iMine!

I am just back from a wonderful few days in slightly, yet sweetly dilapidated Gijón where I installed the first public demonstration of iMine, a new experimental art-app for Android and iPhone.

What is iMine? It is digital art, in the particular sense that (as readers of other articles on this site will know) explores the materiality of the digital. This app, and the associated web resources is designed as a sort of portal to vast realms of real and possible research into the real material conditions of the origin of digital media, that is, in the material of the hardware which has its genesis in the minerals of the earth. This is accomplished through a game interface, which is itself a dramatization of these conditions.

iMine ventures back to the humble and often primitive conditions where the minerals which will become this technology are originally exhumed. It is an assertion of the human facts at the mine head, the actual workers who actually laboured to bring forth the minerals which frazzle and fritz inside circuits and chips to maintain this text so seamlessly legible on the surface of your display right now.

This art-app is dedicated all the human beings who have been sacrificed for digital technology.

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.

Public Emotion!

Paul Virilio is the velosopher, the philosopher of speed...

He is the one who best described how photography accelerated the way we think by allowing us to access the microchronology of daily life, until we were industriously and industrially speeding up production process to keep up with our accelerated consciousness. When, WWI shocked everyone over the scale of slaughter which mechanized ideology could execute, the machines seemed to, as Flusser would say, "spout" history.

As the smoke began to clear, they plowed the war dead into neat memorial garden rows, and claimed "we humans are better than that", cried "never again!" and they believed it. And there was a socialist bouillonnement in Europe which tried to take care of the root problems and misconceptions which allowed simple scientific truth to be so misapplied.

Yet some how, it happened again, and this time around the world, and this time including that which is most offensive to anyone who implicates himself in the least notion of humanism, the industrial death camps of the Germans, and the instantaneous mass slaughter, of the atomic weapons dropped by Americans.

Western thought has never recovered from the shock, but technology can't help itself, nobody dares to pull the plug. Technology causes more problems than it solves, but it does solve them all eventually, except the one that it causes more than it solves, and that these problems seem to be increasing in destructive power.

Public Emotion from b gottlieb on Vimeo.

catastrophe
1540, "reversal of what is expected" (especially a fatal turning point in a drama), from Gk. katastrephein "to overturn," from kata "down" + strephein "turn" (see strophe). Extension to "sudden disaster" is first recorded 1748.

"Le progrès et la catastrophe sont l'avers et le revers d'une même médaille"- Hannah Arendt, oft quoted by Paul Virilio "Progress and Catastrophe are two sides of the same coin", we won't get one without the other. Virilio insists that he does not proclaim the apocalypse, and sees only hope in the finitude, the limits, mortal, and other, of humanity which are revealed with every catastrophe. We expect the best, but suddenly, there is an accident, and this reveals the real best, different but as good as that which we expected.

__what follows is an excerpt from from an interview with Virilio published in Le Monde on February 2nd, 2009

Gérard Courtois et Michel Guerrin: Croyez-vous, comme certains, que le capitalisme touche à sa fin ?

Paul Virilio : Je pense plutôt que c'est la fin qui touche le capitalisme. Je suis urbaniste. Le krach montre que la terre est trop petite pour le progrès, pour la vitesse de l'Histoire. D'où les accidents à répétition. Nous vivions dans la conviction que nous avions un passé et un futur. Or le passé ne passe pas, il est devenu monstrueux, au point que nous n'y faisons plus référence. Quant au futur, il est limité par la question écologique, la fin programmée des ressources naturelles, comme le pétrole. Il reste donc le présent à habiter. Mais l'écrivain Octavio Paz disait : "L'instant est inhabitable, comme le futur." Nous sommes en train de vivre cela, y compris les banquiers.

Gérard Courtois et Michel Guerrin: Do you believe, as do some, that capitalism is coming to an end?

Paul Virilio: I rather think that it is the end which is coming to capitalism. I am an urbanist. The Crash shows the earth is too small for progress, for the speed of history. From which [we get] the repetitive accidents. We used to live in the conviction that we had a past and a future. But the past doesn't happen, it has become monstrous, to the point where we no longer refer to it. Whereas the future is limited by the question of ecology, in the programmed end of natural resources, like oil. This leaves only the present for us to live in. But the writer Octavio Paz said "the immediate is uninhabitable,as is the future". We are living this now, the bankers included.

PS. corollary in today's Wall Street Journal from Granta's John Freeman. The fact that this call to eschew email and forgo all indulgence in the increasing panoply of light-speed communication is being published in the WSJ must mean that it is (and perhaps Granta itself (representing literary traditional intellectual/left critique) has become)not only hopelessly out of touch, but probably, likely through their trust-fund investments, so hopelessly ensnarled in the thing they wish to critique that they can only produce counter-intelligence for the disaster management industry. We probably need more of this.
Or this.