protonumerique

—ENGLISH version below—
El video explica la idea base del proyecto realizado, o comenzado, en Junio en el Medialab Prado, el cual “usa una arquitectura de 3D Audio en la que diferentes tonos o loops de sonido son asignados a representaciones digitales de satélites reales cuyas órbitas y velocidad son escaladas hasta el espacio personal de quien escucha”. Como la librería JOAL para Processing no corre en un APPLET por falta de soporte en JAVA, no existe una version web de la aplicación hecha en processing. No obstante el código está disponible para su uso bajo licencia CC en el repositorio del taller en autistici:

http://code.autistici.org/trac/neighborhoodscience/browser/Birdswithin

En el wiki del Medialabprado hay más información y pronto se tendrá una página de información y colaboración para avanzar el proyecto.

http://wiki.medialab-prado.es/index.php/Birds_within

—
For english speakers a small introduction pasted directly from the wiki (Go to previous link for more info): “The project uses a 3D audio architecture which allows different sound loops or tones to be assigned to digital representations of real satellites which orbits and velocities are scaled down to fit the local space of the listener. This kind of soundscape aims to underline the immediacy of outer space activity, its influence in personal and communal spaces, as well as the possibility to enhance the experience of it by juxtaposing analog and digital media resources with social processes of observation and urban wandering. “

As the JOAL library for processing doesn’t work with applets, there is no online version of the application made in processing. Nevertheless, the code is available with a CC license on the workshop’s repository in autistici:

http://code.autistici.org/trac/neighborhoodscience/browser/Birdswithin

Soon a website will be available for more information and hopefully for attracting collaborators to the project

Posted under AUGMENTED MEDIA, CODING, DOCUMENTATION, ENGLISH, ESPAÑOL, EVENTS, INTERFACING, MOBILE TECH, NEWS, PORTFOLIO, PULP & FICTION, SUBCULTURE, TECHNE

Hace unos días volví de Madrid, donde participé en el taller Interactivos?’ 10 en el medialab Prado, y bueno, bastantes cosas quedan por contar.

EN>> I just arrived from Madrid, taking part on the Interactivos?’ 10 workshop at the medialab Prado, and well, there are many things to tell and infos to share.

El medialab es un espacio abierto con bastantes miembros y proyectos allegados en la ciudad así como en el mundo. La gente asiste en buenas cantidades a los talleres y presentaciones, y la estructura interna del laboratorio es simple y sólida. Con poca burocracia y un equipo de producción exigante así como eficiente, resulta motivante trabajar allí.

EN>> The medialab is an open space with many members and relative projects around the city of Madrid and the globe. People assist in copious amounts to their workshops and presentations, and the inner structure of the lab is simple and robust. Very little bureaucracy and a demanding as well as efficient staff, makes it motivating to work there.

Como es normal es problemático desarrollar un proyecto organizándolo por el camino, lidiando con personal + presupuesto + convivir con diversos tipos de gente en el mismo espacio, tratando de terminar algo bien hecho en 2 semanas. Sin embargo, los resultados fueron satisfactorios y algunos proyectos encontraron una infraestructura bastante sólida par seguir su desarrollo (2 ejemplos):

EN>> As usual, there are lots of issues when developing a Project, between organizational stuff and personnel + budget + many different kinds of people trying to get something done. Results where nevertheless very attractive and some projects got a rather solid infrastructure to keep their development going (2 examples):

http://solares.medialab-prado.es

http://www.re-tag.org/

Enmarcando todo el taller, hubo una interesante dimensión de trabajo en red que unió equipos de proyecto de diversas latitudes pero tambien representantes de otros medialab, dorkboters, la gente de platoniq, y un gran número de artistas/activistas latinoamericanos (Sólo para subrayar su/nuestra mayoría). Desde ésta configuración al menos algo bien interesante surgió: Un canal de colaboración entre gente conspirando desde perspectivas sureñas en una red social “underground”: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/22816/lsl-lab-sur-lab/ Algunas otras iniciativas de trabajo en red entre laboratoristas resultaron poco claras o muy elitistas como para ser tomadas en cuenta…

EN>> On top of the whole thing there was a rather interesting networking layer that joined project teams from different latitudes but also other Medialab representatives, dorkboters, people from platoniq and a great number of latinamerican (Just to remark on their/our majority) artists / activists. From these configuration something interesting emerged> A collaboration among people working on a southern perspectives on an underground social platform: https://n-1.cc/pg/groups/22816/lsl-lab-sur-lab/ Other initiatives remained rather unclear or too elitist to be taken into account.

Por el lado personal, otras buenas noticias fue el desarrollo de mi proio proyecto que estará en el post siguiente.

EN>> From a personal side, the other good news were my personal project that will be on the next post. Cheers.

Posted under ENGLISH, ESPAÑOL, EVENTS, INTERACTION, NEWS, SUBCULTURE

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

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

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

“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.

Posted under CONSERVATION, DOCUMENTATION, NEWS