protonumerique

Why there are so many “web presences” that simply disappear over time or remain forever in a single form? Why so many people including myself end up abandoning their spaces because of practical reasons? Sharing information nowadays is more about a speedy an easy-to-spot way,  writing and reading demands in fact the oposite: patience and effort, idea and concentration. Many acquaintances have ended up giving up their blogs and sites and gone twitting, myspacing or facebooking in order to save customization time and just be practical, be fast. Should I also give up?

I was recently checking a very important documentary made by Adam Curtis from the BBC in 2001. I think it’s important because it contents  hours of amazing footage and of valuable information. It is important because it presents a very complex-to-approach subject and makes it in a narrative, personal and emotive way. It is important because it tries to shock and awake, and it is important because it develops a very critical essay on our culture with a passionate tone.  Trying to go away from the enthusiastic way with which they narrate the contribution of Freud’s Theories to shape most of worlds’ mass control mechanisms, I  focused on the essentials, being these:

-There is a ruling business class with time and power to plan complex mediatic maneuvers with massive effects in the “collective unconscious”.

-Western world could be described a mass of “individualist individuals” that can be controlled by predicting their behavioral tendencies and basic instincts.

I was  not very surprised. Though in more specific segments it gives you a good mirror to channel contemporary media issues. Read More…

Posted under NEWS, THEORY

Don’t need to say much. Just didn’t want to forget about it. Even though japanese were not the first ones to wonder about the uncanny dimensions of electricity, it seems they have so far rendered the most mesmerizing results!

Posted under ENGLISH, HISTORY, PULP & FICTION, SUBCULTURE

One of the most influential Religions in Western Culture is Voodoo. Not really at a spiritual level or because of its number of adepts. It is more a whisper that flies around, misunderstanding the true thing, using the religion as marketing device, subverting it to commercial dimensions. The few (relative to the big Religions) real practitioners are rather regarded as dangerous, charlatans or just part of a weird bunch. It has anyhow become one of the most exploited clichés in folk and pulp cultures, films and even games. It offers the perfect ingredients to configure evil characters and cults inside a western european sort of narrative: Black, misterious people, ritualizing objects, fire and the spirits of the dead.

In Amsterdam at the Troppenmuseum, they set up a very nifty exhibition with the personal collection of a Swiss Woman. Objects and characters that have nothing to envy about any of the protagonists in the soon-to-happen Pictoplasma, are exhibited as objects originated from the cult to certain spirits and as remainings of a very strong tough vanishing culture. Pictures above are from almost human-sized dolls that represent members of certain voodoo secret societies. Note that one guy (In the exhibition many of them), has sunglasses. It is believed -couldn’t find out since when-, that spirits wear sunglasses when they appear. I’m curious on how digital devices are being imported into recent voodoo practices. And I’m not talking about phishers and on-line sourcerers.

Posted under ENGLISH, HISTORY, PULP & FICTION, SUBCULTURE

Giving a new look at the Coltan Wars and their unbearable ciphers in human life costs, suddenly the whole mythology of cybernetics seemed to be embodied and localized all over a human settlement: Congo, the country where the machines turn against men…using men themselves to destroy their own kind. Numbers change with sources, but we speak about more than 4 Million dead -and counting at a rate of approximately 45.000 monthly assasinations-  in the last decade as a consequence of the civilian war, which is partly ethnic but has been drastically inflated by the Tantalum Rush. We are approaching extermination statistics and somehow everything keeps its march quietly. Could we ever stop assigning more value to metals than to the potential of living beigns? What do we understand for “Value”?

Coltan is an abbreviation for colombo-tantalite ore, a mineral from where Tantalum is extracted. Tantalum is used to assemble capacitors needed to assemble the microchips present in cellphones, game consoles and PCs (MACs too). A capitalist, machine-dependent economy increases the revenues for providers of this mineral and hence they go frenzy in their greed. People in the area seems to have no more option than to mine the mineral in order to get money but at the cost of being in the middle of the fire- “greedline”.

http://globalinvestmentwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/congo-coltan-map.jpg

A map showing the geography of the conflict.

Read More…

Posted under AUGMENTED MEDIA, CONSERVATION, DOCUMENTATION, ENGLISH, EVENTS, HISTORY, NEWS, THEORY

Yes Men in Survival Capsules

Let’s take a brake and give some context for the next post that I feel I must write. This time with some “entertaining” anecdotes.

Last week we had a small underground dosis of the Yes Men, who were invited to show their new movie at the Berlinale. Even though launching a film within a mainstream festival, when somebody launched a cheap party for them on Saturday they also came. They gave a relaxed speech standing on a supermarket kart, showed some clips and drank beer with everyone who could squeeze themselves in the circle around them. Friendly, talkative people. Then on Monday they organized a free screening of the same film they released in the Berlinale (The Yes Men fix the World), for which you couldn’t really find tickets anymore in that moment, and they just warned people not to cam the movie to P2P it later. I really hope they’ll get some money back before it will be available on Emule…something they’ll also do off course.

