Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin continue
Can’t believe how late i am in publishing these notes about the Transmediale exhibition. I used to be a young, dynamic and super fast blogger, but that was a long time ago.
Although i always chose to focus on the good side of exhibitions and other events, i rarely have the opportunity to be so genuinely and totally enthusiastic about a festival. This was the media art festival i was dreaming of: a strong concept, an exhibition that does not confuse new media art with circus of interactivity and electro-gadgets for grown-ups, a conference that calls in so many inspiring artists, activists and researchers.
The theme? Conspire. How could you resist that one? While doing some research on conspiracy theories i passed from the expected to the utterly ridiculous (with a few nuggets in the middle). Conspiracy theories spread faster than ever with a little help of the internet and other communication technologies, but more importantly there is no doubt that we are definitely living an era where suspicion (or should i say paranoia?) reigns supreme.
Matt O’Dell, New Worship, image courtesy galerie Schleicher+Lange, Paris
“Conspiracy is the ‘condition’ of our times,” told me Stephen Kovats, the Director of the festival. “When we consider information and network culture, when we look at the questions arising from the relationships between politics and culture particularly online … the loss of authorship – or perhaps authority or belief in universal truths … the weaving of narrative together with speculation and expanding the results at light speed, where anybody anyplace can become an expert or authority on any issue … that’s where the stuff of conspiracy is born. With transmediale, we were interested in exploring what this ‘condition’ in the era of digital mobility as a strategy, emotion, aesthetic, cultural state of being or landscape is.
One of the best moment of the festival for me was PN (Power Noise), a electrifying performance by Elpueblodechina and Zosen who turned the data grabbed from Bureau d’Etudes‘ Bohemian Map into noise.
The Bohemian Map maps the connections and sphere of influence of some 2000 members of the Bohemian Grove, the high-profile annual Sonoma retreat of the Bohemian Club, a group that counts some of the most powerful men in the world. The club has counted every Republican president since Herbert Hoover as a member. Based in Paris, the Bureau d’Etudes group is engaged in the mapping of contemporary power relations at the institutional and international level.
Breakfast at Owls Nest Camp, Bohemian Grove, July 23, 1967 (image)
Bureau d’Etudes (whose work i’ve been admiring for years even if i’ve never written about them so far, shame on me!) was participating to the Transmediale exhibition with one of their latest projects, the Laboratory Planet. While so far they were producing gorgeous large-scale posters that visualize structures of power and ownership which usually remains invisible, this project uses google maps to reveal the laboratory for experimentation that our planet has become. After the end of WW2, the Earth, along with all its living inhabitants, have become a huge site for all kinds of experimentations.
The development of convergent technologies (bio-, nano-, cogno-, info-, robo-, sociotech) is the magic circle in which biological and mechanical species emerge
from the laboratory and from new periodic tables. Much of this research is today carried
out in secret. That is why an understanding of the present itself remains determined by the limited insight that we can have concerning information which is itself filtered or orchestrated. How can we speak of the present ? How can we know where we are or understand the situation we find ourselves in ?
Laboratory Planet aims to be a data base which would give us both a broad vision of the phenomenon, but also a local one as you can check the map and see what is happening in your neighbourhood. It’s also an instrument that calls for the collaboration of the public to enrich its content.
More details in the PDF of the project.
The exhibition, guest-curated by NataÅ¡a PetreÅ¡in-Bachelez, requests some effort from the visitor. Nothing is right here right now, nothing comes to you easily, and even if you visit it equipped with the leaflet that describes each work, there are still a number of questions that you’ll have to investigate by yourself if you want an answer. This way of experiencing the projects fits perfectly the mysterious streak of the exhibition theme.
The show is organized around several “thematic constructs”, each of them explores a different facet of notions such as conspiratorial truths, bio-organic systems and twisted realities.
Back to the theories of conspiracy with Christoph Keller‘s project Chemtrails.
