And this is the reason why it is impossible in a visitation to prevent the spreading of the plague by the utmost human vigilance: viz., that it is impossible to know the infected people from the sound, or that the infected people should perfectly know themselves.

Daniel DeFoe. Journal of the Plague Year.

With the city of Newcastle identified as a layered site of contagion and execution, a leaky processor Symptoms proposes a revealing of materiality and message, of self-evident signal and carrier within the landscape of the plague city.

Methods of revelation are not limited to the esoteric (EVP, ITC, dowsing), the scientific, aesthetic, forensical (as a science also), archaeological, epistemic, and the fetishistic or psychoanalytic. The crypt and cryptographic (decoding) refer to a certain inscription and digging; divining a diagram of execution.

Activities will include the dowsing, scrying and divining of buboes on the skin of the city, the rubbing, tracing and excavation of these sites (inscription and playback of the stone tape using self-built apparatus) towards the collective production of a strange hybrid of archaeologists/forensics report, an essay in self-observation and social questionnaire.

Symptoms is part of Invisible Architectures Newcastle upon Tyne, 9th – 11th September, 2011.

Activities in detail

dowsing, scrying and divining of buboes on the skin of the city

how to arrive at the site?

dowsing rods, pendulum, scrying EM sites (also listening EM), observation, questions/discussion

rubbing, tracing and excavation

of these sites (inscription and playback of the stone tape using self-built apparatus)

rubbing/tracing techniques: laser/photodiode, record needle and piezo/speaker/coil/paper cone, cassette or hd head (inductive), crayon rubbings, cast making with latex, silicon and lead

also inscription (drill, needle and speaker)

collective production of a strange hybrid of report

archaeologists/forensics report, an essay in self-observation and social questionnaire.

Schedule

A series of three walks identifying, examining and overlaying visibility and enclosure in the city of Newcastle.

- the in-visibility of symptoms (incubation)

- the in-visibility of contagion (atmosphere, comets, rats, insects)

- the enclosure against the plague

Day 1: scrying for electromagnetic buboes (visible and divined)

Day 2: rubbing, tracing, scratching, scraping - city skin surface playback and inscription at key sites (dragging)

Day 3: excavation, overlay, casting and city → skin transfer of plague buboes. the report

Documentation

report as a PDF

report as text only

2 psychogeophysical reports as scans

Day One:

newcastle_day_one.zip

Day Two:

Least entropic site in Newcastle on Tyne perhaps related to grey box emitting peculier low frequency EM rhythms.

Day Three:

Resources

Software for RNG/skrying and plotting: newcastle_software.zip

About the RNG plots

The entropy scrying device provides the equivalent of tossing 200 coins every second as we walked through Newcastle. The results (say a count of the number of heads) are logged for each GPS recorded location. The scrying device samples white noise from internal transistor avalanche breakdown. To form each hardware driven coin toss 166 samples are taken, a count taken of the number of samples which AND with 1 (ie. the last bit is a 1). If the result ANDs with 1 we have 0 (say heads), if not then we have a 1. This bit is exclusive ORed with a flipping pattern of 1,0,1,0 and so on within a process (after Von Neumann) designed to reduce any environmental influences or biad. We then accumulate the 200 random bits for later plotting of entropy to (GPS recorded) location.

The cumulative RNG plot, plots the cumulative deviation of these samples against p=0.05 (one in twenty) probability.