Hasta La Creative!

An Atlas of Radical Cartography, edited by artists Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat (Amazon USA and UK)

The editors say: An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. The map is inherently political– and the contributions to this book wear their politics on their sleeves.

An Atlas of Radical Cartography provides a critical foundation for an area of work that bridges art/design, cartography/geography, and activism. The maps and essays in this book provoke new understandings of networks and representations of power and its effects on people and places. These new perceptions of the world are the prerequisites of social change.

New York City Garbage Machine, by the Center for Urban Pedagogy

The slipcase contains a set of ten maps and a collection of essays by artists, architects, designers, and writers who illuminate the maps and explore their role as political agent. An Atlas is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking and original publications i’ve read in a long long time.

First there is a purely aesthetic pleasure of unfolding the maps and discovering the careful, unique and innovative design of each one.

Then the essays are engrossing. They are written by people who have a story to tell you, they are passionate about it, they are angry or worried by the current state of affair but they are also smart enough to know that the best way to solve a problem is to adopt a pro-active attitude.

Right from the cover, showing an “upside-down”map, we are faced with the fact that even the most banal and innocent-looking map has its own agenda, that it is extremely difficult to separate cartography from politics and ideology. Far from being neutral accessories which would merely help you go from point A to point B, maps are often used as instruments for controlling and shaping beliefs. Conversely, maps can also be at the service of protest and social change. That’s what the contributors of the Atlas demonstrate. Deliberately, openly and quite convincingly.

Unnayan | Chetla Lock Gate, Marginal Land Settlement in Calcutta, 1984 (detail)

The first map transports you a few decades ago in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Formed in the mid-late 70s, Unnayan was a civil activist groups which campaigned on dwelling, health, labour, schooling and various rights-related issues met by communities in urban and rural areas of eastern India. Unnayan was involved in projects that including preparing maps that identified settlements which existed in Calcutta at the time but were blanked out in officila maps. Elaborated in collaboration with the communities, the maps helped them locate water pumps, roads, but it also made these communities visible on a space which official maps would otherwise define as “vacant land.” The vast majority of these maps are destroyed by floods or stolen. Jai Sen, a member of Unnayan, reconstructs fragments of these experiments and puts them on record in Other Worlds, Other Maps: Mapping the Unintended City, his contribution for An Atlas of Radical Cartography.

Institute for Applied Autonomy, iSee

All the other maps are contemporary.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy discusses tactical cartography and how locative media technology can be used by activists as cold and precise weapons to foster critical social engagement. They illustrate the concept by detailing their project iSee, a web-based application developed in collaboration with NYCLU and the Surveillance Camera Players to chart the locations of CCTV cameras in Manhattan. By checking iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras (“paths of least surveillance”) allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being “caught on tape” by unregulated security monitors. Their essay explains how stories about the iSee application spread all over the media and generated a series of discussions and debates amongst a -so far- unsuspecting audience. The work also extended to camera-mapping workshops which assumed the double role of rendering the proliferation of surveillance cameras tangible to a general audience and creating an empirical basis for challenging policing and public safety policy.

Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaimen interviews Trevor Paglen about his investigation into extraordinary rendition flights, the tension between art and activism as exemplified by a look at Mark Lombardi‘s drawings and Ashley Hunt‘s maps, the reasons why cartography shouldn’t be confused with geography, etc.

Olivier Clochard and Philippe Rekacewicz, Death at Europe frontiers

I found An Architektur‘s contribution to the book illuminating. Because of what i read in the media and because of the intense pleasure i experience when i am treated like a delinquent by the “immigration” officers each time my plane land in the U.S., i often have this vision that the U.S. is the evil one in the quest of security and border control. An Architektur, a collective that applies sociopolitical questions to space and architecture, proves me wrong by exposing the European Union’s efforts to tighten its borders against asylum seekers and people looking for a better life. Hence, the need to close hermetically the access to EU and to park inside a migration camp anyone managing to jump above the wired fences. An Architektur points to several maps which illustrate the issue such as Migreurop‘ s From European Migration and Asylum Policies. to Camps for Foreigners map (PDF), – Hackitectura‘s map that rethinks the frontier between Morocco and Spain, replacing the concept of border as space of separation with site of connection and reciprocal flow, etc. A striking example is the article and map called Death at Europe frontiers where Olivier Clochard and Philippe Rekacewicz document the death occurred while trying to reach the territory of the European Union. Only documented death are taken into account but their number goes way beyond the 7 000 between 1993 and 2006 (3 000 from December 2003 to 2006). The map shows that danger doesn’t stop when the border is crossed. Once inside the EU, migrants have to face racist attacks, unsafe working conditions for the illegals, police repression, internment camps, etc.

Pedro Lasch, Guías de Ruta / Route Guides, 2003/2006,

These were just a few lines about 4 of the maps and essays you’ll find in An Atlas of Radical Cartography. There’s also Pedro Lasch’s beautifully symbolic map of the America/Latin America relationships, Lize Mogel’s politically heavy re-lecture of the map of the San Francisco Bay Area, Jane Tsong’s children science textbook-style drawings which reveal what it takes to be able to turn on the tap in her bathroom, the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s well-documented New York City Garbage Machine describes the fight for power over the bins, Brooke Singer’s The US Oil Fix demonstrates the impact that the US addiction to fossil fuels has on the rest of the world and Ashley Hunt’s A World Map tackles the world capitalist system.

An Atlas takes also the form of a touring exhibition which is making a stop over unitl May 6, 2008 at Dowd Fine Art Gallery, SUNY Cortland, NY.

Related: Resistant Maps (part 1) – Introduction, Resistant Maps (part 2) – GuerrigliaMarketing.

Back from the 10th edition of ZEMOS98, a festival of audiovisual culture titled this year Regreso al futuro, Back to the Future. I wish all the events i attend were as intelligently curated, carefully organized and stimulating as this one. The audience was great too. And extremely polite: they sat all the way through the talk i gave there in a spanish bastardized with franco-italian words and grammar.

Image from the workshop Control Sonoro

There were workshops, concerts, presentations, screenings and talks. One of the highlights of the week for me was Lisa Parks‘ talk. Her lecture was part of Critical Powers which invited thinkers and creators to share their views on the possible functions of utopia in an era of advanced Capitalism, the effects of technology changes on cultural process, or on the power of a public sphere.

Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual and co-editor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader. Her research explores uses of satellite, computer and television technologies in a transnational context.

ZEMOS98 put a tiny extract of the presentation online:

And i’ll add my notes:

Introduction

The lecture was articulated around two themes (Spying and Dreaming) and was a small compendium of the many topics she has been working on over the past few years, most of the material she presented is based on case studies but for lack of time she merely glossed over them.

