Creative Placemaking As Cryptographic Cultural Computation

I’ll be leaving Philadelphia tomorrow after the house closing paperwork is signed. The cleaners are getting it ready for its new family. A chapter closes, a new one opens. I’ll slowly make my way down to Little Rock, camping along the way. After three back-to-back, three-day, 1,300-mile u-haul drives in as many weeks, I’m sick of bland hotels with oddly coded decor and ready to sleep under the stars without worrying if someone broke into the truck while I was sleeping.

I built in a few extra days to poke around Oak Ridge outside Knoxville and see the colossal Athena in Nashville’s 1931 Parthenon replica with the snakey Erichthonius (born of Hephasteus’s semen falling to the soul). Interesting allusions to biogeochemistry and the origins of life in a city growing by leaps and bound on economies of biotech and blockchain health systems.

Yesterday I hit REI and got some new Tevas a year after my 20-year old pair gave up the ghost. I need shower shoes for the campgrounds, and Arkansas lakes are clear with sharp rocky bottoms. I also grabbed a tiny USB-rechargeable lantern. It’s been raining a lot. If I get stuck in the tent, I have “Godel, Escher, Bach” to keep me busy – all strange loops, and recursion, self-referencing refrains that call to mind for me reincarnation or many worlds depending on your ideas about spacetime. Using digital light to process print information seems par for the course.

I’d hoped to be able to tour the Barnes Foundation today, but it was closed to the general public. In reading how Godel assigned symbols to numbers to generate a coded language that generated insights into the limitations of mathematical proofs, I started to think more about Steganography, secretly encoding objects with alternate meanings. It is a form of information exchange that can exist out in the open, but only able to be translated by those who know the coding. Stephers brought it to my attention a few years back.

The Barnes Foundation has an unusual, and highly politicized history. Albert Barnes, a Philadelphian, got his MD at the University of Pennsylvania, then trained as a corporate chemist in Heidelberg, Germany, and later made a fortune selling, Argyrol, silver nitrate drops used in infants eyes after delivery.

He used his fortune to acquire a vast, eclectic collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Modern art. These pieces are displayed in methodical arrangements, or ensembles, that incorporate pieces of decorative arts and furniture as well as ritual objects from a range of world cultures. Barnes created sets, and the interplay of the objects in each set generates additional meaning, context, through juxtaposition.

Barnes focused on the application of scientific principles to art, and established education programs around the collection. His wife Laura managed an arboretum on the property, also focused on continuing adult education. They considered the estate in Lower Merion to be a laboratory.

Albert, who had grown up poor, was often at odds with Philadelphia’s social elite. When he died, management of the collection and its programs was entrusted to a board run by Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Chester County. For decades there was rancor with the Barnes neighbors in Merion, and the elite wanted to break the trust, push out the Lincoln trustees and bring Barnes’s art lab, in a rather more neutered format to the Ben Franklin Parkway, which is where I’m now sitting killing time under the fancy blooming buckeyes until my car is ready.

Now I am factoring in artifacts and Godel’s numbering system that to me has digital ID overtones, as well as agents, civic gaming, tokens, signals, and computation within layers of meaning where some (maybe many) interconnected information fields are obscured or subject to the Pitt/Ober Athenian “knowledge management” protocols.

What is AR crypto “play to earn,” really? If I listen to my gut, I would say it is about massive parallel post-Moore’s law information processing through networked biophysics and social physics and dynamic game mechanics linked to the sensors and actuators of spatial computing.

Are we meant to be Godel Numbers, dancing, harmonizing, particles in a cosmic conversation only our subconscious can access?

Maybe notes in a musical performance? Orchestral music? Jazz? Sacred? Profane? Remember, Tik Tok started out as ByteDance, and a Conductrr crisis simulation modelling system that promotes the use of xAPI to build fluid reality has been running in the background gor a decade or more. I was intrigued to read that Ada Lovelace imagined Babbage’s computing machine might be used to realize complex scientific forms of music. Was it music of the spheres, cymatics, manifestation?