The Chemtrail conspiracy theory claims that some trails left behind jet aircraft are different in appearance and quality from those of normal contrails, may be composed of harmful chemicals, and are being deliberately produced, and covered up by the government. These unusual trails are referred to as “chemtrails”. Some researchers believe that a chemical and/ or biological agent of some sort is being released. The term “chemtrail” does not refer to common forms of aerial dumping – it specifically refers to systematic, high-altitude dumping of unknown substances for undisclosed purposes, resulting in the appearance of these unusual contrails.
Photo: Jonathan Gröger
Keller’s work includes a video and a collection of photos taken by amateurs. Chemtrails uses the mysterious phenomenon to reflect on superstition and paranoia in the USA.
Wonder Beirut #1, Greetings from Beirut, 1998-2007
The first part of Wonder Beirut, by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, tells the story of a pyromaniac Lebanese photographer named Abdallah Farah.
Wonder Beirut #21, Beaches in Beirut, 1998-2007
In 1968 and 1969 Farah took photos of the capital for the Beirut tourist authority intended to promote the city. The resulting postcards depicted an idealized Lebanon in the 1960s. The postcards are still on sale nowadays , although most of the places they represent were destroyed during the Lebanese civil war.
Latent Images, 1998-2007
In the autumn of 1975, Farah started damaging the negatives of his postcards, burning them according to the destruction of the buildings he saw disappearing because of bombings and street battles.
The “Wonder Beirut” project shows the results of Farahs photographical and pyromaniacal work. Part of the project are also the notes of Farah documenting the photographs which he never developed because of the lack of fixative and photographic paper during the war years. By publishing and distributing these images, the artists try to fight the trend which puts the Lebanese civil war between brackets and includes the Lebanese conflict only marginally in the contemporary history. But is this postcard story a fact or a fiction? (more images.)
The story of Be Prepared! Tiger!, a project by Knowbotic Research in collaboration with Peter Sandbichler, starts with the discovery on the internet of a propaganda video by the Tamil liberation army which shows the glorification of a speedboat that was supposedly financed by North Korea. The boat is deliberately likened to the American F 117 stealth bomber, a myth of invisibility and invincibility. The artists gathered information inside different networks and through private contacts in order to re-engineer and rebuild the boat.
The boat is mysterious in its background, form and tests have shown that it remains invisible for radar systems. Yet, the boat can be seen with the naked eye, it is functional, and it is even a marketable good (the artists put it for sale on various websites.)
With their project, the artists play on the dialectics of visibility and invisibility present in many of our modern technologies, it stands for the ruses and tactics used to escape from the geo positioning and surveillance technologies of the 21st century.
Also part of the Transmediale exhibition: Chernobyl Project – Images of the Invisible, Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime, Symbology.
To amuse the crowd on their way to the restaurant, the absorbing Standard Time by Datenstrudel. A 24h clock/video showing 70 workers building somewhere in Berlin and “in real time” a wooden 4 x 12 m “digital” time display: a work that involves 1611 changes within 24 hour period.
Photo Jonathan Gröger
The spectator looking at Standard Time does not only see the time, but also people tirelessly constructing it. Video.
And on the way from the restaurant to the bar…
5VOLTCORE‘s knife.hand.chop.bot uses a knife to s(t)imulate the test of courage – a kind of game known as “Five Finger Fillet”. The User puts his/her hand into the Machine and pushes the button. The knife starts to hit the space between the fingers, first slowly then continually getting faster. A sensor guides the Machine so it “knows” where to hit.
Electric contacts are activated as soon as the first “nervous sweat” is detected on the hand, the sweat turns the skin into a conductor. Disturbed by the electric current that is now transmitted via the skin, the computer changes behaviour: sounds are generated by the closure of the contacts (circuit bending) that can either be interpreted as warning or act as an additional source of stress. On the other hand, they can have an effect on the position of the knife which is controlled by the computer and thereby hurt the potential perpetrator of the disturbance.
All my images are online.
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.
Today, as part of The Bilderberg’s Future_Brunch 101 salon at Transmediale, Francis Hunger gave a presentation about The Setun Conspiracy which received an Honorary Mention last night at the Transmediale ceremony (details about the winning projects in this press release PDF.)