Her first slide showed us a list of satellites that Spain has ownership on. Most are used for remote sensing. The first one (intersat) was launched in 1974, the latest DEIMOS in 2008 which will be used for disaster management. Parks stressed the importance of developing more literacy about satellites. We can name tv channels and websites by wouldn’t be able to name satellites. Throughout history, hundreds of satellites have been launched into space.

Another of her key interests is the visualization of satellites. We can have an everyday tactile contact with other technologies like mobile phones or television sets but our experience of satellites is very different. Right from the start as satellites are a highly specialized technology. They have to be constructed in clean room, protected from the rest of the world and they are launched in locations which are often closed off for security purpose. Once they are sent into orbit, most of us will never think about them again.

Parks then talked about the footprint of satellites. No matter how clearly defined the boundaries of nations can be, their space will always be crisscrossed by footprints from different satellites launched by various countries. Spain uses satellite technology to beam its signal to Latin America for example. That’s what she calls “Nation Beaming”.

Spying

1. The Corona Project

The Corona Project was a top secret program run by the CIA with the help of the US Air Force. One of them was hidden in Discoverer Spacecraft which contained biological experiments (to check how plants would withstand being launched into orbit). The project was top secret and involved a huge capital investment that the public financed without ever knowing about it.

Corona film recovery diagram

Of the 144 Corona satellites launched, 102 returned usable images.
The Corona satellites secretly monitored and gathered a huge amount of satellite data about USSR, Eastern Europe and Asia from 1960 until 1972.
The program was declassified by President Clinton in 1995 and he made the images collected available to the public.

Catch of a Corona capsule off of Hawaii (image)

The recovery of the images taken by Corona was quite remarkable. A mechanism would drop the film canister and drop it in the air. The canister would then be recovered in mid-air by a C-119 aircraft. If the recovery mission failed, the canister would deploy a parachute and be recovered on earth or on the ocean.

The Corona program was initiated during the Cold War to check if “the other” was developing new weapons. The satellites were thus used to develop an image intelligence which would help the government decide on their own internal and external policy.

Corona launch preparation shed in ruins (image)

The Corona facility are now in decay.

2. Satellite imaging and global conflicts

It’s also important to discuss the relationship between orbit and earth in the age of image intelligence and see how remote sensing get integrated into news culture, how and when classified images suddenly make their way into our global media culture. More precisely the questions her research is focusing on are:

First case study: Rwanda

James Nachtwey, Survivor of Hutu death camp, Rwanda, 1994

Refugees International used aerial and sat images in 1996 to try to find and assist 1 million displaced persons. The combination of sat/aerial images was used as a medium that could uniquely visualize a “nationless social body”. The organization understood how these images could capture better than any other medium the displacement of a moving mass of people who have nowhere to go.

Many satellite images have to be inscribed with caption, without them the images lose their significance, they look like abstract paintings. We need to be directed to read these images.

Pressured US to release sat images to draw world attention to a conflict that was being ignored by the international community.

Second case study: Bosnia, July 1995

Satellite photo of Nova Kasaba mass graves.

US was boasting to have real time visibility over the war theatre – Information Dominance
Srebrenica is US-protected, highly monitored and as such regarded as a “Safe Haven”.
US State Department released sat images of alleged mass graves in Srebrenica 6 weeks after the massacre occurred.
Sat evidence of atrocities released after the fact, rather than during the act. The US State department claimed that the problem was that volume of sat data was to plentiful.

Case study 3. Colin Powell and Irak, 2003

Slide 12 of Powell’s address

Powell presented sat images in his address to the UN Security Council to make the case for a US-led war against Irak, alleging they contained “undeniable proof” of Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction.

From Lisa Parks vantage point the case raises a real problem as Powell not only plagiarized a PhD thesis but, more crucially, the whole story undermined the credibility of any future use of sat images by US official in a global forum.

Satellite images are digital images and have thus no physical reference, they are generated by a series of 0 and 1. Yet they are useful. One shouldn’t embrace them as state truth but as a field of investigation. The 3 case studies highlight how much has changed in the US after the Corona programme.

Institutional Changes

The privatization sector is led by European companies:
1983 SPOT (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre) begins selling sat images – 10 m resolution, meaning that an object 10 m long can be visible from space.
1987 Soviet company Soyuzkarta joins the game. They charge $500 to $800 for images of 5 m resolution, a price affordable for States or corporations.
1994 Clinton administration privatizes remote sensing in the US. The technology can no longer be used solely by CIA and the scientific but can be tuned into a profi-making industry.
The privatization of remote sensing occurs throughout the ’80s and ’90s.
In the 1990s Earthwatch and Space Imaging emerge and sell images of 1 m resolution.

Today the website of Satellite Imaging Corporation claims that they are the largest because they are the one who possess most satellite assets. They own a fleet of satellite, one of them moves makes a complete turn of the Earth in 90 minutes.

The commercialization of sat images has led to some odd uses and requests.

In 2001, Dan Bollinger, a fan of the tv program Survivor: Africa, sent a request to Space Imaging to acquire the image data over the Kenya location and share them with other fans of the show. The CBS facilities were discovered but the tv channel didn’t want to see their production site exposed.

The images nevertheless traveled all over the world showing that satellite images are no longer a matter of security issue but are part of a broader visual culture.

Another case which illustrates the previous statement come from a campaign by KFC. The fried chicken company needed to re-design the brand and came up with the “Face from Space” in the Nevada desert, also known as the “UFO Capital of the World.” The fast food company purchased an Ikonos image of the site and distributed it through global media circuits.

While satellites have historically passed over the earth to observe “naturally unfolding” phenomena, now events are staged precisely so they can be viewed from an orbital perspective. Remote sensing satellites are now being used to pitch products and address global consumers just as other media such as commercial television or the world wide web. More in this article by Lisa Parks: Obscure Objects of Media Studies: Echo, Hotbird and Ikonos.

Google Earth

Since 2005, Google Earth presents us with a “mosaic’ed” version of the world using satellite images coming from various sources. But while the logo of Google is always clearly visible on the images, no matter how blurry they are themselves, we are kept in the dark regarding the satellites used to compose these images. Google Earth is a great opportunity to educate the public about satellite but instead they do GE tends to almost erase the existence of the satellites.

Digital Globe provides date information for satellite images that are part of Google Earth using color-coded squares and “I” icons. By clicking on “preview,” you enter a meta-browser featuring the single satellite image captioned with information about how to purchase it or others from Digital Globe. Digital Globe is thus providing date information as part of a marketing strategy. GE becomes a billboard.

