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

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?

. 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.