Florian Wenz <F01>, Philip Pocock <P02>, Daniel Burckhardt <D03>, Udo Noll <U04>, Gruppo A12 <A12>, Roberto Cabot <R13>, Wolfgang Staehle, Juergen Enge, Birgit Wien, and Øthers.
<A12 - Genoa - Shanty Functionalism? - 15.10.99> h|u|m|b|o|t is a project that involves many different authors, circa 20, each with their own area of expertise. It is a project where a simple single leading concept doesn't exist, because it is the sum of different layers that interact with points of contact in an ongoing process, building and accumulating regions of interaction. The ordering element is the explorer and mapmaker, Humboldt.</A12>
<P02 - Karlsruhe - T(r)opical Chor(e)ography
- 14.02.99> 05.06.1799. Alexander von
Humboldt takes his first step into a virtual maze of mischarted territory,
heading across oceans, up and down rivers, through jungles and swamps,
over plains and peaks, around the forsaken torrid zone of equinoctial
America. Accompanied by an indefatigable confrère, M. Aimé Bonpland, and
a provisional host of itinerant liaisons between station and stopover,
they all arrive at their quasi-fictional characters in a shared documentary
epic unfolding in 30 tomes over 20 years (1807 - 27) - text mappings and
passages - stemming from Humboldt's pen. 
Humboldt
(and his readers) enter the chora between human nature and nature, in
the trajective space linking private mappings (psychogeography) and public
mappings (geography). The Humboldt expedition endures 5 years (1799 -
1804) and still endures 2 centuries later as a cluster of topoi, conceptual
starting points, for tele-travellers rehearsing a getting-around on the
7th Continent, where the affective spatiotemporal measure of geography
is drawing to a close.</P02>
<Alexander von Humboldt - Paris - "Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent" - 1811> "The more travellers research into natural history, geography or political economy, the more their journey loses that unity and simplicity of composition typical of the earlier travellers. It is now virtually impossible to link so many different fields of research in a narrative so that what we may call the dramatic events give way to descriptive passages".</AvH>
<Werner Heisenberg - USA - "Physics and Philosophy" - 1963> "One has now divided the world not into different groups of objects but into different groups of connections. The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole".</WHeisenberg>
<R13 - Cologne - h|u|m|b|o|t.release - 04.07.99> Im Zeitalter des Massentourismus, in dem jedes Ziel jederzeit erreichbar erscheint, gelingt den Künstlern eine Neuverortung des Reisens. Formal und inhaltlich begeben sich die Künstler auf eine Entdeckungsreise, indem sie mittels der Kommunikationstechnologie des Internets eine Erzählstruktur entwerfen, die kartographish orientiert wird.</R13>
<Melquíades - Gabriel García Márquez - "100 Years of Solitude" - 1967> "They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up a telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman at arm's length away. 'Science has eliminated distance,' Melquíades proclaimed. 'In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house" .</Melquíades>
<A12 - Milano - THE FOLLOWING TEXT IS MEANT TO BE OPERATIONAL AND PRACTICAL, SO THERE WOULD BE NO QUOTATIONS, ONLY IMAGES - 22.05.99> A firewall is an electronic protection to avoid intruders to break into a net system and cause damage. It creates and inside and an outside. To get into the inside you need to know the coded words. Sometimes you slide inside, sometimes you crawl under a small passage, sometimes you climb a stair, sometimes you enter a tunnel. The intention is to inject real life and confusion into a system, the Internet, seen as lacking any physical presence. The hypothesis is to give physical evidence to one of the metaphors of Humboldt: the travel as an intimate, personal discovery of the self. The intention is to have that space as an hypnotic womb, in opposition to the active and dynamic piazza outside.</A12>
<Paul Virilio - Paris - "Open Sky" - 1997> "Between the subjective and the objective it seems we have little room for the trajective, that being of movement without which we will never achieve a profound understanding of the various regimes of perception of the world".</PVirilio>
