Hasta La Creative!

The largest part of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals we take go through our bodies and eventually end up in waste water. As water and waste treatment plants haven’t been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water, based on the food and drugs we ingest.

Tuur van Balen, one of the graduates of Design Interactions at the RCA, decided to explore this issue in a project which imho had the perfect balance between speculation and solid anchorage into reality.

The way people live and behave in each zone of London can be reflected in the quality of the tap water. Tap water in London Notting Hill very probably benefits from the high density of organic shops found in the area. Tap water in the city of London is presumably enhanced with all kinds of stimulants, from caffeine-rich drinks to cocaine. Golders Green which houses an important Jewish community can be expected to ‘produce’ a very fertile water due to the low concentration of people taking anti-conception pills.

Back in January, at the opening of the department work in progress show, Tuur presented My City = My Body, the first chapter of this research into future biological interactions with the city and more precisely into how the increasing understanding of our DNA and the rise of bio-technologies will change the way we interact with each other and our urban environment. He offered tap water to the visitors of the show and asked them to donate a urine sample along with their postcode. The samples, their biological information and postcodes were then added to a map of London which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes.

The next step is a website which helps London inhabitants describe, speculate on, map and share what they think are the unique characteristics of their tap water. The map thus created reveals potential local city-body ecologies, or biotopes. The system will also generate a custom-made label which you can download if you want to sell your own tap water.

Filling the bottles in the City…

That’s what the designer did. He went to the hip and organic-addicts frequented Broadway market in Hackney to set up a stall, offer people to “buy” bottles of tap waters, branded with the London area they came from and engage in a discussion about the possibility of new urban biotopes.

selling tap water on Broadway Market from Tuur Van Balen on Vimeo.

You can find various websites which details the quality of various tap waters. But most of the systems employed to analyze water do not check for say, anti-depressant substances or cocaine. What if biotechnology could provide us with cheap detectors?

With the help of bioengineer James Chappell, Imperial College, Tuur developed the concept for a Urban Biogeography tool. The instrument would enable anyone to study the distribution of urban biodiversity over space and time by monitoring sewage. With the tool, a tiny amount of sewage can be pumped up and scaned for different pharmaceutical and chemical traces, without having to lift a manhole cover.

Using synthetic biology and in particular the biobricks tools, bacteria are programmed to become cheap biosensors. The bacteria-sensors, housed in the small transparent compartments, change colour when oestrogen, antibiotics, Viagra or Prozac are detected in the water. Since synthetic biology is both open source and modular, this instrument can be redesigned to detect other chemicals by any Urban Biogeographer, even amateurs as the technology is becoming increasingly accessible. The set of data thus obtained can be used to influence healthcare or property prices in the area, that of course would be the ideal scenario…

All images courtesy of Tuur van Balen.

Related: 24c3: Programming DNA – A 2-bit language for engineering biology, Designer Microbes.

While i was at LABoral visiting the Homo Ludens Ludens exhibition, i got to live the uncanny experience of being bossed around by wooden boxes that deliver Situation(ist) quotes, order me to bring them to their friends (which were also boxy and made of wood), carry them upstairs within 30 seconds, and treat them like princesses. I felt like a puppet in the hands of Objects of Desire, the latest game of Ludic Society. This international association of artists, game practitioners and theorists seek to provoke a new artistic re/search discipline, best addressed as ‘ludics’ (cf. some of their previous works: Tagged City Play for Real Players in Real Cities and The Pong Dress).

Objects of Desire is a Neo-Situationist’s walk in the company of capricious spimes through an invisible city of electromagnetic waves. The play-map constitutes of real names of wireless access points, found during a “WIFI-Sniff” through the city of Gijon. Names of actual urban WIFI zones (my favourite was called Familia Alvarez) are mapped and tagged like street-names in the exhibition space while aether waves with the same subjective names are also superimposed on the arts space, as playground.

Instead of writing down what the game is about, i’ll just send you to the video of the game . It clearly explains the developments, mechanics and rules of the game. And because the plot unfolds in sunny Gijon and LABoral, you’ll also get an idea of what both the city and the art center are like.

I asked Ludite Margarete Jahrmann (who developed the game together with Fleshgordo, imonym, Rene Bauer,
and MosMaxHax) to give us more details about their game:

How does the game work technically? Does it use rfid?

Yes, each object is tagged with a RFID tag. Our self-built LS-Gerät can sniff each box and based on the RFID number and cabbalistic numerology rules the object’s desire will be appointed.

On the other side, we hide a couple of WIFI network clouds (some openWRT hacked linksys routers) in the exhibition space by which each player is located through the built-in WIFI function of Nintendo DS. The clouds are named and geographically located like access points in Gijon-city.

Basically, it is a very speculative motion tracking, like a triangulation with cell phones, virtual and real. Anyhow we used them as an inverse surveillance for each player. Each move is logged 😉

The Ludic extensions of SM (standard model) game consoles are extremely beautiful. How exactly do you craft them? Does each shape correspond to a particular function?

They were all DIY self-built and designed in our LSCV (Ludic Society Chapter Vienna). The design is conceptually connected to our ideas of a PCB – ‘Pata Circuit Boards – which are standing for Imaginary Machines and Devices of Wonder (read more about in issue#1 of LS magazine).

Each LS-Reader is equipped with a voltage booster, a Wunschmaschine, not only referring to our concept but also in Real by literally lifting the supply voltage up from 3 to 5 Volts. Each shape corresponds to a different conceptual starting point. The little tree refreshes the EM (electromagnetic) aether while the “Blitz” refers to our notion of BlitzPlay (Urban Guerrilla Street Play Tactics – TAZ). The circular shaped PCB is a sequel of our LudicWheel, a living machine, built for playing the game- and the reality engine either-way.

What is the story or motivation behind the objects’ stories and desires?

Playtarget: inverse surveillance by mobile toy-gadgetry…walks between WIFI and RFID waves-.. the city waves in Gijon – site specific metaphors…
Some parables between the electromagnetic waves of a city and the waves of the sea…

Then about the inverse control of objects by subjects – a domination and surveillance PlaySurVeillance 😉 by “Subjectivated” objects… with eeach RFID tag, the internet of
things gains more power. The boxes are just placeholder for any commodity or tagged object…

Based on what you could observe while you were in Gijon, how did people react to the uncanny experience of being bossed around by wooden boxes?

It was funny to watch people how exciting they became by obeying some very simple instructions, just for the sake of getting some points on a virtual screen. Some were lying on the floor (even the curator Erich Berger), standing against the wall for a minute or shouting out loud.

But with each game, it depends on the *player’s obedience* to the rules.

The readers are new bachelor machines to extend the Standard model game
console.

Originally we (in that case me and 3 more Ludic Society members – PM ONG, Fleshgordo and imonym in conjunction with marguerite charmante) thought about making a game through the whole exhibition- with objects tagged – which have certain behaviours — the visitors shall bring them to their “natural born home” of the Objects (OOH) which is stored in the RFID tag of the object…), we wanted to further develop Ludic Society’s urban games into a white cube test area.

Thanks Margarete!

Previous posts about the exhibition in LABoral: Homo Ludens Ludens – Play in contemporary culture and society, the Art of War.

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.

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.