Congo Confluence : a proposal

I just submitted a proposal to do a psychogeographic project for the 01SJ Biennal 2010 in which Kinshasa will be superimposed on San Jose using public projections, both mobile and stationary, performances/rituals and a variety of other mobile media tricks. What follows is some of the text from the concept proposal.



The title of this work "Congo Confluence" is a reference to the Congo Conference of 1884-1885 at which the European powers divided Africa into the nations we know today. This work addresses a core issue not only in Digital Media but also in globalization as a whole. This is a work in which technology is used to open a window of human access to the black box of the economic relations which already intimately connect them across the the world.

This is a work about about the materiality of digital media, the cellphones and other portable devices, laptops, built-ins and wearables. The layer of digital media which is coming to spread over every surface is not news, from media theory to industrial design this has been an exciting topic for at least a decade, however, what is not discussed, is that this information conveying layer is also a physical, material one, and that many of these materials are won from the earth under conditions which would be unacceptable to any contemporary humanist.

My point is that the idealism inspired by increasingly tiny and mobile technology is simple vanity unless it is counterbalanced with an earnest acknowledgement of the material circumstances of the technology's production. Despite all our relative wealth and security, we continue to look at the rest of the world and even each other with fear and trepidation. Increasingly it seems weapons and defence uses dominate technology research. Why? because there is injustice in the materials of our technology. It is hoped that a rapprochement with this fact will bring about more humanizing and valuable use and discussion of the state-of.-the-art technology.

It is a painful fact that the 10-year war in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) is largely the result of various militias and the corrupted DRC army vying with each other for control of Coltan, Cassiterite, Niobium and other minerals vital to producing the very smaller electronic components which make our state-of the-art. By some reports, these 'conflict minerals' have resulted in the deaths, rapes and orphaning of over six million people. Every developed country, their corporations and their "aid" agencies is involved in this sorry state of affairs. The DRC, mineralogically, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, is one of the poorest. Kinshasa, the capital has less than 3 hours of electricity per day.

Nevertheless, just as it does here, life in the DRC goes on. Markets open, and people go to work and try to make a living, a career, a future. Kinshasa, over 1000 miles from the mineral-death-rich Kivu provinces, is a bustling metropolis with a thriving music industry and burgeoning contemporary art scene.

Now I know psychogeography is so y2k, and, in the early days of locative media, everybody started quoting deBord and getting big grant money for projects which largely either flopped or were no more than prototypes for industrial products which arrived on the scene 24 months later. And now that Israeli army is using deBord to blast new trajectories through people's houses in Gaza, its seems his pedigree as a leading light for radical emancipatory digital practise has become almost irredeemable.

But psychogeography can help us understand what it is like to live somewhere else without actually travelling there. Seoul's Flying City's 2003 project, mapping (for Koreans) inaccessible Pyongyang onto Seoul, had a strong resonance. So, too, I believe will the current proposed project of mapping Kinshasa onto San Jose and extending the map eastward to scale so that the eastern frontier of Congo, the aforementioned Kivu provinces so drenched in blood and hardship, the regional capital Goma, will be found right next to Denver CO.



Layering the thriving culture of today's DRC with all its hope intermingled with the reverberations of extreme injustice and pain on the relatively sedate surfaces of today's America should produce some powerful effects and, it is hopes, engender much valuable discussion and long-term exchange between the two places so tied by economic binds, to mitigate the injustice that eats away at our satisfaction with the accomplishments of the technological age.

Murderous Mineral Trade

I will be presenting on the deep-material relations in consumer electronics tomorrow at the University of Arts in Berlin. Did you know that the #1 industrial consumer of electronics is the game industry? Playstations, Wiis, Iphones and all sorts of contemporary comforts and enjoyments all need cassiterite, coltan, copper. The cheapest source of these minerals is, of course, Africa. Why is it so cheap? Because that is the value of human life in institutionally impoverished countries. yet they should be among the richest countries in the world.

Jaromil at transmediale a great presentation



It is officially illegal to source conflict minerals. Congo is prohibited from building new airports near Kivu province where the trade is going on. So... the airplanes land on the highway.

What to do? Be aware, make others aware. I think Jaromil made a great point when he described the problem as endemic in the product R&D cycle. If manufacturers have a problem, say they need smaller, more heat-efficient processors, they will research only far enough to solve the problem for the time being (in this case, the solution was Coltan from Congo) instead of looking at what would come next in terms of the life cycle of the technology and in terms of the possible repercussions intensive exploitation of the newly necessary resource would have on the local people/ conditions...

What does illegal mean? It means there is a lot of money to be made on the black market. In Germany, they like to say "Kein Mensch ist illegal" I think it was Beuys who said it first "No person is illegal". This is a battle cry of the immigrants rights activists in Germany. My cynical rejoinder is here "Kein Euro ist illegal!"

UPDATE: a new article in TIME today, linking to some previous one few paid any attention to. The problem remains urgent and unsolved... there is human sacrifice inside the screen we are reading this on right now.

UPDATE: 050809 An article in the New York Times today gives a dire picture of what is still going, seemingly unabated, in Kivu provinces of Congo. We can see here how any so-called political solution only seems to exacerbate the problem, and the victims are thousands and thousands of innocents who just happen to be living in the path of mineral money juggernauts.
Last year, this situation had already been going on for a decade, but the root causes are not addressed, so it continues. typical of the complicity of our 99.9% pure sold out mass media.

UPDATE: 120809 Hillary Clinton reportedly announced today a $17 000 000 (17M$) relief fund for rape victims in the Congo.

"But a real change in the political climate is needed if things are going to change for the citizens of the eastern Congo. ... electronics manufacturers must work with governments to end the trade in illicit conflict minerals, the way the trade in Blood Diamonds from Sierra Leone was squashed through coordinate international efforts. The war in Congo, brutal though it is, is not fought for no reason. A complex array of actors with various goals and allegiances are vying for influence, control, and for power. But the fuel feeding the conflict is wealth, and much of it comes from the illicit trade in Congo's natural resources. " - Charles London

Is the "fuel feeding the conflict" wealth? meaning no wealth no conflict?...hmmm... I would imagine that the fuel feeding this conflict in pedestrian greed but the atmosphere which allows the fuel to burn brightly is a general disregard for human life, where mega-profits, and, especially the luxurious lifestyle they afford, trump local and inter-human concerns. And we can see on MTV (and all mass media is becoming MTV) that this is definitely the case. Otherwise the article hits all the right points. Hopefully more people will feel implicated and get engaged.