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Dark Heart of Codeness
A .walk into computational darkness, Tuesday the second of August 2010. [15.00-17.00] at the entrance of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park.
It is hard not to feel sympathy for Martial Bourdin, the clumsy anarchist (aren't we all?) who tried to bomb the Lon/Lat HQ of the English Empire in 1894 (i.e. the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park) and who is forever ridiculed in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent. (Wikipedia writes about Joseph Conrad [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad] that “Despite the complexity of his novels, Conrad in his private life was predominantly conservative.” Who could have ever thought…) The bomb in question exploded near target in Bourdin's face. He died 30 minutes later without mentioning his name. It is presumed that he was planning to destroy the clock ticking to centralized time. A just cause as time, which obviously does not exist, is a deadening tool of artificial concensus reality…
The Royal Observatory is also where, between 1765 to 1925, the Nautical Almanac Office employed scores of human computers to compile and calculate tables of astronomical data. In of those tables, the 'Nautical Ephemeris for Finding Latitude and Longitude at Sea' Charles Babbage found over a thousand errors. The invention of the mechanical computer, Babbage's Difference Engine, was inspired by the desire to diminish the number of ships wrecked at sea caused by faulty data.
The Royal Observatory is also where the London Psychogeographic Association went looking for ley-lines but of course ley-lines are just pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo that nobody needs. Say no to the tantric fellow travellers! Say no to the psychogeographers of yore!
The Dark Heart of Codeness / a pedestrian code experiment starting from the Observatory / human computers will run walking codelets / a “stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” (Conrad) will haunt the .walkers at every step untill they will succumb crying in a whisper at some image, at some vision — a cry that was no more than a breath — “The horror! The horror!”
Some thought on what_is_psychogeophysics?