(image)

Google Earth teamed up with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create the Crisis in Darfur mapping initiative which collects and diffuses visual evidence of the destruction in Darfur.

On the surface it looks like an admirable project but in several ways it missed the opportunity to represent the conflict in all its complexities. It uses tropes to represent African tragedy (images of suffering children carried by their mother). There is no visible effort of providing a political and economical education about the tragedy.

With the slide i pasted below, Lisa Park claims to demonstrate that earlier media news provided more opportunities for education:

Problems of GE Crisis in Darfur layer:
– obscure satellite imagery,
– represents the “past perfect”, because it show what we monitored from space but didn’t do anything about at the time,
– involves the branding of global conflicts (no matter how blurry the image, the Google brand is always conspicuous),
– exemplifies neoliberalism (David Harvey) and disaster capitalism (Naomi Klein),
– from CNN effect to Google Earth effect? In order to get world attention will an event have to appear on Google Earth?

What does it mean for a US corporation to reproduce foreign territory as they want and without asking permission (some nations actually complained that GE causes a serious security concern.)

In a nutshell:

The public remains relatively uninformed about satellites, their uses and their impact on everyday life even though citizens taxes subsidize satellite developments.

The second part of Lisa Parks was about The Dreamers, the artists who use and comment on satellite technology. I found this part a bit weaker (less documented and with errors in the orthography of the artists’ names, happens to everyone of course but look quite bad on slides.) But here are a few notes:

“The Dreamers” encourage us to see and reflect about sat technologies and their potentials. they dare to experiment with satellites (traditionally seen as a heavy and highly specialized technology) and how they are used. Encourage us to think about who owns and control, satellites, orbital space and the spectrum. Develop uses that are not just about state security or corporate profits but about citizens’ needs.

Artists acknowledged in her presentation about satellite art and activism:
– Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabinowitz,
– Douglas Davis,
– Brian Springer,
– Marko Peljhan,
– Trevor Paglen,
and a special and enthusiastic mention of Aram Bartholl.

Last recommendations from Parks:

Image on the homepage showing Laika, a dog launched in orbit together with the satellite Sputnik II in 1957.

10 days ago, i was in Ghent for the festival The Game is Up! at the Vooruit. Artists who study the relationship between art and consumerism were invited to perform, and present their work to explore this year’s theme: Art for Sale.

Vending machines, installed all around Vooruit magnificent 1913 building, were packed with surprise objects made by the artists who participated to the exhibition: t-shirts, 5 euro banknotes inside blank envelopes, badges, crazy eyeglasses to see what is happening behind your back, etc.

Eva De Groote had invited me to moderate a couple of Fricties Salons. That’s how i finally got to have dinner with one of my heroes, Heath Bunting, saw a performance of Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping, had drinks and a lot of laughs with the smart and hilarious Christophe Bruno and the guy who resuscitated net.art Carlos Katastrofky. Definitely one of the most exciting events of this year for me (so far). Bliss-a-lujah!

Photo indymedia

On Saturday March 8, i was walking on a cloud telling myself what a lucky person i was to present a FrictiesSalon with the masked and magnificent guys of the Billboard Liberation Front.

Not that it has been a piece of cake. How do you introduce people who should not be introduced? Who have to keep their identity secret in order to be able to keep on doing their own activities? All i could find in the press were stories about the CIA or Mafia like secrecy that surrounds them and implies that “Spouses and friends do not know that the members are in the organization.”

“Improving outdoor advertising since 1977” is the catchphrase of the Billboard Liberation Front. The idea is simple: by making small adjustments to billboards, the BLF creates ironic and often highly critical street marketing campaigns. By changing just a few or sometimes only one letters, they turn upside down the clean and seemingly well-controlled facade of an entire company.

Photo by Gina Gayle for the SF gate

BLF has several sets of presentations. They could have gone for the “terrorist” version but given the theme of the festival, they chose the “corporate” one.

First, we were given a tour of the Fundamentals of the organization, its clients and the opportunities.

They started their actions 30 years ago. At the time, there was no internet, no mobile phone, no blogs, etc. It was also a time when advertisement communication just went one way. Consumers received it and didn’t have anyway to hit back through blogs or forums. There has been dozens of members over the years, some have gone, others have arrived more recently.

Client portfolio

In 77 a “bunch of freaks” in San Francisco called the San Francisco Suicide Club had vowed to live each day like it was the last one. 27 of them (including ten members wearing gorilla suits) were blindfolded and taken up to a roof. They were faced with two Max Factor billboard and some paint. Unfortunately they were a bit drunk, a bit conspicuous because of the gorilla suits and they started arguing about what should be done with the billboard. Some neighbour called the police and SF Suicide Club learned the message the hard way: be prepared, don’t get drunk, don’t wear stupid suits.

1980. Marlbore instead of Marlboro. It was the first time that the prank was interpreted as a real message from the tobacco company while in fact BLF wanted to comment on the lack of originality of the billboard.

1989. Kant, probably done by a student intern. “Actually it was probably a European intern as no one in the U.S. has ever heard of Kant.”

1994. an ad for the the Hillsdale Mall. Very straighforward operation, all they had to do was turn a couple of lights off and just keep the central letters: LSD.

Only a few months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, one of the most devastating man-made environmental disasters ever to occur at sea which occured in Alaska in 1989, the BLF turned HITS HAPPEN — NEW X-100 into SHIT HAPPENS — NEW EXXON

Then they became more ambitious:

1997. Alteration of a Levi’s billboard overlooking a major highway. BLF issued a press release in which they introduced Charles Manson, a figure who didn’t need any introduction, as the new corporate spokesman of the jeans’ company. This historic collaboration between two of most potent iconic forces of the 1960’s taps into a frothy zeitgeist of manipulative nostalgia.

1996. Am I dead yet? Technically more elaborate as they had to sub-contract an electrician and a neon guy.

1989. The “Think Different” campaign of Apple became “Think desillusioned”. The company had appropriated the image of famous dead guys or exiled ones like the Dalai Lama. Bulletins are the biggest and the most expensive.

The clients this time were technology companies, with a sector focus on the “dot-coms”. Large-format warning labels were added to the billboards, in the style of a standard computer error message, bearing the bold copy: “FATAL ERROR – Invalid Stock Value Abort/Retry/Fail”.
Ironically the stock market crashed right after this action.

A billboard manipulation can take from a few hours to a few weeks for the most ambitious actions.

Even before the improvement action takes place there is a careful preparation. The area surrounding the billboard is mapped, looking for the best ways of quick escape, ideal positions for ground crews, etc.

BLF has to go more and more tech-savvy, just like the industry does. Today you get talking billboards, talks of billboards in space, billboards activated by motion sensors, etc.