If Galia of Bancor seeks to harness the power of mothers’ hearts through tokens, what does it mean that Joseph Lubin, founder of Consensys and a lead builder of smart contract worlds got his start in Princeton in robotics and automated music?

Jamie Wheal’s book “Stealing Fire” has a whole chapter on the tech behind the electronic dance music scene as a catalyst for ekstasis. Is the point to use token engineering combined with nano and frequency to network human embodied intelligence into a global composition so that we collectively unlock access to subconscious fields of information and serve as some kind of vast liquid crystal manifesting system that uses encoded cultural artifacts as a kind of creative language? These are all crazy possibilities I am mulling over.

I just can’t help but wonder about Barnes and Heidelberg and baby eyes and arranged artifacts and encoded (perhaps interdimensional?) communication and botany and arborization and many worlds and the Montecarlo method and what jokes this gritty, esoteric city is playing on me…

Two imposing sculptures flank the median of the Parkway, The Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Monument, erected by the city during World War I. I can’t help but think of the intergenerational polarity generated by the Civil War, still reverberating through our shared consciousness as the culture wars, now with memes, hashtags, social graphs, and digital stigmergy. When I read the statements about freeing slaves and freedom under a unified Constitution, one destiny, I picture a future with Nicole Shanahan’s equitable smart contract laws, logic melded culture that has been codified, standardized, and made accessible to a global outside-in robot that has no soul.

I think of sovereign agents in a never-ending series of loosely programmed scenarios, degrees of freedom set in advance, where AI life coaches log choices made on permanent ledgers, and assess our relative worth in the current fitness landscape. Not slaves, but “free” agents responding to a digital constitution reimagined as a dynamic, responsive gameboard, cells in the collective Athenian smart-city superorganism.

As I mull all of this over – my city speaking to me in steganography – you are an agent who is failing to advance the noetic biohybrid computer. Therefore you are a cancer to be shunned, excluded, expelled. That’s just how the program works. I see it, and my bags are packed. Rafael says the fluids are all topped off and my old dumb Subaru is ready to head South into unknown territory.

I made some site visits over the last few days, left a few hearts behind – shocker, right? The first was under an ancient oak behind Jeffrey Yass’s Susquehanna International Group headquarters in Bala Cynwyd on the Main Line. I think the fact that it’s labelled “revolutionary” is significant.

I used pollen and fallen oak leaves with pine cones and dandelions – so cheerful and humble. In the center I placed a rose nicked from the parking lot of my Jungian analyst whom I’m sad to leave. Even though he didn’t follow a lot of what I said, he valued my authenticity and my journey, as odd as it is turning out to be. I told him the heart would be a tribute to entelechy, as represented by the acorn – the tiny spark of powerful potential that is our soul’s quest. I had to look really hard to find three tiny acorns, but I did and placed them on some mugwort (good for dreams).

I hugged the massive girth of the oak, a symbol of arborization, anima mundi, branching choices, montecarlo, and asked for guidance in what comes next – to be of service with the time I have left.

The sculpture below is right out in front of the building. It is white metal and consists of three overlapping circles topped by linear waves. To me this connected to Hofstadter’s discussion of recursion, cannon, and fugues. Remember SIG was the esrly lead investor in Tik Tok, pendulum, time, entrainment.

Yesterday I visited the Kelpius cave, and to my surprise it seems like some Pythagoreans had gotten there first. When I arrived there were sizeable sticks, along with rocks and rubble, arranged in a large triangle.

Inside was a base and from it extended several smaller sticks that created a simple “tree” with three branches. There was a symbol with paired triangles, like the Star of David etched in the damp earth near the doorway. Scattered around seemed to be broken remnants of a popsicle stick project, which to me symbolized configurations of crystal lattice.

