Living Beings and Movement in Historical Space:Opportunities in Agent-based Modeling

Taking a nineteenth-century Ottoman insane asylum as a case study, the presentation explores the process of populating historical space. At the broadest scale, the project is about “restoring” people back into art/architectural history, and understanding spaces as lived and inhabited Although art/architecture historical narratives do count for the inhabitants, this is rarely the case in modeling and reconstruction efforts. The presentation reports on the development of a system that incorporates living beings by using agent-based modeling (ABM) in art/architecture historical research.

ABM is a computational process simulating agents and their behaviors; the relationships between agents; and the interaction between agents and their environments. In art/architectural history, ABM enables simulating inhabitants in addition to space itself and its formal qualities. Agents, programmed with basic rules or data to move autonomously within space, are modeled to recognize and “sense” their environment. This approach can expand both art historical questions and narratives by observing emergent movement in space and interactions between inhabitants.

Based on scattered evidence on life in the Istanbul Toptasi Asylum (functioned 1876-1924) and the scripted strict schedule, we model interactions between various agent types, as well as between agents and space, all of which is measurable with the autonomous sensing of agents. The asylum presents a productive case study of applying ABM to art/architectural history as the movement of agents provides insight into the functioning of a nineteenth century imperial medical facility.