In 2005, they collaborated with artist Ron English for their first animatronic billboard alteration. The background is an original 12′ x 22′ painting by English. At the foreground the animatronic of Ronald McDonald feeding a fat kid his daily dose of Big Macs. The improvement took place in broad day light at a busy cross road in San Francisco while 15 persons where on the ground, dressed up like McDonald and acting crazy.

Some of the key rules of their billboard improvement actions:

– Make alterations that will make people smile not something that will make them angry,
– Less is more. The best improvements are those that require only to alter a single letter to change the whole meaning of the campaign.
– Expose what is hidden. Some advertisers are too shy about what they really mean, BLF will help them make their message clearer. Case in point: the 2005 improvement of Johnny Walker where “Drink responsibly” became “Drink yourself blind”.

– Send the press some media releases to better disseminate the action. A modified billboard might remain only one hour in the street before it is removed but its traces remain forever online.
– Document your action with some Before and After images.
– A careful planning is essential: Don’t get caught, don’t get hurt. The larger the billboard, the higher you’ll fall.
– Minimize property damage and respect the sign men. BLF make modification which are easy to remove and always leave some beer or liquor for the men who have to come and clean their “improvements.”
– You don’t have to be in San Francisco to make and see billboard improvements. Make yours with the help of BLF’s The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement guide (PDF).

And just like Rev. Billy did in a local shopping center, BLF made their own billboard improvement in the streets of Ghent.

More images of their actions.

Last week i flew to one of my favourite cities, Liverpool, to visit the Sk-interfaces exhibition at the FACT art center. The show, curated by Jens Hauser, explores, materially and metaphorically, the concept of skin as a technological interface.

A controversial new exhibition on display in Liverpool showcases real skin tissue in sculptures wrote the BBC news website. Yet every single person i spoke with during the 2 days i spent in the city didn’t seem to find the show controversial. Interesting, surprising, fascinating, challenging, thought-provoking, worth bringing my mum, etc. That’s what i heard but no one i talked to seemed overly shocked nor disturbed.

There is material to cause quite a stir in sk-interfaces but Liverpudlians seemed to be more concerned by the issues brought to light by the artists than by the potentially seditious or “freaky” character of the works on show.

I’ll start the blog visit of this multi-disciplinary exhibition by walking to the second floor of FACT.

Critical Art Ensemble, Immolation. Image courtesy of the artists

Immolation is a video installation concerned with the subject of the use of incendiary weapons on civilians after the Geneva Convention and the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons of 1980. The USA have refused to sign the convention and they make regular use of firebombs in the Middle East. Not because these bombs are the most efficient (they are not), but because they act as moral crushers, tapping on people’s visceral fear of being burned alive.

This video chronicles the major war crimes of the United States involving these weapons on a ( macro) landscape level, and contrasts it with the damage done to the body on the (micro) cellular level.

To accomplish this task, the Critical Art Ensemble (a collective of tactical media practitioners who explore the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism) grew human tissue at SymbioticA last year, and using high-end microscopy shot the micro footage of skin cells dying by either exploding or imploding. In parallel, CAE shows film footage of present and past wars that have used immolation against civilian targets as a strategic choice for the sole purpose of terrorizing entire populations.

Critical Art Ensemble, Immolation

The result is a video where war crime are shown at both the micro and macro level but which skips the human level. Yet you still manage to view your own body in the narrative. The video is made even more unsettling by the absence of sound, it’s just silence and destruction.

The goal is to provide a different way of imaging, viewing, and interpreting the human costs of these war crimes, in contrast to the barrage of media imagery to which we have become so desensitised. The video portrays what CAE calls an “ecology of crime.”

CAE felt that as long as warfare would be at the center of the Bush agenda, they had to come up with new connections and find venues to show their work (since the arrest of Steve Kurtz some US administrations are feeling the pressure).

Right next to Immolation, is Truth Serum, a work that responds to the lawsuit against Steve Kurtz and their persecution of Critical Art Ensemble in the USA, which marks an ever-increasing creep of the security state into the nervous system of culture.

For Truth Serum, The Office of Experiments, initiated by Neal White, follows research on serums used historically by official authorities in interrogation processes as a means to obtain information without using torture. The effects of truth drugs were first examined in the 1920’s, and heavily used by the CIA during the Cold War. The present artwork echoes the debate around art’s freedom in the fear and increasing security regime that has emerged after 9/11, while drawing on the cultural history of so-called truth drugs and recent discussions about their use in the interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Scopolamine, an ingredient used in truth serums (image courtesy of Neil White)

The use of truth serums is actually illegal but after 9/11 there have been talks (mostly in the press) of using the method again during interrogations by the FBI and the CIA, even though truth serums are more an art than a science.

The installation at FACT combines a space concealed behind a white door and a series of video works that reflect on the aesthetics of terrorist messages, using a dark clown as an anonymous spokesman who reflects on the possibility of carrying out mass self-experimentation with truth drugs as a form of self-defence.

On 29 March 2008, volunteers will be able to participate to the performative part of the Truth Serum installation in support of freedom from artistic censorship.

In a central (and still secret) Liverpool location, participants will willingly submit themselves to a short psychological experiment based on substantiating Truth lasting around 10 minutes. The aim is to probe an atmosphere of paranoia spreading since 9/11.

More information to participate.

My pictures and FACT pictures.

sk-interfaces is on view until March 30 and launches FACT’s Human Futures programme which includes 3 sections – My Body (SK-Interfaces), My Mind and My World, each one hosting a major exhibition, conference and research focus. You can follow its development through Human Futures blog.

Related: They make art not bioterrorism, Jens Hauser’s presentation in Aix en Provence (part 1 and 2.)

Situation Room, a project / prototype conceptualized and proposed / produced by hackitectura.net, is on view until March 17 at LABoral, an new exhibition, training and production centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries located in Gijon, Spain.

Situation rooms are places used in times of crisis to assess and monitor data for decision taking. These rooms are equipped with monitors and data boards to control everything from the Strait of Gibraltar to the nuclear fission processes in a nuclear power station or the life sustaining mechanisms on board the International Space Station. If i tell you that they are also called “control room” then all kinds of images from war, space and spies movies might come to your mind.

British Destroyer On-Board Glass Polar Plotting Board (via)

With the arrival of the Internet, a more open access to data collection and display technologies has enabled several experiences of Situation Rooms in civil society, with temporary media-labs mainly influenced by cybernetic ideas and free software.

Taking Asturias as a case study, Situation Room invites the public to participate in an open experiment-simulation of a situation room. The second goal of the project is to facilitate the production of common knowledge among artists, geographers, architects, biologists, economists, computer specialists, critics and the public, about the issues put forward.