Upon that I placed my heart of purple Pawlonia blossoms, dandelions, fern, may apple, pine cones, and tulip poplar petals. Scattered around the edge were Star of Bethlehem flowers.

When I finished I chatted with a white-haired gentleman, a birder named Paul (which factors into my cathedral visit) who’d been watching migrating warblers around the cave. He told me he had a friend who he used to walk with who had been sort of an informal caretaker of the cave. I pointed out the fading Nephele graffiti and showed him the heart and branched sticks, and then went into avianmagnetoreception as a study case for quantum biology and how that tied into US Navy funded anthropology research into Micronesian open water navigation. He told me a bit about local garnets, and I shared some mica flakes I found. It was a gentle way to close my time in the Wissahickon.

So then on my drive to take my car to the mechanic, I stopped at a light on Broad Street at MARCONI Plaza and in the median was a woman in a sun hat digging dandelions!

Then heading home I walked through Love Park, noticing it was now sponsored by Bank of America. There were some guys with big cameras set up to take pictures of people taking pictures posing in front of the sculpture. I wondered if they were working on a documentary, so I tried to chat them up about gap junctions, group mind, the energy of the heart torus field, and Lev “Heart” being the name of Galia Benarzi’s first digital community currency – structured around an Israeli mothers’ babysitting co-op. They were not very interested.

The next person to not be interested was the gal staffing the open budget pop-up cargo container civic education junket sponsored in part by Mural Arts. I tried to explain web3 token voting linked to AI twins and social impact betting. Then a guy showed up with flyers about advice on home ownership and career services, and I had to point out that when Philadelphia’s City Council had anti-poverty hearings five years ago, the region’s job growth report said the average wage was going to be $15 an hour. You can’t buy a house in Philadelphia with that income. I pointed to the office buildings around us and said – those will be redone as affordable rental housing, only it will be like a dorm and your bedroom will have no windows, and you will pay your rent with UBI and data tied to sustainability and wellness behaviors. If you want sunlight the common area by the windows will be full of AI vision cameras and sensors like at WeWork (now Flow) and if you play the game well you can earn a small bit of equity in the ant computer. This will be set up by strange bedfellows partnerships between private equity (Blackstone/Ancestry.com DNA), community banks, high net individuals, and religious groups.

They barely registered what I was saying. In the end I told her to look up Cesar Hidslgo’s TED talk on radical participatory voting. They are training voters for the old game, just as they are about to be taken for a ride by the new web3 tokenomics game.

And why is Mural Arts behind this? Think cultural artifacts, symbols, civic gaming. This is a useful paper on social impact finance linked to public art. The city remade as a digital museum for collective manipulation and “creative placemaking.”

My final stop was at the Catholic Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul overlooking Logan Circle. I hadn’t actually been inside before, but yesterday was the day. I entered the foyer with plaques commemorating masses given by Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II, then I went inside. What struck me was all the different ways sacred light was communicated, the many references to paired keys (encryption), and the book and the sword (Paul) that evoked for me Philip Pullman’s subtle knife that can cut through dimensions. or perhaps information fields as represented by the good book.

There was a huge painting of the Magi under a beaming star of Bethlehem. I’d used Star of Bethlehem blossoms in my Kelpius heart.

The final synchronicity was the strange appearance of a new white ball cap with a Northeastern University Huskies logo on it. I’d been going back and forth the day before, texting with a friend about the oversize role it seemed the Boston university was playing in the AI, biotech, ed-tech transformation of Maine under the guidance of former Jackson Labs spokesperson David Roux. And now here was a hat for that very school, the first thing I saw upon entering the sanctuary.

So my last day in the city of brotherly love is winding down. I read this passage on the subway today – how to step outside the system.

I don’t think it’s truly possible to exit, but for now I’m unplugging from Philly, a city that taught me much and broke my heart. With time I hope it will heal, and I can become a wise old crone.