And for whatever this is worth, it was my favourite work among the nominees…
The SETUN computer was developed in 1958 by Nikolai Brusentsov and his team at the Moscow State University. SETUN is based on ternary logic (-1, 0, 1), which distinguishes it completely from the usually binary operating computers of the present and the past. While the binary logic just allows two states yes (1) | no (0), the ternary logic has three different logical states: yes (1) | no (-1) | both or maybe (0). Western computer scientists tried to create such a ternary computer in the following years but never succeeded.
“Setun” trinary computer developed at Moscow University (image)
Francis Hunger’s work consists of several elements: the archive research collected since 2003, representation of the results in form of an office since 2005 and a book with essays and interviews, which is is just out from the printer*.
Installation view
The installation puts visitor in an office situation with a waiting line of rope and stanchions that lead to a cardboard office, reminding the high security places where human behaviour gets directed. The waiting line are meant to have visitors experience the whole space, getting to watch 2 images projected on the wall (one of the computer, another one of the team who developed it) and read the list of rules that instructs their behaviour: people are allowed to ask questions only, not to make comments; they should access from the right side; they should keep a discretion distance since it is an individual session with only one or maximum two persons allowed to come near the performer at the time. Any visitor who would not respect the rules will be dismissed.
It is both a “discipline and punishment” situation but also a playful one.
After having done extensive research about Setun (exchanging emails with Nikolai Brusentsov, extensive readings and research for documents written about the computer, etc.), Francis’ concern was “What is the best way to distribute knowledge?” A text could of course transmit the knowledge but wouldn’t produce the same situation, that level of interactivity. Throughout the “interactive” performance Hunger is the only one who has the knowledge. If people ask the right questions they might discover whether the Setun conspiracy is a fact or a fiction.
Hunger than read a text that has influenced a lot his ideas about interactivity. It is a statement that Alexei Shulgin wrote11 years ago and which addresses the question of interactive art:
Looking at very popular media art form such as ‘interactive installation’ I always wonder how people (viewers) are excited about this new way of manipulation on them. It seems that manipulation is the only form of communication they know and can appreciate. They are happily following very few options given to them by artists: press left or right button, jump or sit. Their manipulators artists feel that and are using seduces of newest technologies (future now!) to involve people in their pseudo-interactive games obviously based on banal will for power. But what nice words you can hear around it: interaction, interface for self-expression, artificial intelligence, communication even. So, emergence of media art is characterised by transition from representation to manipulation.
The Setun was what was called at the time an “electronic calculation machine”. For Nikolai Brusentsov, the ternary system was the most logical solution. It also turned up that it allowed to build the machine using less units and it was much more reliable than other computers made at the time. 50 copies were manufactured which, again, was quite an achievement for the time. It was used for agricultural calculation, nuclear power plants, for teaching programming, etc.
Here’s some more info found on the Soviet Computing website: Unfortunately, after the Setun-70 project, Brusentsov’s lab was relocated from the Computer Center at Moscow University to a windowless attic in a student dormitory and was deprived of any serious support. The new university rector considered computer design a pseudo-science. Brusentsov’s original Setun computer, an experimental prototype that had faithfully worked for seventeen years, was barbarically destroyed and carted off to the dump. Brusentsov’s laboratory coworkers took the Setun-70 to their attic laboratory and used it as a basis for developing the Master Work Station – an educational computer system.
To this day, Brusentsov maintains that the trinary system is superior to binary.
The artist is actually not happy with the title of his work. The word conspiracy evokes two ideas, it also evokes the difference between telling History and telling a story. There are conspiracies that exists. For example, the conspiracy against President Allende in 73 which is now sustained by well-recognized facts and sources which can be named. And then there is conspiracy that supports ideologies and simplifies world views. In the performance, the word “conspiracy” is used to get people interested in the work.
One year before Setun, on October 4, 1957 Sputnik satellite went up which triggered the “Sputnik Shock” in the US. They suddenly getting interested and preoccupied by this success of Russian technology. The conspiracy that Hunger constructed was that the Russians didn’t want to show the Setun computer but the US tracked down and found a traitor ready to talk to them about the computer.
