protonumerique

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

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