<P02 - Karlsruhe - Dai.lies - 10.10.98> h|u|m|b|o|t on-line is a hypermedia 'well' fed by audiovisual traces of situations encountered by its authors in contemporary Cuba and Venezuela and ØtherWhere (1999 - 2004). This evolving matrix of knowledge is mapped according to a connective topography with a cut-up version of AvH's "Persona l Narrative". An activist aesthetic arises in the Zwischenraum spanning the authors' hypernarratives, added to the 'well' over time, and paths trodden by our participants, drawn from this 'well' of experience, each leaving a trace that informs future user itineraries. In short, authors (AvH and h|u|m|b|o|t) realize a 'cyberatlas', through which users may 'travel' in search of 'moby'.</P02>
<Ismael - Herman Melville - "Moby Dick" (The Chart) - 1851>"... in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul".</Ismael>
<F01 - Zürich - flatbook/flatmovie - 08.06.99> So the idea is that there are two maps humboldt (him) and h|u|m|b|o|t (us) that have their own keyword system and visual identity and then are woven into each other, by collapsing keyword space into one. The thing will store input from authors as objects with properties and organize it in multidimensional maps according to selected properties. These maps are being displayed from different positions and perception modes, output media etc. to other authors/users who will perceive the objects and generate more input/properties ... cycle ad infinitum = knowledge metabolism machine / collective brain / social technology.</F01>
<h|u|m|b|o|t - king.dom.de - de-River - 01.08.99> 12.05.1800: An unlikely tributary stealing water from the Orinoco - the Río Casiquiare - is discovered by Bonpland and Humboldt to spill into the Río Negro, which in turn flows into the Amazon. The quest for a gateway linking the Orinoco and Amazon is answered.</h|u|m|b|o|t>
<Alexander von Humboldt - ibid> "Rather than discovering new, isolated facts I prefer linking already known ones together" .</AvH>
<U04 - king.dom.de - wider landscapes in
mind - 25.07.99> eine sache macht mir
kopfzerbrechen. wir hatten in koeln darueber gesprochen Kohonen ermittelt
nach jedem durchlauf fixe relative positionen, die sich sonstwie abbilden
lassen. in meiner idealen welt muesste Kohonen
(*) aber in sehr kurzen zeitabstaenden laufen,
um die vom visitor beschrittenen wege zu beruecksichtigen und auf die
dadurch entstehenden relationen reagieren zu koenne. grob gesagt muesste
jeder klick registriert werden (pro user, pro session also) und verglichen
mit anderen 'pattern'. was sieht man auf so einer map?
</U04>
(*) A Kohonen map is a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) using Artificial Neural Network techniques to clarify relations in a complex set of data. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/kohonen.html.
<D03 - Berlin - flash for h|u|m|b|o|t - 25.07.99 17:04> ich würde nicht direkt über die räumliche anordnung der orte reagieren, aber über die _darstellung_ der orte. vermutlich ist das noch zu simpel, müssen wir also wirklich ein pasigrafisches system aufbauen, wo wir mehrdimensionale informationen (gefühl, autor, ort) usw. in ein symbol stecken können. ich mache mich gerade hinter die konkrete realisation eines fixen entwurfs, um einerseits für mich zu sehen, was er taugt, und den andern möglichkeit für feedback zu geben, was bei einer rein platonischen idee schwieriger ist.</D03>
<Darren Tofts - http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/content/VirtualCultures/vc7-tofts-paper.html - "ABC of Cspace" - 1996> chora: "Plato's term for space, discussed at length in the 'Timaeus'. In that text Plato discusses space as that which comes between being and becoming". chorography: "a highly powerful concept of writing as a creative space that creates complex and unexpected relations from and within the matrix of the autographical writing subject".</DTofts>
<A12 - Genoa - multi-individual - 15.10.99> As much as the authorship of the h|u|m|b|o|t web site is multi-individual, the responsibility of its presence in the first Lichthof of the ZKM is multi-individual: technical requirements, desires, security impositions, the many and different skills of several workers, various and complex, sometimes opposed cultural backgrounds (it might sound like a silly joke, but although all the staff of ZKM marvelously supported all our ideas and made us able to realize the project, we are sure that no one will ever buy in the future an Italian car). All these and a thousand more ingredients compose the h|u|m|b|o|t favela. Like in a card-deck, all the elements of architecture were all present during the process, but mixed in a different order. But not only identities and the relationships between their social and creative roles are blurred, but much more, the disciplines which seems to be inserted in the project. In its totality h|u|m|b|o|t works as a overlapping of various layers (the wood, the maps on the web-site, the images running on the screens, the historical traces), which fold and create points of contact and accumulation, where new spaces are created, in a dynamic system, where in real time everything is modifying.</A12>
