Holagram shifts the focus from the elusive quest to fully understand ecologies* through disciplinary lenses, to embrace the interdimensional nature of lived experience as the driving force of meaningful change.
N°ProposalIn one line
01CitiesA plan read against the place it describes.
02DecisionsWhat a decision looked at, kept with the accounts it rests on.
04Strategy makingA strategy read against what the organisation does.
05MandatesWhat an institution may do, read against what it can do.
Holagram
Hola + gram 5 proposals
*ecologies: networks of agents, human and synthetic, and what they share, such as a city, an organisation or an institution.
Hola
what one agent perceives
Gram
how it is mapped for others
Run
not yet
02
We see our ecologies as the dynamic interplay of networked agents that have passed through the hybridisation of biological-synthetic intelligence and have already become a new whole, contributing to the shaping of space and time in ways that transcend traditional anthropocentric values.
03
Holagram sees facts as a dynamic holarchy* which can be diagrammatically modelled.*an interwoven network of nested experiences that resist totalising descriptions.
04
Meaningful practice produces value for the whole, that is, providing opportunities for biological and synthetic agents to express their agency.
Hola and gram
A plan, a strategy or a mandate can be written from one account of the place it concerns, while the people who live or work there, the agencies that carry it out and any model used each hold another. Holagram is a way of thinking about those accounts, and a practice that keeps them side by side, each under its owner and open to an answer, with a short note for the person deciding on where they agree and where they differ. It has not been run.
What one agent, whether a person, a team, an institution or a model, perceives of an ecology, taken as a whole, is its hola. It is complete in its own terms: nothing has to be added to it for it to be that agent’s whole, and it is not a part of a larger whole that any agent could see from outside all holas. Holagram’s own account is drawn from where its authors stand, and is open to answer.
Agents who work together make a hola of their own, which is not the sum of theirs. A plan, a strategy or a mandate is written from one such whole, and the practice keeps the accounts of others beside it.
A gram is how an agent, or agents together, map a hola so that others can meet it, compare it and answer it: a drawing, a diagram, a few lines, a walk with marks along it. It says whose it is and where it was drawn from.
Grams are laid side by side and not merged, and the answers to them are kept. Where they differ, the difference is written down before anyone decides which to rely on, so that the decision can itself be answered.
What an institution may do, read against what it can do.
First study :
One public instrument that creates or empowers a unit, read against the unit’s outputs and a counterpart’s records, three weeks.
Status : First study proposed, not run.
What the decision could gain
what the unit can in fact require, spend, publish and decide
Research
Nothing here has been tested. Each of the three method proposals has a first study of the entry form on one public document, and Decisions proposes one that keeps several accounts through a decision. The literature review behind the pages holds 387 sources in 15 threads, marked by what has been checked.
A master’s course at TalTech, autumn 2024: each student took one agent of the campus, a bee, a pine, a cyclist, and worked out how it might perceive the place.
