What is a Geosocial Instrument?

An instrument denotes several related categories of object, covering both the physical and the abstract. In its most obvious form, an instrument describes a tool geared towards a specific activity - a surgical instrument, a writing instrument, a musical instrument. Here, it is a physical device utilised to produce a secondary effect, such as the production of sound or language. Equally, the instrument object is defined by its relational-materiality, the combination of its substance and the substance of the material it inscribes: steel and flesh, feather, ink and parchment, wood, string and wind. The instrument represented the meeting point of the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective - the tool by which one brings the other into resonance. 

And yet, instruments live in the non-physical realm too. Fiscal or legal instruments need not take a corporal form, but nonetheless inscribe meaning and structure on their respective domains. Such instruments execute legally enforceable acts, imparting a tangible requirement - obligation, duty, ownership - upon those to whom they pertain. Such instruments point to the future, as yet unwritten - they are a speculative fiction.

Instruments extend existing capacity - they are the means by which the given is able to perform beyond its systemic reality, and as such sit in a vital space between a tool and its utility. Instruments suggest action, they are both a noun and a verb, they carry across the threshold of the given and the known. As such, they point beyond physical limitations - they are not simply the description of themselves, but a description of their capacity - not just the thingness of the instrument, but also the affordance of the instrumental, the instrumented. 

By all these definitions, instruments deal fundamentally in changes of state, tools by which substances or relationships take on new forms via the addition of external energy. As with any such transference of energy, instruments are as such bound by the laws of such energy - which is to say, they are bound by the laws of entropy. 

We might look also to another, auxiliary definition. The instrument is not only a device for the performance of substance, the carrier of a change of state - but also the means of measuring such changes. Here, the instrument operates in an unusual position, acting as both a potential agent of change and the tool by which such change is measured. Whatsmore, since the instrument maintains its relational-materiality without defining the limits of its material, it is not limited to any particular context. It can exist as both a tool for art and for science, for individual betterment and communal reimagining. 

Our project seeks to develop a new instrument that forgoes any singular utility in favour of underscoring the myriad of concepts and affordances that all instruments share. How can we develop an instrument that prioritises its role as a tool for changing states, and simultaneously measures the transference of energy, the entropy, inherent to the act of such a change? How can we develop a relational instrument that points to both the objective, the thingness of the physical world, and the subjective, the passing of responsibility or agency? How, in short, can we develop a geo-social instrument, that allows a community of players to execute, measure, and ultimately predict, changes to their shared lived environment?