The movie is rather utopic in its feeling and full with typical yet always surprising Yes Men Maneuvers, such as super protection suits for corporate people in order to survive an environmental catastrophe (Inspired in biological processes of amoeba), and insurance executives giving them their business cards in the belief that something like that could somehow reach a production state. They homage the dead with humor, they confront corporates with their own stupidity and they take over media to reinforce their discourse and punch holes through the complicated layers of double morality and falseness that the medium itself tends to place upon facts. A recommended film to think about, and a recommended activity to follow up.

Read More…

Posted under EVENTS, HISTORY, NEWS

Difficult to write in situ within a festival that inmerses you day and night into intense mental and physical activity. Exhibition, club, conference, walk over the Reichstag 10 times a day…After finishing, I started to work and stopped thinking, so perhaps, now I’ve forgotten most of what was important to say. Nonetheless, I’ll make a couple of annotations.

. Transmediale Architects didn’t use any new materials for the setup this year, they grabbed everything that Mr. Kovats had stored from previous festivals in his warehouse and built what they did with it. So the trashy look aimed to look like a sort of experimental field and to speak about sustainability, recycling, hacking, among other key topics about the environmental emergency. The connection was there indeed and somehow worked, even though the only video that won a prize was the only one that had a proper exhibition room. Not to say that this had something to do…but the projections on plastic fabrics were an attack to picture quality. Anyhow, no other work using video different than six appartments (3rd prize) gave so much relevance to image resolution subtleties, so no more complaining. It gave also a nice atmosphere in some areas.

. The Tantalum Memorial that so much captured our attention even before the festival, took at the end the big prize, that wasn’t actually so big ( €5000 for a group of 3 artists and their helpers), but a good push. It gave the general impression to be the most deep and well investigated work, as well as the most developed. Even though something important was definitely lacking in the spectator’s experience of the installation, the artists could manage to push the concept through, albeit a delicate problem with severe implications that was exhibited with the work itself, a good conference and some documentation.

This work definetely aroused a big deal of ethical thinking about IT (Information Technology) in the festival. The coming post will go into the delicate Matter that the Memorial has awaken or reactivated for some.

Posted under AUGMENTED MEDIA, CONSERVATION, ENGLISH, EVENTS, HISTORY

Yesterday the Transmediale.09  was oficially opened under the name Deep North.

Evelina Domnitch performing at the opening ceremony

The first thing I saw was a cook frying integrated circuits covered with a mix of eggs and Silica Gel, and baking pizzas made with electro-resistors, cables and spare electronic parts. There’s a good sense of humour in the air, and no respect at all for technology. That’s relieving.

The director Stephen Kovats presented the event as the most supported and well funded version in recent years and was enfatic about the support of Berlin’s Culture Senate. At a first glance, Transmediale looks the same as always, with a main hall populated by some main works, including those I quoted on my previous post, and many different spaces offering a selection of video projections, installations and satellite events.

On the surface, the first thing you get a bit concerned about is architecture. The exhibition’s architects are a Berlin company named “Raumtaktik”, or “space tactics”, who decided to build a kind of “under construction” context for the exhibition. Materials used are wood and those rough polyurethane fabrics they use to close construction sites and the like. Most information texts are not aligned, intentionally twisted and fixed with thick industrial adhesive tape. In contrast with the kind of language used in the trailer and the cleanliness of the icy, polar and quite romantic (The speaker from the German Federal Culture foundation reflected on some Friedrich’s painting of the north pole in her speech) imagery being passed around in slides, print and other visuals of the event, the montage looks so trashy, that I’m still trying to find a connection. The space of the HKW is indeed hard to handle, but simpler and cleaner solutions can also be transgressive and better suited to give a chance to the works being shown.

For instance, the “man with a movie camera: the global remake” project has been completely fulminated by the dense structure that makes it look like a video ornament projected on top of it. This happens with many other videos and gets worse with some installations, where it’s difficult to say what is part of the work and what of the architecture. Coming back to the works I was expecting to see, the “Tantalum memorial” is there too and looks pretty nice as a weird proto-digital device, but nobody gets what it is about: When you use the headphones, you just hear recordings in congolese without any apparent linkage to the limited informations on the screen, and the machine is completely autonomous, making it a completely closed system that contradicts commmunication processes from every point of view. I couldn’t get the chance to speak with the authors, might someone help me understand what are the dynamics of this piece? How was it planed and executed in London?

Among many other observations, I cannot avoid to feel myself a bit frustrated by these features perceived during the first hours of the festival, but also enthusiastic about the content and the diffusion being done this year. Conferences will be streamed everyday and alternate events promise a series of deep talks and motivating shows like the performance of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand with TeZ. Coming in the next days, video selections plus talks and discussions, plus the result of work done whithin some workshops will give us a more or less common platform to base our opinions on. So far…

Posted under AUGMENTED MEDIA, CONSERVATION, DOCUMENTATION, ENGLISH, EVENTS, NEWS

Transmediale is about to begin this weekend, and once again, I’m kind of not so well informed about it. I went then to give a rather fast look at the most promising events, hoping that the main exhibition would be a bit more complete and interesting than last year, when the main exhibition was a bit dissapointing, leaving aside a kind of astrophysical installation by Norimichi Hirakawa and the very intriguing book-Crime of Paolo Cirio and Alejandro Ludovico. That time, conferences and workshops became the real hotspots of the festival. For my surprise, the works that will be contesting this year seem a bit over-interesting and demand a further, attentive look.

