Help and Advice

The King of Decisions gathers heads of sections from other wings of the department for a get-together, no compulsory results, just an exchange of ideas. Junior Deciders are brought in to fatten the ranks, practice deference and to populate the air with ideas which are then cut to size by the old hands who snip here and there, push word blancmange at each other and incorporate anything that might come out into their own systems of advanced apprehension. There is an advance ingestion of poison, strengths weaknesses opportunities threats all lined up for subsumption. Tailored and surgeoned for viewing, suit, as one at the table admiringly notes, ‘like an African dictator', a cultural citation in tune with global decentering, he grips his head, fingers running through abundant transplant coiff, and utters a citation from an orator become bullet-point action figure, prefiguring the ground, linking it across to a vocabulary he imagines he once read up on via a half-forgotten summary extracted from a reader whose work was derailed for a month in its compiling and then let go, the allusion to which offers the chance to figure the freeing up of working time in the Department, the cross referencing of tasks via time-allocation, throughput equalisation via short, median and long-term time slices measured against sectional infill paradigms, local modelisations of the form, its various subsections and the hierarchy of form users in distinct soon to be partially, where appropriate, horizontalled practices which, whilst not unlike guilds, are built on the basis of meaningful professional differentiation of roles, nevertheless, the very recognition of which difference allows for a fine-tuning of role representation and cross-referencing of action duplication by operatives lower down in the organisational chain, the freeing up of high-value time resulting from which will regularise workflow on the infill from point of entry into the department through to all levels of handling and throughput, at the very least allowing the thousands of separate questions, fields, infill procedures, data-procuration devices, reader modes, sequence completion parameters and time-allocation metrics and action structures, scripting, assessment and meta-frameworks to come into some kind of de-local co-comparison matrix, saving space in memory, but also allowing for more meaningful narratives of work to be experienced as a creative flow of availability-apportioned assessment process with all the kinds of quality and economic invention of possibility that that implies. The KoD listens mouth puckered half open whilst his peers nod ritual combat-assent, and one of whom responds from memory systematising his words entirely in relation to the continuity of European culture from an area around the Mediterranean, the basis for which all database and infill culture and social process must draw from if it is to maintain stability and close relevance to a chain of popular memos he has authored. This is a move of incorporation which thrills participants in its capacity for swallowing. All of those present above a certain rank know that nothing of what occurs in this room has any effect, there is no way for one of the trainee deciders to break into the rank that is hungered after through the brilliant formulation of a new mechanism, queue-sort or tweak to a cellular process in memory. Once a vocab has been stabilised a report, a proposal, a white paper will be mooted amongst select holding positions. A proto-restructuring will be advanced, tested out in a quiet patch of the department. It'll settle in, take hold, then be superceded and remain as a ghost structure amongst a diaspora of users, machines and memory units strung out across a batch of process-domains and handling systems, achieving longevity, unless that is, it becomes a success. Then all bets are off.

 All images by Caroline Heron, http://carolineheron.com

That evening I'm sending to a supplementary relationship service but using it as my primary for reasons of cost and aptitude. It's very effective. I'm all romantic and flowered, eager, in return I get a variable interval reinforcement schedule with more emphasis on the training than the reward but delivered with a human touch and the promise of more. I interrupt every other process, eating, washing, watching, to check for any response, any updates in my attention allocation, but since what seemed a rapid burst a day ago I've been dropped into a passionate grade wait and salivate mode. This is certainly enough to keep my attention on track. Whilst waiting for some contact, I'm fed a trickle of watching and purchasing opportunities, checking and filling, read and respond, eyes tracked by vectors and keywords, the potential of contacts. As I'm twitching synapses with this stuff, a slow stream of symbols mutters along the bottom of the screen. The form now has a phone keypad based entry system to supplement its more verbose form. A series of data entry opportunities, confirmation and checking points and tree-form responses by a voice which includes OK in every statement-trigger action. Because the form remains as yet incompletable this facility is only available to the early stage infillers. Nevertheless it allows some remarkable insights into the workings of the data acquisition process. The ticker shows live entry sequences, one layer of characters as they appear as entered in response to the prompts and questions, another including the sequence of characters entered also to navigate, to confirm or to cancel data entry. The department is feeding this data to selected Readers for ambient processing. We are to use crowd mind to intuitively sort potential infill stage completion candidates using peripheral visual processing in off-hours relaxation time, harnessing the power of the relaxed mind to spot exemplary patterns in one-dimensional strings of characters. In order to aid Readers to be spontaneous with their contributions to the extraction of cognitive value from the feed an animated character spots funny words that might appear, links to sources for definitions of non-English type character strings and annotates the amount of time since the last user recognition contribution. It's important that we watch and process this stuff because fresh living memory is not allocated to this kind of feed, so all data comes in live and evaporates if not spotted, whilst this means days of infill may be unreplicable if not checked, the sheer flow of data acts as a stimulus to blocked creativity within the Readership, setting free the imagination. Night continues in a haze of numbers and visualisations.