I found the project so interesting that i asked the coordinator of the project, Pablo de Soto, if he had a few moments to answer my questions. In the meantime i realized that Pablo is a member of hackitectura.net, an activist group of architects, hackers and programmers, whose work i had been admiring for a couple of years. At the core of hackitectura.net are Sergio Moreno and José Pérez de Lama and Pablo. Their collaborative network undertakes practical and theoretical research into the emerging territories of information and communication technologies, new social networks and the traditional physical space.

Answers by both José Pérez de Lama aka Osfa and Pablo from hackitectura:

Situation Room. Image LABoral/Cárdenas

I actually discovered your work a few years ago at the festival Mal au Pixel in Paris where you gave a talk about Hackitectura. How does Situation Room builds upon the experience and projects Hackitectura.net have been developing since its creation? How does the project complete (or differs from) your previous works?

The project Situation Room is the distillation of the experiences made by hackitectura.net since 2003 in the design and implementation of several temporary media-labs: “Pure Data Beta Rave” in the abandoned AVE station in Seville, “Okupa Futura: Ciudad Disidente” in the Centro Cívico Federica Montseny in Corvera de Asturias and “La Multitud conectada”, a media-lab with satellite connection in La Rábida Huelva (2003), Fadaiat: freedom of movement / freedom of communication in both borders of the Strait of Gibraltar (2004 and 2005).

The Multitud Conectada (“Connected Multitude”) was a prototype for a networked public space, produced for a network of activists, artists and technicians. Using technologies such as the bi-directional satellite connection, the wifi (in its infancy at the time) or the streaming with free software, -with real time connections to México, Bogotá or France-, we created a space which was both local and global, digital and analog.

Dave Tarifa Psand pointing grid antenna to Tangier. No GPS device was used. Picture: osfa

In Fadaiat, which we developed in the framework of the Indymedia Estrecho network (an independent production platform and a bi-political production to which hackitectura actively participated), we developed the same concept but focused on the production of a cyborg geography (conception of spaces, social networks and electronic flux), which was located in a geopolitical node as peculiar and antagonistic as the frontier that separates Europe and Africa in the Gibraltar Strait. In Fadaiat, which held editions in 2004 and 2005, we had a distributed medialab, part of it was located in the Castillo de Tarifa (Spain) and the other in the Marshan, in Tánger (Morocco), linked between each other by wifi connection. Besides, this connection, set up by a network of technicians and activists from both parts of the Strait, was the first wifi connection ever made between the two continents, at least the first one managed by hackers and activists. We like to highlight how the link crossed a densely controlled and militarized space, a space with which we were trying to communicate in some way or another.

Planning of the wifi link, as sent to ITU Morocco for permission. Image:osfa

The SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior / Integrated System of External Surveillance), which had started to take ground in the area since 2002, constitutes the first attempt to fortify the frontier with electronic tools, and Fadaiat was conceived as a kind of critical mirror to it.

Media-lab Tangier. Daytime, fixing the link with Tarifa. Picture: hd_(((i))) bcn

More specifically Situation Room is the continuation of the temporary laboratory that hackitectura.net designed and implemented in Geografías Emergentes (“Emerging Geographies”, 2007), which took place near the nuclear power plant of Valdecaballeros, located in a Spanish region called Siberia Extremeña. Because of the social opposition, the power plant was put to a stop 25 years ago, before it even started functioning and since then it is abandoned, dominating a severe landscape made of steppes, like a post-nuclear ruin.

Valdecaballeros nuclear power plant (image)

Taking the challenge of the regional government which called for a development based on knowledge (we are talking about the first region in the world who chose to work with free software at an institutional level) and sustainability, we decided to simulate a takeover of the nuclear plant as a participatory lab in order to initiate a reflexion and come up with proposals regarding the re-use of the power plant in another economical and production context and from other subjects. The laboratory was located in the middle of the field, surrounded by sheep, but it was connected to the internet by a satellite antenna and equipped with computers and screening systems. A geodesic dome acted both as a shelter and as a screen for projections. Made of white textile, it worked from the inside as an immersive interface and from the exterior like a magic lantern in the middle of the night.

Geografías Emergentes, Geolab

The various events that took place in the lab (presentations, debates, workshops, performances) were broadcast live on the net and we also had remote participants via streaming.

An important element of Geografías Emergentes was the participation of young people from the area (a competition selected 10 projects to be implemented in the lab) but also of children and adults from Valdecaballeros who participated to workshop and festive events.

Situation Room, an attempt to combine the ideas of a media lab and media room, with practices of data-visualization, cartography and free streaming, aims to present previous experiences in a more artistic and institutional context.

Situation Room. Image Marcos Morilla. Courtesy of LABoral

Which kind of data are you going to monitor during these two months spent in Asturias?

We understand the Situation Room at LABoral, more as a simulation than an actual device to scientifically mine and process data. The main information that we have been showing and discussing at least in the first part of the project, has been the presentation of the concept itself, its origins and proliferating use by command and control powers, and the potentials to hack situation rooms in order to make them perform with other goals.

Situation rooms are on the one hand, devices connected to complex contexts, where processes are non-linear. In order to take decisions and act in these situations, the different agencies (military staff, governments, business, police…) need to continuously monitor reality and establish a permanent feedback loop between it and their actions.

The processing of sets of data extracted from complex systems needs new ways of processing and evaluation, which have to do with cartography and data visualization. On the other hand, situation rooms are only meaningful if we understand them as embedded in networks, which comprise at least two main areas, a sensors area (that captures data) and an actuators area, which allows for strategies and decisions to be performed.

Our ideas where to use Situation Room as a space and time to discuss these issues, and particularly the possibility of turning them into a “multitudinar” device, that is the possibility to use them to empower the action of social networks, rather than central powers. How could situation rooms enhance distributed control. How could they be used to generate socially useful knowledge and to increase coordination between social movements.

“Financial core,” Bureau d’études, World Monitoring Atlas (via)

One of the questions that we made ourselves is, then, what kind of data would such a situation room be interested in. In order to advance in this direction, we held a workshop with Bureau d’Etudes, the French team famous for their cartographies of capitalism, power and production. It seems somehow that before or beyond quantifying data, a situation room of this sort should produce different images of the system, that would enable other desires and goals. In this workshop we started studying different critical mapping projects, and after that participants – focusing on Asturias, the region where the workshop was happening -, made a list of possible mapping subjects (worked out of the ideas of nodal points, threats and opportunities). This allowed us to produce a preliminary map of the region, somehow a strategic map, that should guide future data mining – and could as well work as a communication and coordination tool.

