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 than “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.

• timeline of US presidents encoded into shopping street (Jan Evertsenstraat, Amsterdam)
• timeline of hominids encoded into opposite side of shopping street (each block 1 million years) (Jan Evertsenstraat, Amsterdam)
• mindpalace of damselflies (into branch structure of tree at FoAM's MidWest garden)

• areas: to encode important instances, moments, ideas, entities
• places: to encode important instances, moments, ideas, entities
• entities (monsters): help embody important details when there is little in terms of features available on location
• lines (of places or areas): to encode a sequence of any kind
• cycles: anything that has no beginning or end, but does have an order
• branches: lines that fork, for example for related plant-families, each branch representing a set plants within the family
• combinations of the above

• Aboriginal songlines of Australia
• Native American pilgrimage trails
• inca ceque
• ceremonial roads of the Pacific Islands
• neolithic causeways and henges of Europe

monstercode_intro and memory_craft

working in small groups, each working with a small 'data-set'
Data sets:

• European elephants
• 10 famous female pirates
• 3 flooded villages
• recipe for sandcookies
• common butterfly species

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:

• 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.

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.

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.