Take a look at the “Tantalum memorial”, a critical installation-network project using phones to reproduce communication practices between people in Congo, a country swollen by dictatorships from 40 years ago and rich in Tantalum, a metal that is more valuable than gold for Mobile phone and Computer fabricators. This fact, as happens with the exploitation of other “valuable” resources, induced war and the violent death of more than 3 million people in the last decade. Apart from denouncing a problem that is almost unknown outside of africa and is called the “Coltan wars”, the installation goes into criticizing the addiction to permanent communication in contemporary society. The term used to describe the piece is also thrilling: “a Telephony based memorial”. More info.

stills Vertov

On another network approach to a more formal problem, I’m glad we’ll be able to see “The man with the movie Camera: the global remake”, a work made in 2007 by Perry Bard, a UK artist who works with video in Public contexts. The project is an ambitious approach to collective film-making, and the principles are basically simple and somewhat serendipitous, being composed of video shots by people from anywhere in the world, that are uploaded to a server and edited, mounted and printed by custom software into the form of the classical Dziga Vertov’s film. The final movie doesn´t exist. It could actually be an endless projection of the original film in the left side of the screen and a new set of shots ensambled randomly by the system on the right. Although random is not really the word to call the process. The shots are uploaded by people according to a rather complete taxonomization of the film into scenes and shots, so that, when you upload something, you specify exactly which shot of the original film will your material be representing. Haven´t found any specifications about the software, but it’s known that it produces one new version of the film every day trying new sets of clips extracted form the database, and that it causes severe space problems with the server, so the project is not running so smoothly. I’ll try to figure out more during the Transmediale days.

Check the movie

So far, if you’re in Berlin come along…

Posted under DOCUMENTATION, ENGLISH, HISTORY, NEWS

Soy yo el sleeping bag de mi alma? Es un trabajo en paralelo con Ana María Gómez, Psicóloga de la Universidad Javeriana e investigadora en la FU de Berlín. La obra parte de una idea personal que se divide en dos instancias: Primero, quería desarrollar una herramienta que me permitiera el juego con video en tiempo real, con herramientas bastante básicas pero con una metáfora bastante orgánica, como un cuerpo vivo que se taxonomiza.

Segundo, quería confrontar una relación amorosa fallida pero de bastante importancia, de la cual quedaban, sin ser vistos desde su grabación, algunos videos de un viaje a Italia, que en algún momento fueron grabados con cierta intencionalidad, pero que se fueron convirtiendo en evidencia de algo menos claro, de una forma de desear culturalmente insertada y a la que nos aproximamos de una forma casi que inconscientemente cinematográfica.

video disection from lebustamante on Vimeo.


Como software, el programa desarrollado en Processing presenta bastantes fallas debido a algunas dificultades técnicas que presenta la plataforma al importar video via Quicktime, por lo cual no fue presentado de manera pública. Aún más, el concepto específico que correspondía a éste trabajo, en especial el análisis realizado por Ana María, no exigía que el espectador se hiciera partícipe de la historia. Ésa sería otra fase del proyecto. En la exposición “El amor cómo va?” se presentó el resultado de la interacción con los videos y la mediación, análisis y diálogo con la contraparte científica que buscaba evidencias semánticas, clichés y patrones de comportamiento en las imágenes.

Posted under CODING, ESPAÑOL, NEWS, NUEVO MUNDO, PORTFOLIO

From the 18th of December, the exhibition “¿Y el amor cómo va?” (How’s love doing?), will open in Bogota, Colombia, at the Galeria Santa Fe (website in spanish). Presented as a “reprise” of another exhibition made in Paris in 2006 (L’amour, comment ça va?), this one expects to find different artistic views that reflect on how love is confronted and understood under the current social and cultural circumstances. As society is driven by uncertainty, individuality and imposed desire ideals, sexual complexity has been inserted in social schemes thanks to queer struggle and reinterpretation of genre, biochemistry and psychology have rendered it possible to understand the chemical reactions that lead humans to experiment that feeling. Is love possible at all? how do we approach this question? The change of cultural and Geographic Context, is expected to represent drastically different perspectives to those of the Parisian instance.

One of the differences that becomes apparent at a first sight, is that, while the French Version was almost completely photography-oriented, the Colombian one gets to show some Video and Installations, as I’ve heard from the curators. Furthermore, all artists are exclusively Colombian and the space is a rather important art center of the City.

More infos and Visual Material of my own’s and other’s contributions will be posted after the opening.

Posted under ENGLISH, NEWS, NUEVO MUNDO, PORTFOLIO