protonumerique

Up to this stage of our century we’ve been thouroughly pursuing, embracing or simply reacting to models that once before were commonly approached as science fiction, Myths that were produced in that rich dialog between the imaginary and the possible, desire and technology. It is rather foggy to assert if we shape the future or if it’s the future that shapes us.

I was looking at this video and some others from Blaise Aguera y Arcas presenting the Projects he leads in digital mapping. Appart from the technical achievements showing off behind these services developed at Bing maps and the interesting aesthetic results of their concept, there are, furthermore, some hints about the coming “internet of things”, where the physical is mapped to the bits and viceversa. Indeed, at some point in the video you get a feeling of place and time dislocation that might be useful to get you out to research on the topic.

What is interesting to remark is that Mapping became the new obsession of IT and Telcos. A major “need” of our new world seems to be that of not allowing ourselves to ever be lost, but also to be able to tag and mark everything we see in its digital representation. GPS, huge user-generated databases around the web and some experiments with generative 3D animation make it now possible to gradually re-create the world inside the digital modell of it and increase its resolution, hence enhancing our experience of the mediated world. It is really base on need? Need for speed? For Information?

I just remembered, that one of the myths that I as an infant enjoyed the most from cyberpunk literature, was the later popularized idea of the matrix, or cyberspace as Gibson first called it. That space within spaces, simulated, perfect architectural illusion mapped to the real world but with different properties, dis-place of information trafficking, entertainment and international crime. In the rules of a classic sci-fi RPG called cyberpunk, different areas of the matrix could have different degrees of resolution going from wireframe (Something like Tron or an Atari shooter game) to life-realistic, this one being something like, well, basically like life itself or the one we know from the matrix films. This degree of renderization was also a fashion-related issue, each site owner defining the degree of realism, look and feel of their matrix presence, and more importantly, was geographically defined. So basically this kind of architectural sites would be mapped to a geographical location in the matrix-map of the world and being at someone’s place in the matrix was the equivalent of actuelly being there, at least in that huge world representation. Somehow each place on that model was holding its own server, not so dislocated as our actual cyberspace is like.

So far, the presence of this imaginary, if we might call it so, can be depicted in cyberspace as we understand it now: Media branding, social networks, web presence… all seem to be a simplified application of that Virtual Architecture. Websites are commonly not geographically related, but real places soon will offer access to many virtual places on top of them… We are seeing, alas the big software corps., that our bidimensional cyberspace surface is also beginning to change massively towards an indeed more realistic set of spatial metaphors intertwined with, and accessible (If ya buy the right tool) in real space. It’s not about the VR googles and the electrode suit, It’s like moving away from VR to enter the world of “we don’t know where we exist”. Dazzling.

Some more links about the internet of things, if you allow me. Just to finish:

http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/what-is-the-internet-of-things
http://www.iot2010.org/
http://www.bing.com/maps/
(Got to be a Windoes guy if you want to check the 3D stuff, it seems. Non-existing help for Mac Users…)

Posted under AUGMENTED MEDIA, ENGLISH, HISTORY, MOBILE TECH, PULP & FICTION, TECHNE

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.

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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.

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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

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