Hasta La Creative!

The very lazy (we meet up once a year) but nevertheless always exciting dorkbot berlin is having another gig on January 28, 2008 at c-base. It’s one night before the opening of the Transmediale festival. If you live in Berlin or just hit the town for Transmediale and if you want to show off your projects, do let us know by droping an email to sedlag at snafu dot de.

Somewhat unrelated but it feels so weird now to write a post which will have less than 1290 lines that i’m cramming another piece of information here. The paper mecca of design addicts, ICON magazine, had the bad idea to invite me to be their guest editor. I invaded the pages at my disposals and gave them a theme: activism. After that everything went smoothly, i asked the 3 persons i admire the most to contribute to the issue with a text that explains readers how they can recreate at home one of their activist projects: there’s guerrilla architect Santiago Cirugeda, fashion renegade Otto von Busch and finally Head of the Environmental Health Clinic Natalie Jeremijenko who teamed up with Debra Solomon to give you an exclusive page of their (hopefully upcoming) InterSpecies Cookbook. I haven’t seen the magazine yet but i’m hoping that their ideas will shake up a bit the glossy surface of the design world.

Image: Otto von Busch. Photo by Jens Klevje

Yes, Etech, that O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Earlier this year i met Brady Forrest in Berlin and when he asked to be part of the jury selecting the projects i was everything but enthusiastic, even if he promised that the 2008 edition would be different. Then i saw that i’d be in good company: Alex Steffen from World Changing, Cory Doctorow and David Pescovitz from Boingboing, artist and curator Kati London, etc. We received some really good papers and i’m the first one to admit that i’d never hoped that the programme could be so stimulating. Anyway, now that the papers have all been selected, Brady, Kati London and i are looking for art projects. They will be part of an Etech art fair which will take place during the conference in San Diego on March 3-6, 2008.

The theme of the art exhibition is AWARENESS. Please drop me a line at reg at wmmna dot com if any of you or any of your friends has a project that addresses the way we can unveil what surrounds us and is not immediately visible, from electromagnetic waves to carbon footprint, from corporate activities to genetic information, from social network discrepancies to pollution.

Having rapped for well over 8 years, hip hop was and still is a pretty strong part of my life and I’ll probably never get over my taste for it, although regretably, hip hop is seen by many as only a world full of guns, luxury, women treated as sexual objects and an exponentially excesive macho-like attitude.
 
So in the rap game, if before it was gold, nowadays it’s all about diamonds. Those little carbon polygons practically move the world and it’s virtually impossible to find yourself a rapper without some bling-bling of their own.
 
However, we only seem to be seeing the prettier side of things. Polished chains, the rings, the grills, the pimp cups, etc. But… Where do the diamonds come from? What processes, what sacrifices are being made in other places so that we can all go blind from the jewels on the latest hot rapper on tv?.
 
That’s what Bling tries to tell us. A documentary narrating the journey of 5 world-claimed rappers to the place where most diamonds are being extracted: Sierra Leone.
 
Jadakiss, Tego Calderón, Paul Wall, Raekwon y Kanye West travel to the african country to realize that the price to be paid is even greater than the value of the diamonds.
 
A raw, real documentary that shows just how ironic things can be in the world some times.
 
Link:Bling.

Exactly one week ago, Pablo Coatts, the mind behind spanish-speaking e-zine OblongoMag asked Victor Fernández, Claudio Araos and who’s writing to become a part of the e-zine’s regular staff.
 
With great enthusiasm we accepted the challenge and today finally, after a lot of work we’ve released to the public OblongoMag’s official website, the blog, and issue number 1 of the electronic magazine.
 
You can download issue number 0 as well as the all new issue number 1, and without a doubt I leave you an invitation to check out the website I mounted entirely from the ground up and that has me really quite satisfied.
 
I’d enormously appreciate any kind of feedback on the e-zine, the website or the overall content.
 
Greetings to all of you wandering around here.