More info about the book:
*SETUN. An Inquiry into the Soviet Ternary Computer. Eine Recherche über den Sowjetischen Ternärcomputer. Institut für Buchkunst Leipzig. German/ Englisch, ISBN 3-932865-48-0
The work deals with the production and representation of knowledge, the historical and ideological aspects of technological development, and it aims to create an understanding of the intertwining of current technological and social developments using a historical perspective. The book makes original Russian sources available in English and German language and is accompanied by an original essay investigating into the relations between the “communist” Easts’ and capitalist Wests’ technological development. While the book aimes to provide a basis for further research, the artistic work tries to involve visitor and artist into what can not be expressed within the realm of theoretical discourse.
I am quite enthusiastic about this year’s edition of Transmediale. The theme was Conspire and as such it attempted to enter the increasingly prevalent yet ambiguous worlds of network induced narratives, cryptic environments and speculative inquiry. As far as i can tell (i missed the three first days of the festival), the festival delivered its promises.
Here are the notes i took during the talk of Eva Horn who was part of Session 4: Techno-Historical Collusions: The Making Of A Trojan Horse. This session investigated the way politics, narrative, technology and belief systems collude.
From left to right: moderator: Florian Cramer. Speakers Eva Horn, Trevor Paglen, Pierre Lagrange and brespondent: Konrad Becker
Eva Horn is a professor of German Literature at the University of Basel. Her research focuses on literature and war in the twentieth century. She has recently finished a manuscript titled The Secret War: Espionage, Treason and Modern Literature (in German). She is the author of “Knowing the Enemy: The Epistemology of Secret Intelligence” (Grey Room).
In her talk, Eva Horn analyzed conspiracy theories that have emerged after 9/11 as an example of a political discourse in the internet.
Unlike the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the 9/11 tragedy didn’t appear at first sight as a conspiracy. Several other explanations were proposed on the first few days which followed 9/11.
She quote President Bush, in a talk to the United Nations, urged people to reject conspiracy theories:
Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty.
The main catch phrase in the discourse about the perpetrators of 9/11 is the term “Network(s)”. Another quote from the National Security Strategy offices:
Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us.
This text emphasizes the cheapness of this kind of strategy. It also blurs the line between individual and political acts. 9/11 here is about networks. Invisible, latent networks become all of a sudden visible.
Mathias Bröckers‘s work “The WTC Conspiracy” tries to list facts that do not agree with the official version of the event. It has been translated into english only very recently. Can’t find any trace of it
History Commons is an interactive timeline projects everyone can contribute to by adding facts (not opinions) relevant to the 9/11 events. The website provides users with detailed information about and around 9/11. Minute by minute. It also engages with the roads that led to 9/11. The aim is not to try and sell any coherent truth but rather to raise questions and point out incoherences in the official version. The timeline is not complete but provides an open source material that gives readers an idea of how complex the structure of politics is. The time line does not identify a clear and simple cause of the events, it doesn’t point to precise alliances with a neat cut between friends and enemies, there is no well-defined causes that lead to conclusions. Instead it demonstrates the hypercomplexity one has to face when trying to understand 9/11.
USA. New York City. September 11th, 2001. As people work around him, a minister stands amid the wreckage of the World Trade Center, seemingly dazed from the events of the day. © Larry Towell/Magnum Photos
Horn then showed an extract of the movie Loose Change which, unlike the timeline, has a narrative and a view on what the “truth” is in this context.
The documentary film, made by film students using recycled footage, claims that 9/11 was a mock terrorist attack and that the events had in fact been orchestrated by the United States government, and bases these claims on perceived anomalies in the historical record of the attacks.
Loose Change 2nd Edition Online Version (Google Video):
For Horn, conspiracy theories are a way to deal with the impenetrable complexity and connectivity of politics and other factors. When dealing with high complexity we have to recognize our loss of control: we can’t name the culprit anymore, we loose clear distinctions between friends and enemies, etc. Theories allow you to get back to a sense of control behind what happened. The idea that US secret services couldn’t prevent the event looks too much like a loss of control. But with a theory such as the one exposed in Loose Change”, we don’t lose control over just “10 Arabs in a cave”. This sort of political discourse negates global complexity and connectivity.
We have to abandon the claim to absolute truth.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
