the timboucher experience

iPhone Time Travel App

Well, okay, maybe the keywords I used in my title are a little bit misleading. But not by much. Google did recently introduce a time element into their Earth program. This means that now you can not only look at satellite visuals for a particular geolocation, you can also increment backwards along a time axis to observe the appearance of that location at asynchronous points in time.

In other words, you can time travel - if only virtually.

Time travel, I’d like to predict, will become all the rage in the future. Failing the utter collapse of civilization, it is destined to become a certainty. How can I be so sure? By looking at which way the winds are blowing: digital augury. You just look at how things are now and make a safe bet that they’ll stay more or less on that course for a while. Inertia maybe, pragmatic realism. The trick becomes how to make the present as dazzling as possible.

But what good is the present in a world where it’s always the past or the future? That is, in a world where you can have asynchronous experiences overlaid against actual sense data in your sensorium? Consider this example, by way of an article on Narrative Archaeology:

The participants walk the streets of a city with a G.P.S unit attached to a lap top computer. Headphones for up to 5 at once are attached to the computer and worn by the participants. On the laptop is a map with a marker that identifies the participants’ location. The marker moves along the map tracking location and movement through the city grid. Data triggers are set along points in the physical city by latitude and longitude. Some triggers or “hot spots” are marked as squares on the map while others are left to be discovered. All written narratives are read by voice actors to create an overlap experience in real time of experiencing two places at once. The only visual is the map that tracks one’s movement and shows hot spots and the distance readings on the g.p.s unit.

This experimental project is a logical impossibility in a city like Baltimore, where you’d get jumped in about two seconds by non-time-travelers lusting after your technology. And who can blame them, right? It’s not everybody who is allowed to walk between worlds like that. Or is it?

Monument City

A friend and I have recently embarked on a project called “Monument City,” in which we’re taking first-person human-level eyewitness historical documentation of significant landmarks, monuments and historical markers within the geographic space of Baltimore City.

Monuments are anchors which remain embedded within a geographic and cultural landscape which changes against a time-axis, just like Google Earth. So our basic premise is to use GPS data correlated to URI locations in cyberspace. What this allows you to do as a folk historian, artist, or simply someone with something to say, should be readily apparent to any good time traveler.

And that is, we’re leaving copies of ourselves as ghosts in time - or at least in cyberspace.

Think about it: if right now you can go back in time with satellite footage of a specific location, at some point you’ll be able to go back in time with other media embedded in a specific location. If you have a fully-immersive synaesthetic spatial interface, then you essentially have a time travel machine in which people in the near future can come back and experience (1) anything which has been documented, or (2) anything which can be simulated. Thorough historical documentation in multi-modal media, in fact, guarantees that better simulations of yourself can be created in the future. Ghosts in time are no longer science fiction. We’re here to stay.

While ephemeral business interests come and go and neighborhoods change with their occupants, monuments usually remain intact. They have a lifespan that lasts for as many generations as are willing to keep the memories of the past alive. “Primitive” peoples had ancestor worship; we have contained our ghosts and animist spirits within specific forms, statues, embedded in the landscape. And they become waypoints around which the transit of commerce and everyday life blends and shifts in chaotically beatific patterns when viewed along a time axis. Ants devouring a gecko to bones in seconds. It’s a real video on YouTube. Watch it and get back to me.

Meanwhile, in the Real World™, I began outlining last night an iPhone* wayfinding application (*note: I don’t actually have an iPhone) based around the uber-simple workflow we have set up at the Monument City outfit. The idea behind it is dead simple, and could probably be cobbled together out of existing apps. I’ll happily send along the full email, which includes a simple use case example, to any interested parties, as the concept and description has already been released into the Public Domain.

That’s another thing I really dig about monuments, is that the are public markers of shared spaces, of the commons, geographic locations where some people at some point in the past decided they ought to get together and remember the fact that they got together. So they built a monument, erected a column, hoisted a statue, held a little ceremony, inscribed some words. Not such a bad way to live: it’s sustainable after all, building things which last, things that are durable, markers that everybody shares as reference points. They become part and parcel of our cultural landscape, our lexicon, a kind of universal language embedded in the very fabric of our neighorhoods.

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