<Robert Smithson - New York - "Artforum" (A Sedimentation of the Mind) - 1968> "Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particle s each containing its own void".</RSmithson>
<A12 - ibid> Why shanty functionalism? The core of the h|u|m|b|o|t architecture is just to have what's needed in order for the space to be useful and comfortable, so the machines can work properly, so the users may be able to enter the project freely. There wasn't a clear concept or poetic to rationally develop following some sort of hierarchy. The process of design wasn't canonical, because it sought the interaction of all involved in the project convinced that cyberspace is found on both sides of the screen, inside the cathode tube a s well as inside the museum space. This attitude magnified any possible dysfunction and diseconomy: in fact it has been a process of construction deriving from a trial and error technique. This means that Humboldt's steps where traced in the books, in the jungle and in the web site; the installation was built without one drawing, moving large amounts of furniture, making temporary spatial sketches (that only the museum's closed circuit cameras may testify), bargaining for space and compromises with the curators and the resulting sum of the elements is just one step of this ongoing process. Therefore the mass of energy and material spared become almost ridiculous. In its sponge-like attitude of inclusion, either of positive but also of negative elements, the h|u|m|b|o|t installation works as a relational architecture, physical evidence of immaterial processes.</A12>
<Alexander von Humboldt - ibid> "In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants o f life, but in its general influence on the intelligent advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments. Such a result can, however, only be reaped as the fruit of observation and intellect, combined with the spirit of the age, in which are reflected all the varied phases of thought".</AvH>
<P02 Abstract - the Nature of Narrative for a Narrative of Nature> h|u|m|b|o|t is a 5-year (1999 - 2004) chorographic installation project mapping a loose menagerie of architects, artists, datatects, hackers and writers to intermittent travel-as-art situations in equatorial America and ØtherWhere on the new New Continent, taking the explorer and mapmaker Alexander von Humboldt's book "Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1799 - 1804" as its topos. H|u|m|b|o|t confronts online participants with a topographic map containing Humboldt text passages (read and marked up by the project authors with help of gender study and art history students) according to Humboldt's position(GPS), location (i.e. in a canoe), emotion (identifying emotion according to coordinates clicked on an emotion map concevied for the project) as well as category, word frequency and freestyle text parameters Along this the Humboldt's text paragraph by paragraph, H|u|m|b|o|t author video, clip by clip, shot on location in Venezuela and Cuba was marked up using the same system. Both Humboldt text passages and H|u|m|b|o|t video clips were input into a Kohonen neural net like Self-Organzing Mapping program, and 'mapped' onto the screen. It is a sort of atlas, and the travellers being the H|u|m|b|o|t site participatants and users.</P02>
H|u|m|b|o|t installation, net_condition exhibition, ZKM (Center for Art and Media) Karlsruhe, Germany, 1999.
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Credits: florian wenz <f01> Born Munich, Germany, 1958. <http://www.gameover.org> philip pocock <p02> Born Ottawa, Canada, 1954. <http://www.dom.de/acircle> <http://king.dom.de/equator> daniel burckhardt <d03> Born Meiringen, Switzerland, 1971. udo noll <u04> Hadamar, Germany, 1966. <http://king.dom.de><http://king.dom.de/equator> gruppo a12 <a12> Genoa, Italy, 1993. roberto cabot, <r13> Born Rio de Janeiro, France, 1963. Thanks to: Goethe-Institute Caracas, ZKM, Karlsruhe; Brigitte Schenk Cologne; Axel Wirths, MedienKunstRaum, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der BRD, Bonn; Dr. Bernd Sheffer, 'Schrift und Bild in Bewegung', Munich.