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

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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

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.

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…)

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.

I was wondering if Facebook is not a glance of the culture of the self coming at its peak. Me being public, posting my life to the world, and peeping into other life’s by every possible means. Digital Identity transformed, the illusion of being someone, of appealing to others and being unique within a massive set of similar individuals. But setting a discussion about all the privacy issues and efficient communication tools given by FB is not our goal. It is, off course, a very personal problem to discern and set politics on how you manage and protect your most personal data, a byproduct of all the cool “social” tools.

So again. I was facing that decision some days ago, and thinking, that facebooking and twitting seem to be the way to go. Why to keep a site of some nature if I’d rarely post anything? Somehow because our present economy and communication flows supports this trend, I was feeling rebellious and increasingly reluctant to follow the path. Casually, while visiting facebook for an ordinary peeping-into-others session, I bumped into this: http://www.seppukoo.com/ I was so moved by the initiative, that I just went on for the ritual and then I got a cute facebook obituary. http://www.seppukoo.com/memorial/Luis-Bustamante/626874837.

Been 4 days in this “new” better life after dead and I’m still ok. Sofar I think it’s entirely possible to go back to email and reduce my screen hours per day while spending more time in writing and doing personal stuff. Simbolically this is the first post in months and the re-start of a more prolific digital routine. Let’s see where this leads to

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.

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…