protonumerique

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.

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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…

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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…

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“Acaso hay algun escrito que funde el mundo y no sea el libro?”
Umberto Eco, El pendulo de Focault

Last weekend at the ADK (Akademie der Künste) Berlin, the exhibition “notation: Calculus and Form in the Arts” closed its doors after a couple of months. The show took you through a “short” tough very intense travel over a wide spectrum of work processes by not-so-unknown people from the last century. Scores interpreted visually by Boris Bilinski opened the first room and from there you bounced from wonderful photographic documentation of Marey’s experiments, to Leger’s “Ballet Mecanique” and Hand drawings by Walter Benjamin. The connections from scientifical correctness and methodical consideration to artistic creation turned into a thin, almost invisible smoke string like those from Marey’s photo series.

smoke curtains

Very much on the ZKM style, the compilation includes all kinds of media, including video, sound, installation and sculpture, but charmingly, everything was turning around paper pieces, old notebooks and some graphite. This makes emphasis on the very basics of human creativeness and plays with the power of signs to re-code reality and materialize the transition from concept to structure, from structure to existence. As in Eco’s book, playing with the sacred letters arises your own creature and renders it real, sometimes even more “true” than yourself.

One of the more notorious achievements of the exhibit in my spectator mind, was the sense of proximity and understanding with works that weren’t even there. In many cases, the traces of labour resulted more evocative sometimes than the actual pieces, like in Oskar Fischinger’s animations, where you could stare for hours at the kind of abstract story boards that hanged on the wall, but the videos where presented on a small screen at floor’s level, perhaps with the intention of reducing their relevance, and also making them hard to watch. I wondered if that was bad, but I didn’t care much since my mind was eager for more drawings and notes.

A flaw could be the excessive ammount of museistic strategies like glass, panels, frames with Paspartue and white, but in essence, the materiality of the documents has to be protected, so that’s not really a point of critique. More important is, that the mere content of all this rediscovered “pieces of art”, goes way beyond contemplation and offer an attractive source of information to go back to. Would be a hard job to get hands on a Digital archive of the exhibition, but I wouldn’t be amazed if ZKM has already some well fed database…The work would be then, to craft some tools to access it, but well, then they come, the rights issues, owner’s permissions -since most of this paper sketches are possesed art objects-, profitability, and then you forget about the idea. In this sense I’ll simply point out how this blogging practice resembles, for some, a way of notation, where page after page we find incomplete thoughts, sketches and online planning / process exhibition practices. We might go thinking that a curatorial proposal around blog-sketchbooks is interesting. Any hints?

Some personal highlights of the exhibition were, Etienne Jules Marey and his locomotion studies a la Muybridge but a bit more “detailed” -also Hollis Frampton did something like that-, the work of Anthony McCall and the notes and plans for the Lecorbusier-Xenakkis Phillips pavillion in brussels, 1958.

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An old Project that’s worth to be presented here: it was developed at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany), where I did an Internship in the mindframes exhibition. The main objective was to give viewers an active role as researchers at the exhibition spaces, by offering them tools to learn about and play with the content of the exhibition in different fashions. For this purpose, a curatorial team designed and built several interfaces for the museum space, but particullarly for the so called “labs”, spaces where users could explore the works of each of the eight artists as well as complementary information.

I designed and developed an application for touchscreen for dynamic playing of videos and also a web site for local consulting of the OASIS database. An overview of the result in this video (in german – better if you rightclick and open in new window).

The experience wih the OASIS archive, which is an EU funded project aiming to compile a digital research and conservation center for the digital arts, motivated the now personal question about this subject. In the exhibition, each of the artists had one dedicated OASIS station where the public could take a deep exploration of their work in form of written documentation and work analysis. This allowed people not just to see the exhibition but to approach the artist’s works with an improved understanding of their context, even going as deep as to explore interactively the tools and techniques used for their production.

This could be done similarly within a media-art-research perspective, where information is rather chaotic and disperse, concentrating around communities or artists themselves. One of the purposes to start this site, is partially to develop a small-scale project that offers sufficient information about projects that interest me or the public in general and set a more or less complete database that allow other creators to learn from the given research.

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