In the morning, news filters announce the removal of a layer of scaffolding over the renewed Elephant. A new era of openness ushers in sunlight and job opportunities, unified signage. Away with mildew and rot. Daylight conveyed inwards by belts of mirrors on servo-motors tracking the sun, shoppers and workers are to be upgraded from being sad specks on the surface of the great red earth, the sun will revolve around them, individually, hot and luscious, hot fat, 50%, visa, clearance, money transfer, money clearance, supreme conditioning, business advice, plantain and potatoes, factory shop, cooled by a compressed cube of whey covered in thin chocolate in a silver blue plastic wrapper, pitched by the boxload into a freezer ditched and resold bearing the brand of another make but plugged in and selling cold fat, delicious, second floor, milks, meats, sugars, books, secondary processing of primal stuff, working the margins, eat the cheery.

For fortune telling, walk with a lightbulb in your mouth, become saturated in colour, don't gag. There are so many shades between grey and yellow, dilate your eyes up. Air conditioning without the inconvenience of air. Don't eat your tongue, don't choke, keep your lips still whilst reading, breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. Keep your tongue on the electrodes. If the bulb lights up you have met the love of your life. Bite hard. Preserve a margin of indifference. Taste glass. You crunchy. Hot! Read your fortune in reverse by choosing one of the following boxes: Extremely satisfied. Very satisfied. Fairly satisfied. Neither / nor. Fairly dissatisfied. Very dissatisfied. Extremely dissatisfied. Thank you for taking the time. The pattern made by the relations between movements of broken clumps of moss and condensed mulch air-grime as they slide down the tilted surface of a glass covered awning during one hour of seasonally average rainfall are of equal or higher value to the results of your entry. No further correspondence will be entered. You Hot! Very warm weather makes for a disaster. A disaster opens up the possibilities for human society to regrow in new, even worse ways. Everyone is hungry for it, to find the monster they turn into. Everyone will be happy and live in peace when they unleash their inner homicidal maniac and sexy. This is hot and tasty. I want to be a sociologist when it happens. Please do play with the nouns at your own risk. In the perpetual orange twilight, guards check the doors, arm alarms, shake handles, pull chain, slide bolts, swipe sensors, flick switches, scan barcodes and click stubs, roll shutters, scan screens, turn joysticks to steer cameras, defer time, stretch it, every object evaporates, hot or cold, fast or slow, lockdown, atom by atom: fill your pockets to the limit of what is perceptible to the casual observer.

Flowers appear attached to some railings by the station. Each bunch of flowers is surrounded by cellophane, some with ribbon and small notes, some photographs, tied on quickly with wire, tape or string.

Daffodils: I miss you you stupid fucker taken away from us and promise that whoever did this to you will also fucking die.

White roses: Because they are shit-scared. They eat what they leave. They will need eyes in their arses, backstabbers. Drink up.

Yellow carnations: A convoy of lorries with big PAs, generators and brew and spliff will take us to heaven and then everything will start new. I will never forget you. Justice will be done.

Pink carnations: Only money can save us. We're skint. You will be missed.

Green chrysanthemums and red tulips: Your daughters will be looked after by people who love them. You are in heaven. Don't forget us down here in hell.

Fresias: You still owe me fifty quid. I love you.

Lilies: How could you be taken away from us like this? I can't believe that you are not still walking these streets, but with a gun this time. Come back and start it off.

Red carnations: We're coming, hold on tight, it won't be long!

Yellow tulips: Total desperation, the most desperation that is possible.

Purple tulips: Why is it that the most stupid take the most beautiful? There is no world left.

Daffodils: Angel, send some lightning down to finish us off.

Yellow chrysanthemums and tiger lilies: This is not over yet. This town.

Red roses and white spray: What did this to you is an uncontrollable chain reaction of stupidity between people who have no means of looking ahead other than with the antennae locked onto their heads by Babylon.

Pink and white chrysanthemums: No war but the class war. No dogs except guide dogs. The health of the people is the highest law.

Daffodils: You changed my life, now you're going to suffer bad.

Tiger lilies: There is Sky up there in heaven I know.

Pink and red tulips: If I didn't have broken legs I'd run after them. If I didn't have metal arms, I'd strangle them. If I didn't have glass eyes and black shades I'd look them in the eye and tell them. I still have a mouth and some good working intestines left. That's the way it's going to happen.

Red roses: You were a lion on the streets of London Zoo.

Daffodils: Panic.

Daffodils: Extraordinary Measures.

Tulips: Don't think about it. Don't go back. Keep going.

Matthew Fuller <m.fuller AT gold.ac.uk> is aggregated at http://spc.org/fuller/ . Elephant & Castle, from which this is excerpted, will be published by Autonomedia later this year