When dealing with computation, one is first informed that computation is any action that calculates or determines some result through logical or mathematical methods. This assumption relies heavily on weights that the modern day has subjected on the noun, the computer, which stems from the shared base, to compute. The idea of computation, however, is on a far grander scale than that of the confines of modern technological status. Computation in the loosest sense is the process through which information is gathered, interpreted and broadcasted or stored. There can be many types of computation, and the types that this project is dealing with specifically are the computational aspects in navigation.

Navigation, in turn, is the process of gathering data about ones surroundings and applying knowledge about the relative aspects of this data toward the purpose of coherent movement. This is what this project is trying to decipher: in what way is the space responsible for this movement, and what happens if the actual space is not included in the navigation of the space itself. The project, as it will be explained in detail further, is the navigational computation of a space by virtual participants who have no connection to the space except via incidental coordinates recorded by me on location. The connection between the space, the participants, and the self is the reason for this experiment.

While understanding that the particular place has to be referenced somehow in order for the space to exist in the sphere of the project's scope, the space is taken out of the picture to a large enough degree so that the explorations deal with the question of the actual space's importance to its description. The description of a place in terms of this project should first be defined. I mean description as the amount of information necessary for the particular understanding of the place to be cemented. The visuality of a place should not be taken into account in this case, since the data is being minimalized to the extent of its usefulness. The visual representation of a place can almost always give the easy recognizable description, whereas this experiment deals with the notion of navigation without the crutch of knowing anything about the space itself. The references are removed and the constraints are enforced.

Dealing with navigation and computation, a few points arise that are necessary to the overall introduction to this piece. For one, the idea, from Edwin Hutchin's book Cognition in the Wild, that "a good deal of our behavior has communicative function without communicative intent" is very important. This explains in a sense the necessity of the restriction of information to the virtual participants, as well as the entire reason for the virtualization of the participants as well. Their behavior, in dealing with constraints, should only express the information in a satisfactory manner in terms of this experiment if information was able to be passed along without the exact intent being calculated and characterized.

Another important idea from Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild is the idea that "the cognitive properties of a group may depend as much on the system of communication between individuals as on the cognitive properties of the individuals themselves." A great deal of effort in this project was spent on the production of the virtual participants that serve to characterize the space without their specific knowledge of the space itself. The first obstacle to overcome was the introduction of what information they were actually going to receive. A dissected GPS tracklog served to provide the path with which I traveled and interacted with the space, and the points are input into the environment via a tracker program that appears at each point for a fraction of a second and then disappears. The actual movement is an issue when dealing with computational navigation, and therefore it was necessary to try out various iterations of motion.

This is the first, and the most abstract, also one of my favorites. The lines signify the tracks of the virtual participants and the tiny + symbols notate the track that I took over the grandstand, the rock formation that characterizes this piece. The information that comes across in this description of the space through this particular motion method is lacking, yet the visualization of the space is both the most minimalist and the most abstract, as well as, I attest, the most intriguing.

This iteration holds that the participants follow the same movement standards as the first example, yet move at a highly increased rate. One immediately notices that the description of the space has increased in resolution, and the path is very apparent. This is not the situation that I had hoped for as the participants are only describing the space in the manner that they were described it in the first place, and there is no interpretation or illumination of the space that arises from this example.

This piece finally starts showing the type of variation that I had hoped for. Even though the edges are ragged and sharp, the organic nature is still present. The interaction between the path and the participants is now shown to be indefinite, yet somehow intrinsic. It is the median between the first iteration and the last.

This iteration was disappointing at first glance, yet somehow it serves to illustrate the idea that communication is not always the intent, yet it manages to show up. The lines converge at a point that was physically the highest point on the grandstand. The elevation was not given to these virtual elements and yet they characterize the space via some happenstance. The method with which these participants moved is very simple; they travel toward the next point at a fixed speed until the end of the path.

This is the final iteration and the most descriptive. The idea behind the movement was that the virtual participants moved extremely fast when far away to the tracker and slowed down when close, yet had to keep going in a forward direction with a variation of 10-20 degrees, hence the circular patterns. The descriptiveness in this final piece serves to illustrate the problems of the second iteration more clearly. The variation in motion is the key to getting results that have a characterization of their own, yet the speed gives the experiment a detail that allows for an in depth description. The two collections of circular patterns that seem to be on either side of the middle division were the peaks of the grandstand.

The important thing to remember regarding this experiment is the emergent nature of the images. All that was passed to these elements was a target's coordinates that kept changing, with the entire picture restricted and the result is a (non)coherent understanding of a space through a methodology that strives to limit the information used in the throughput. Understanding navigation and computation and the information needed in both these is an important aspect of this experiment. The navigational aspect needed the computational aspect minimally, and the information emerges as a result of this interaction. These images are far from perfect representations, of course, yet they serve to illuminate the information we gather about a place and how important that information really is.

Link to the animations: Initial Exploration----Final Exploration