Installation Cibersyn operations room (image)

The second workshop dealt with a project which we feel very closely connected to ours, which is Cybersyn. Cybersyn was a network developed in Chile between 1970 and 1973 under the socialist government of Salvador Allende (Cybersyn was presented in Transmediale, right after Situation Room). A very young team of Chilean techs collaborated with British cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer to develop a Chile-wide system to coordinate nationalized industries. The aim of the project, however, wasn’t to control factories and workers, but to regulate the network as a living organism, where autonomy of the different cells was compatible with the overall functioning of the organism. Of course, the right wing coup d’etat didn’t allow the project to be completed, but its promises are still of great appeal. One of the interests of this workshop was to realize the social potential of the concept – which astonishingly was designed almost simultaneously to Arpanet itself (1969). Rather than being afraid of control and technologies in general, we think that research and creativity should be applied to the social appropriation of them; we even think that the source of technological creativity, as Cybersyn shows, lies rather on social cooperation, and that is only later captured by the military or capitalism.

Situation Room. Image Julio Calvo. Courtesy of LABoral

Situation Room is a complex project which includes a series of workshops, a laboratory and the installation itself. What is the aim of the project? What do you hope to explore and learn with it?

We think one of our aims was to advance in the design of situation room that could be actually used in the context of social movements, for special events or for daily research, strategic planning and organizing. Somehow we understand that it should be rather a multiplicity interconnected of situation rooms, embedded in networks of “biopolitical labs” such as social centers and independent media and research groups. As we wrote in the presentation for the project, somehow anyone equipped with tv, Internet, mobile phone and computer, has a personal situation room at home, but we would like to go on researching how the combination of hacktivists medialabs, artists media rooms, multimedia communication, participatory cartography and emergent free software data mining and visualization technologies, could empower social action.

Situation Room, graphic from the first proposal

The presentation of the projects says that the public will be able to participate. How exactly can they get involved in the project?

In the first part of the event, we organized the two already mentioned workshops that were open to the public, and students in particular.

There was a small but intense participation, composed by artists, architects, techies and activists. In the opening sessions we had remote participants, from Barcelona and Malaga, whose images occupied one of the walls of the room. The sessions were streamed through GISS (a global free software network) making them available to anyone connected.

One of the results of the workshops was an interactive cartography of Asturias, based on meipimatic (a wikimapping platform developed by some Madrid friends). In the next weeks, meetings will be held with different local collectives, that are knowledgeable on particular issues such as ecology, labor, urbanism, etc, that we expect to join the mapping team. This groups will be invited as well to set up their temporary offices in the lab and use its resources.

Open tactical cartography of Asturias

The general public is also invited to contribute to the map.

Another way of rather automated participation is through rss feed. Feeds form relevant media, especially independent, are processed and permanently projected in several of the large screens in the lab, presenting a panorama of current issues in Asturias.

Eventually, there will be several workshops with children. Activities will include access to data bases, introduction to data visualization technologies and creation of data bases and maps to be visualized in the Situation Room. Children’s contributions would be incorporated as well to the Asturias meipimatic.

Thanks Pablo and osfa!

Situation Room. Image Marcos Morilla. Courtesy of LABoral

Situation Room is the winner of the first convocation of the LABjoven Experimenta Contest at LABoral in Gijon, Spain.

The talk i was looking forward to listen to during the Transmediale conference last week was Trevor Paglen‘s who was part of Session 4: Techno-Historical Collusions: The Making Of A Trojan Horse.

(Previously, in the same session: Eva Horn’s talk at Transmediale)

Paglen works at the border of art and research and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His artistic work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and other more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. He has published two books (Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (Amazon USA and UK) which documents the use by the CIA of modified commercial aircraft for extraordinary rendition; and I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Amazon USA and UK) about the secret world of military imagery and jargon revealed by patches from classified projects) and is currently preparing the third one (Blank Spots on a Map, 2008/09).

One day Paglen arrived at his office to find man standing in front of his door, looking with intensity at a picture hung outside of the office. At some point, the man tried to pick out the image out of its frame. Paglen intervenes and asks him what he think he’s doing. The guy then asks him “Do you know what that place is?” Starts a dialog where the man reveals that he used to be a pilot. He and his companions at the army were instructed that there were places in the desert where they would not be able to fire at all, where they could not land under any circumstance. One of these places was just called “The Box”. But one of the pilots ran out of gas and has no choice but land on “The Box.” A week later, the guy comes back. He wouldn’t say anything. “That place belongs to the Black World.” The black World, as military insiders call it, is the world of classified programs, projects, and places, whose outlines, even existence, are deeply-held secrets.

Tail Numbers/Gold Coast Terminal, Las Vegas, NV/Distance ~1 mile/5:27 pm

Paglen then showed us pages from the Department of Defense Budget Fiscal Year 2008. The document is publicly available but presents some puzzling numbers. For example, a whopping $ 12.3 million is allocated to toilets which, the document states, must provide soldiers with equipment 2 enhance their efficiency and efficacy.”

Paglen showed more images from a documents of classified strategic RDT&E programs. Some projects with mysterious names such as “Pilot Fish”, “Retract Juniper,” “Chalk Coral”, etc. receive huge budget but, unlike the toilets do not present any justification. Sometimes the sum allocated to a project does not appear at all, leaving blank spots in the budget. The National Security Agency has mostly blanks in its budget.

Code Names: Classified Military Programs Active Between 2001 and 2007

One of Paglen’s work inspired by the military budget is Code Names is a list of words, phrases, and terms that designate active military programs whose existence or purpose is classified.

So what happens with these “Selected Sites Associated with Classified Military Activity”? Money doesn’t disappear like that. Paglen calls them the “Black Dollars”. A number of places where these figures congeal are located in the South West of the country, more precisely in the desert. That area has a long history of being an unexplored region. In World War II, these places became useful to hide secret bases where airplanes were tested. Also the Manhattan Project in 1945.

Manhattan Project, “Jumbo” atomic device being positioned for “Trinity” test at Alamogordo, New Mexico (souce)

This Black World started to get more importance in the ’80s. The Black Budget became then a big part of the defense budget with President Reagan, a man fascinated by secret weapons.

Paglen showed more documents to prove his point.

The next issue he tackled was “How do we study something that doesn’t exist? Something that must stay hidden?”

Paglen turned to geography to make emerge a negative image of these black spots on maps. That’s where he compares his work to the one of an astronomer because he deals with dark matters, with phenomena which are detectable only through the influence they exercise on the visible world.

Open Hangar/Cactus Flats, NV/Distance ~18 miles/10:04 am

He uses similar instruments as astronomers’ to create his Limit Telephotography series.

