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…)

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!

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.

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.

Jaromil (winner of the shared theory award inthe Transmediale), announced he’s organizing a Campaign (Still searching for info on the web) for a no-computer day in June, when all participants around the world should shut their beloved extensions down. It is an act of conciousness that sketches a problematic question: should we as media related artists, designers or activists use blood-stained technology at all? The Hardware you use represents corporate profit made with Tantalum. But as I write, the production of digital devices keeps on and the only way to transmit this information and make it active is by using the network. Is it possible to find a solution? use some other material to build our machines? Someone asked… The answer was,  that businesses are made where something apparently ‘valuable’ to someone has been forbidden, it’s scarce or hidden, isn’t it?  Think about drugs. So why would corporates let go of enhanced profit by any reason? Let’s keep the Tantalum fever as long as there is some left… Sony, which fired up Tantalum’s price while producing the hitherto new PS2 around 2000, claims not to use Tantalum from Congo, which posseses almost 25% of world’s production. Researchers are highy skeptical, as it is known that to “clean” the exportations of the condemned substance, the metal is extracted and transported to neighbour countries from where it can be “legally” commercialized.

The questions coming out of this complex subject go into many directions but basically it confronts us with the tools we accept to get into your life as part of a consumerist society and the use we make of them. Finding solutions to this paradox seems to be a task for some years and lots of people networks trying to create new perspectives and work towards different production, and above all, consumption dynamics. Sounds utopic but late unstabilities in world’s organisation, the economical crisis, the food and energy crisis that are crawling to the most powerful nations should force even the most profit-oriented into similar processes…should it?

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.

I couldn’t talk about the Coltan Wars with the YES MEN, I could just say hello somehow, but I found two powerful images pretty close to each other in both the YES MEN movie and a performance streamed during the Tantalum Conference. This stream came live from the French Alliance in Kinshasa, one of the few places in the Congolese Capital that guarantees permanent Internet connection. The camera that registered the action of the performers passed repeatedly over a dancer that was painfully rolling on the floor subsumed by a skeleton robot. In the Movie we have the yes men presenting in their corporate fashion, a golden skeleton as a symbol of their campaign for an acceptable amount of human deaths in proportion to profit. We don’t need to describe the common ground here, because both symbols represent exactly the same: The perspective from the oppressed entailed in the African dancer who is subsumed by the tantalum death reinforced by the golden skeleton that dances and comforts the heart of the investor: In the american movie, one conference participant expresses that feeling when he approaches to have a  chat after the conference saying that the idea of an acceptable index of human casualties was relieving. He makes it seriously although with a stupid enthusiastic laugh in his face. This leaves us with a deadly metallic taste in our mouths and a rather deceiving perspective on human nature.

No conclusions here.

. 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.

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…