London Psychogeophysics Summit 2010

Neither the circle without the line, nor the line without the point, can be artificially produced. It is, therefore, by virtue of the point and the Monad that all things commence to emerge in principle.

[John Dee. Monas Hieroglyphica]

In this instance, the summit will be intentionally and necessarily reduced to a series of point enclosures, and the descriptions of varied movements around those points. It can be further constrained to a set of vectors which could readily be processed and reliably communicated through a simple compression algorithm, and thus notated as a series of overlays, transparencies on the skin. The production of a suitable carrier for such a communication was investigated on the last day of the summit. En route, in black cabbed enclosure, to Cross Bones in Southwark, a bicycle wheel is wound with copper wire; at the site cutting the earth's magnetic field, with a modulation frequency accorded to its turning speed. The addition of an angelic helmet after Persinger completes the image of an all-too-literal psychogeophysical device.

Each day's walks are in series, layering which unwritten past over which unwritten present, vegetable roots hollowing a flat space beneath Hyde Park, snaking under Albion Gate to rise in dull buildings framing Connaught Square.

He (Albion) sat by Tyburn's brook, and underneath his heel shot up A deadly Tree: he nam'd it Moral Virtue and the Law Of God who dwells in Chaos hidden from the human sight.

[William Blake. Jerusalem]

The location of the famed Tyburn tree or gallows, past the deathful brook, is now marked by a series of hesitant points, strange attractors pulling us towards a central stream through the fast-moving traffic, steeply banked by stray Oxford Street tourists, serco enclosures (making a difference to people's journeys and lives) and errant buses, searching for that elusive stone island measured in strides (300) east from the convent.

A momentary pause here, as a subtle overlaid grid of a blue plastic vegetable crate, ringed again with copper wire, sings outside the convent through headphones. A case of electromagnetic breakthrough, perhaps easily explainable as a closed loop hearing system, installed in many churches, or some other incursion within the day's enclosure and compression.

The cross of Tyburn Convent marks one literal site of execution, on that day of the God of Law (Ty's day), unresolved, a hidden island close to Albion's Gate. Another site proved more fruitful, viewed remotely the previous evening, a session conducted in a tight office setting, clustered flatscreens and nervous, wheeled pneumatic chairs. The location, number 49 Connaught Square, near to the convent, a fictional address, yet, circling the heavily guarded square, on its very border, meeting Seymour Street, we find the same serifed convent cross, the sign, inscribed in the kerbstone. Another fixed point, potentially the place of the Tyburn gallows, a site of execution to be layered with our own inscriptions on the skin, on top of the stone of London.

Returning now to the original point, the point (hill) which prescribed the to-be-executed algorithm of vectoral compression, coded for the first time in the obscure Brainfuck notational language, with its crosses, arrows and brackets again projecting forwards the key signs for the walks of the week to come. Compression of language, points and vectors and also a compression of time, a fogged-thicker temporal bandwidth (after Pynchon) wrapping and enclosing the week. This is precisely what the coarse psychogeophysical measurements aim to accomplish, this dense thickening. It becomes harder to sense which sign precedes or foretells another sign; the necessity for an overlaid series of transparencies, for thoughtographic imprints.

The easy offset spiral could be traced as a drawing in two dimensions by my Garmin GPS. From point one, Greenwich Royal Observatory to barren Point Hill itself, a scryed dot.walk initiated by socialfiction.org, instructions delivered, framed by the symmetry of the Royal Naval College, in the distance the rising horrors on the Isle of Leutha's Dogs.

This island is a tense enclosure, again the blind serco lorries caught in stalled traffic, marked by a breakdown on the black heath, crossed again in a likewise branded carriage (Docklands Light Railway, an opposing W.A.S.T.E network) three days later as we hurry back to Point Hill, dogs digging, uncovering those buried (thoughtographic) exposures, another layer under this point narrowed, reduced again by that spiralling attractor, a tree bordered enclosure.

And later that evening marking the sites of these walks and locations on a pinned map, the points lined up, key locales revealing a set of intersecting vectors, the Tyburn cross showing itself again in five blocks, the centre placed in Southwark. Further compressed, dividing this hieroglyph into four triangles, arriving at Redcross Way, site of an unconsecrated prostitutes graveyard, for the Winchester Geese. Tomorrow's vector is revealed today, the future site of revelation, bewitched dolls, Bombay Sapphire and a cross of bones; the future site for an experiment in quite literal psychogeophysical interpretation, the first layering.