Many of the military bases and installations hidden deep in deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land are so remote that a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to visually document these places, Paglen uses high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent. Because of the distance and the heat coming off the desert, these images have peculiar aesthetical qualities that sometimes evoke impressionists paintings rather than photography.

Limit-telephotography resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth.

Flight Tracking
CIA sets up civilian front companies to hide these “black” operations, making it look like a normal business. But even front companies must produce flight logs, registration papers, and other legal documents. And most of them publicly available. That’s the kind of data you check to know if a plane will land on time for example. Now how do you find front companies? Documents such as the Civil Aircraft Landing Permits lists the planes which are allowed to land on military landfills. These are companies you have never heard of. You can get a list of the planes these airlines own and from there track information about where they land and from where they fly.

Terminal Air

Terminal Air, a visualization system that Trevor Paglen developed together with the Institute for Applied Autonomy tracks the CIA aircrafts. You can register and get an email message when a CIA plane is coming to your city.

These companies leave other traces. They must have addresses. One of them lead Paglen to a law office which is weird for an aviation company. No one would answer his questions. Then there are signatures at the bottom of documents belonging to the companies. He deciphered the names and found individuals which, unlike the rest of us, leave no electronic trace: they have no credit history, no driver license, etc. They all have a single address which is a PO Box in Virginia. Paglen went there and discovered that the PO Box was used by hundreds and hundreds of names. It’s a long collection of ghosts, of fictional characters. Which makes sense as these people are in the business of making other people disappear.

Signature of a non-existing airline company member (image source)

Paglen also practices some Amateur Anthropology.

These people involved in secret activities have colleagues which are the only persons with whom they are allowed to talk about their jobs. They organize reunions and form bonds. They also give awards to each other but they can’t exactly say what this award is for. So someone would get an award for his or her “significant contribution in a remote location.”

One of Paglen’s slides showing the cryptic information of someone involved in one of the secret programs he’s investigating

Paglen is also into Amateur geo-spacial intelligence. He and his collaborators make maps of the world based on those flights.

He then reminded us of the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen who was abducted, flown to Afghanistan, interrogated and tortured by the CIA for several months in one of those Black Sites and then released without charge. The extrajudicial detention was apparently due to a mis-spelling of El-Masri’s name. When the CIA realized El-Masri was the wrong guy, they threw him on another plane and freed him in Albania.

Aerial view of Salt Pit (image)

It is believed that the jail were he was detained was a secret CIA detention center outside Kabul called the Salt Pit. For five months, El-Masri says, he was locked in a solitary cell in the Salt Pit and interrogated by Arabic-speaking inquisitors who asked him repeatedly if he was involved with the Sept. 11 hijackers, if he’d journeyed to Jalalabad on a false passport, if he hung out with Islamic extremists living in Germany (via).

Symbology.

NOYFB. Fabric patch, Edition of 50, 2006

Military have all sorts of patches, icons and insignia. They reveal anything that they do or are. These markers of identity and program heraldry begin to create a peculiar symbolic regime when they depict one’s affiliation with what defense-industry insiders call the “black world”.

The symbols and insignia shown in Paglen’s Symbology series provide a glimpse into how contemporary military units answer questions that have historically been the purview of mystery cults, secret societies, religions, and mystics: How does one represent that which, by definition, must not be represented?

Both the icons and words used on the patches are weird. “Alone and on the Prowl”, sometimes with inside jokes “Gustatus Similis Pullus” (Tastes Like Chicken); “Doing God’s works with other people’s money,” NOYFB (None of Your Fucking Business), etc.

You can see some of these patches until February at the Transmediale exhibition which runs until February 24 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.

Related: Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy; Tracking the Torture Taxis; The Captives.

Artist and activist Cat Mazza is the founder of microRevolt. This collective of “craftivists” develops projects which combine knitting with machines, and digital social networks to investigate and initiate discussion about sweatshop labour.

A 2007 Media Arts Fellow in New Media (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), Cat has exhibited her work and given workshops and lectures around the world. In 2005, she received a “Digital Communities” award at Ars Electronica for her project knitPro, an online tool that translates digital images into knit, crochet, needlepoint and cross-stitch patterns.

Her 2006 Turbulence Commission: Knitoscope Testimonies is the first web based video using “Knitoscope” software, an experimental program that translates digital video into a knitted animation. She is Assistant Professor of New Media as at UMass, Boston.

How and when did you start to be interested in anti-sweatshop issue?

In 2002 I moved to Maine after working for 3 years at Eyebeam (a New York based art and technology center), and was doing research in new media, women’s studies and globalization. That work led me to volunteer with a Bangor based organization called Peace through Inter-American Community Action (PICA). I met people active in the anti-sweatshop movement there, and that’s where it began for me.

Sweatshops scandals have received some press coverage over the past few years. And i suspect that you follow the issue more closely than most. Did you see the situation evolve for the better since you started to get interested in the issue?

I don’t know that labor exploitation in manufacturing global goods has changed in the last 6 years, but I do agree that there has been increased visibility of the crisis. This ultimately makes a difference. One thing I’ve witnessed grow in the United States (with some international allies) is a series of local groups networked into a coalition called Sweat Free Communities (SFC) who campaign for better trade and purchasing policies. There also have been some great films like Maquilapolis and China Blue that have helped raise awareness. And we should not underestimate the resurgence of craft and the subsequent alternative on-line micro-economies that have developed. So even if the working conditions have not improved, many consumer, activist, entrepreneurial and legislative change agents are finding ways to confront the problem.

Image from the movie China Blue: To avoid getting fined for falling asleep, Jasmine (17) and Liping (14) use clothespins that keep their eyes open.

What is the value of micro-revolting? Of the small acts of resistance that your work encourages? How significant can they be?

The concept of “micro revolt” is loosely inspired by the idea of molecular revolutions*. What if social change was not simply a consequence of governing or economic policies; and small, disconnected resistant acts overlapped to nudge along change?

MicroRevolt in many ways began as an experiment more than a conviction. These web-based projects did achieve networking craft hobbyists in a form of labor activism, but the efficacy or value is hard to measure.If it’s “revolutionary” to favor drastic economic or social reform, knitting could be an interesting place to begin. I was just reading this book where Noam Chomsky was asked about the significance of policy reform “tinkering” and he said this can be preliminary to large-scale structural change.

Why not? What is the political potential of craft and can it be an avenue for pleasure as well as organizing for social good? You could ask the same question of art.

* This winter I hope to have a podcast of a chapter of a book by this title.

The Nike Blanket Petition project started in 2003. How did it evolve, grow and what impact did it have?

