Holocaust by Design

Hamlet on the Holotaph

Central to my inquiry into the materiality of the digital image is the discovery of the human fact of this materiality, one aspect of which is the ongoing global tragedy of the so-called 'Conflict Minerals' Trade.

Last year, a bill was introduced to the US Congress which has the intention of mitigating, and hopefully ending this tragedy. Though the provisions in the bill for auditing companies doing the secondary processing of conflict minerals, transforming them into the alloys and other refined materials used in the electronics industry could easily be abused, the bill itself, especially Section 2, is valuable in that it officially acknowledges the scope of the problem in some painful detail.

One of the consultants on the bill was Danish documentary filmmaker Frank Poulsen who managed to personally visit and even film in one of the mines and come back to tell about it.

His film project still needs funding and support. The problem, however, is deeper and more intractable than one film will be able to solve.

There is something endemic to our globalist economic system built on ever increasing debt which necessitates permanent economic growth. We are blackmailing ourselves into the future. And the the over-hurried, harried material result of this is not only bad design, which is obsolete with in a couple of years, but a design philosophy which does not take into account where the materials that must be mined to create the design on a globalized scale will come from, and what potential disruptions this new sourcing paradigm may cause on the local level.

What we see in North Kivu province of the Congo was partially caused by an 2004 EU declaration that solder used in electronics should no longer contain lead. Though this was ostensibly a good idea, the legislators far away in Brussels did not consider that the sudden jump in value of the suggested replacement material, cassiterite, was mostly to be found in a desperately poor and unstable part of the world, and that the gold rush there might have terrible consequences. According to US Congress figures over 6,000,000 people have died as result of the conflict minerals trade. When we look at the materiality of the digital image, we have a holocaust at our fingertips.

Or, rather, to be precise, because, here, out of respect for the murdered, we should be as precise as possible, the term holocaust is not accurate. 'holo' means 'all', 'caust' means 'burnt' which also means that the word holocaust is not entirely accurate to describe the nazi institutional genocide. And the murdered of the Congo were not burned, but were, at least, one would expect, buried, so perhaps a construction such as holotaph be fitting. We have a holotaph at our fingertips.

When it comes to mass-production on the global scale, good, conscientious design is a moral imperative. Bruce Sterling put a damper on the techno-giddy audience at his talk at a Vodaphone MoMo Mobile Monday event in November 2008. In his trademark sneer he cut to the core of the matter, design matters, but waste is good for business.

I have treated the issue of conflict minerals periodically previously on this blog.

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, on the site of the former Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin, let us also remember the millions whose lives and bodies have been sacrificed for the imagineered idealisms of today's globalist social networks.

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.