structures in place. The maps can reflect personal experiences of social space as affected by differences such as colour, class, cultural background, gender and sexuality. These mappings can become instruments for social change and agents for linkage within and between individual experiences and diverse cultures.
As a piece of collaborative software, Nine(9) is grown from the Mongrel Linker [http://www.linker.org.uk] project. Nine(9) creates a server based application that can accommodate ((9 groups) x (9 archives) x (9 maps)) = (729) knowledge maps, of individuals, groups, collectives or strategic alliances. The software is an open source project created by Mongrel/Harwood while artist-in-residence at the Waag Society Amsterdam in conjunction with Imagine IC. Mongrel & Nine(9) is supported by Arts Council England.
As a social software project, Nine(9) is directly born, changed and developed as the result of an ongoing sociability between users and programmers in which demands are made on the practices of coding that exceed their easy fit into standardised social relations. Nine(9) can most usefully be understood to work in these terms. It is a socio-technical pact between users of certain forms of licence, language, culture and environment. The various forms of its freeness or openness are being developed as part of the various rhythms of the life of this software; its production and critical engagement with the process of permission. In addition to this, Nine requires new social machines to spawn its codes, to diffuse and manage its development and implementation.
Nine(9) is a study in language as Data. Nine(9) uses indexing and word frequency to examine the stream of textual input into the Nine archive. Users use these statistics to set word lists that both represent their content and determine how their content will link to other users. Nine(9) is a dynamic analysis of word use.
Nine(9) is a study in self-evident learning systems: The software has 9 groups, each of which has 9 archives each of which has 9 maps. Each map has 9 images, 9 texts, 9 sounds. This simple structure allows for simplicity of understanding the software-only one number to be remembered.
Nine(9) attempts to flatten hierarchies of knowledge at the level of algorithm and information retrieval. Nine(9) uses Word Frequency to determine the present content of the archive.
Nine(9) uses image as ambiguous memory, because an image can be seen as both proposition and pointer to information. Nine(9) use this tactic to allow the navigation of its underlying content.
This software is a core device for Mongrel to conduct workshops. Nine(9) was presented in workshop form and involved Liverpool residents during FACT's <KOP> exhibition.