The Nike Blanket Petition started with learning how to crochet. I was interested in the tradition of pre-industrial crafts, tacit knowledge, learning to make stuff with my grandmother. I then met up with a local craft group and they agreed to help. Gradually more and more people participated. It was on the microRevolt website that attracts a lot of traffic because of knitPro, a useful pattern freeware, so people learned about the project there. It went to craft and electronic arts festivals nationally and sometimes internationally. The project has been going on for years, but it has been this slow trickle of signatures, like a 1950’s mail art project or something. People often send a single square and occasionally I’ll get multiples from a Women’s Center or a knitting circle from Portugal, and encouraging notes like “Good luck with the revolt!”.

Hand-made petitions for Nike Blanket, 10.16.2004

People have participated from over 30 countries and every state and I’m still behind updating the data. It’s hard to measure the impact. My hope is that individuals who participated in the project have started a discussion in their circles and considered their own methods for activism.

Stitch for Senate invites knit hobbyists to craft helmet liners for every US Senator in an effort to encourage them to support the troops sent in Iraq by bringing them home. I first read about that project in March 2007. What is the outcome of SfS so far? Did you get any reaction from the Senators?

This is a very important year in the United States because of the presidential election, and 1/3 of the House of Senate seats will be campaigning as well. To get elected they will have to be bold about their position on our troops in Iraq, and the Stitch for Senate project is an attempt to engage people in discussion with their public officials about the war. There are some tenacious knitters out there willing to knit a helmet and make testimony. All of the participants support the troops; most of them are pro-peace (including some military moms). I’ve lived in New York State for 8 years and on the morning of 9/11 I was trying to walk over the Queensboro Bridge while the towers were in smoke… but I never supported this administration’s approach to this war, or my Senators (Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer) authorization of military force in Iraq. US Senators are required to respond to every letter they receive, and they’ll likely be glad to articulate their position. We are not mailing the helmets to the offices until we have 100 so we can send them all at once, with 100 people from all 50 states. I am hoping we can do this before the November election.

You participated to the Hackers and Haute Couture Heretics workshops in Istanbul last summer. Could you give us some details about what you’ve been developing over there?

Firstly, Istanbul is breathtaking. For me this was a really thrilling trip because the exhibit’s organizer Otto von Busch is so amazing. His writing is really interesting, and he is extremely skilled at designing. Most wonderful is his community based fashion projects like Dale Sko Hack and Merimetsan Alchemy – a fashion project in a mental health facility. I think you interviewed him about this. But also, he is a fashion theorist. What is that? You have to hear it in his words. I recommend his book Abstract Hacktivism. He had a very particular idea for this exhibit and I hope he writes about the outcome. The people he invited perhaps under the “craftivist” flag; all have very different practices and maybe even agendas. So that was interesting. It is unfortunate but I think that in some ways the intended project failed. We were supposed to collaborate with a Turkish high fashion brand called Vakko. Some of us were already skeptical and they ended up canceling after we each did an intensive design challenge. Instead, there were many fruitful workshops (Junky Styling, Counterfeit Crochet, Hacking Couture). What is special is just to have a public space where people can come in and learn and make, sew, knit, machine knit, etc.) Amazingly, this all took place in a gallery right next to a Nike Town store. The highlight for me was after four years, with a lot of help from Otto and the attendees; hundreds of the post-mailed squares were stitched into the border of Nike blanket. So it’s nearly finished. I also met beautiful Iranian sisters who took me on a ferry around the Bhosphorus.

Testimonies: Alex Tom, Chinese Progressive Association, San Francisco and Yannick Etienne, Batay Ouvriye, Haiti

What are you working on currently? Is there any upcoming public event in the microRevolt agenda?

From now until August my main focus is a new artwork – Knitoscope Sampler. I may have to put microRevolt reBlog to sleep for a little while and shift my web presence from labor to war because of the election and Stitch for Senate. Also on January 26, 3-5:00pm, “Crafting Protest” – Panel Discussion and Craft Reception at The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York City, NY. Moderator: Julia Bryan-Wilson, art historian and critic. Panel includes artists: Liz Collins, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cat Mazza, Allison Smith. February 20-23 in Dallas, Texas I’ll be participating in two events Social Fabrics and Gestures of Resistance as part of the CAA conference. Stitch for Senate helmets and video exhibits at the Museum of World Culture in Göteborg, Sweden opening January 17.

Now something more personal. I’ve always been fascinated by knitPro, , a program that translates digital images into knit, needlepoint, x-stitch and crochet patterns. However, i can’t knit and even if i could, the only moments when i picture myself knitting would be while i’m bored in the plane or at the airport. But they would probably confiscate my needles there.

Is there any service that would allow me to send a pattern to someone and get the shirt back nice and ready to be worn?

Not that I know of, but this could be a highly successful business. What about going to your local yarn store and asking? People that go and work at yarn stores are usually totally pro and up for commissions.

Or is there any place where one could buy one of those leg warmers featured on your blog or the little face mask. I have one and people keep asking me where they can buy one.

So far I haven’t been into selling the knitwear that I make. The logoknit series was made to bring attention to the branding of corporate monopolies that were sweatshop offenders and also to show what is possible with knitPro. I made two Mickey Face Masks that I donated to Turbulence.org. I was really glad you got it because the other one didn’t sell and I felt bad because it was a fundraiser. The Barbie Legwarmers I sold to Natalie Jeremijenko‘s daughter for her art collection. But that’s it. I’d rather organize uploaded knitPro patterns into a searchable database than make and sell knitwear. Plus this is an election year; must focus.

Is it totally silly of me to assume that most craftivists are women? Or is it more gender-balanced than i’d assume? Do you come to expect that most of the people who will engage with your project will be women? How much do you think that it matters as far as your own work is concerned?

Craftivism is a new term I think coined by Betsy Greer, of craftivism.com. I am not sure I understand what and if craftivism is yet, but it’s not gender specific. See: (menwhoknit.com). As far as my work is concerned, I have worked with mostly women but many men too. I just got the first balaclava from a male knitter from Federal Way, Washington who stitched for Senator Maria Cantwell and it’s wonderful because it’s his first knitting project with round needles. Also, I met my boyfriend because he needlepointed a series of pillows of Communist Heroes from South America.

So if one can’t (or just won’t) knit which kind of small acts of resistance do you recommend to people who want to protest against workshop labour?

1) Investigate your local Campaigns and see how you can help
USA: SweatFree.
Intl: Clean Clothes.

2) Vote with your dollar (Support sweat free labels, fair trade, worker owned co-ops, etc.)

3) Be sure to know about where your public officials stand on trade, petition and vote

Thanks Cat!

Logoknitting, a tactic that uses knitPro to knit logos of well known sweatshop offenders as a way to raise a discussion on how advertising, labor, production and consumption relate