Deep North (rough notes, still editing)

Climate change as paradigm shift

It’s Saturday afternoon. I’m in my studio in Oslo and I’m supposed to be doing some accounting. I have dropped in to the live stream from the auditorium at Transmediale in Berlin – a panel debate about climate change – and I become more occupied with what’s going on there than what I’m supposed to be doing here.

There is a woman speaking, her name is Alice Miceli.

I’m not exactly sure what she is talking about at this point,  but she is describing how to approach the invisibility visually. How to penetrate space in a specific way. To create images of the zones and spaces you that cannot see. She is talking about Chernobyl as a turning point, an accident in time. The melt down at Chernobyl happened local in space, global in time. Comparing it with 09.11, or other accidental scenarios where we see the consequences, we don’t see the victims right away. We won’t even see them all before we die.

Who is to blame?
Is it the director of the power station?
Who is responsible for balance?
It is a moral question.
If you don’t know who your enemy is, how can you begin to understand the situation.
Creating the vocabulary by the very means of the vocabulary, of the matter of radiation, to tell the story.

A question from the audience …..

– Are you actually using the local radiation, auto radiography?

Yes. A direct imprint with a special kind of film, working with the actual radiation of the zone to reproduce life sized images.

– What kind of images are you getting from the process? An image from a tree/house, what would it be like in the end?

We had no clue of what these images would look like. In the middle of the process the results are mimetic in relation to the source, but you can’t tell what the source is like.

– The matter – the intangible matter, what does it look like.

The combination has many aspects. You can see that in the pictures themselves

(Unfortunately, I can’t see the pictures on the stream)

More questions to the panel (Endre Kiss, Victor Nemchinov, Rob van Kranenburg, Alice Miceli)

– What do you mean by multitudes?

(Dr Victor Nemichov) We want to see the horror images, we can only see the broken windows, the dead trees – how to visualize that in a non binary way? I would go to Chernobyl and take pictures of the cemeteries of the men who died, whose children never lived ………….

(Professor Endre Kiss on multitudes ….) Multitudes want to indulge rather than conform. It is our option as to whether we constrain ourselves or not. On a global level it means compassion, communications and trying to come to grips with the dangers around us. The idea is too young to use practically (or something along those lines …. )

(Kiss has earlier described 3 scenarios for the future:

I. apocalyptic scenario
2. politics, arctic commission, immigration (environmental)- by functional/rationalist means.
3. optimistic scenario – to replay the 20th century (lit. of 1910-12 discovery of north pole). The earth is already discovered, but through this scenario, we can gain our north pole – discover it again.)

(Someone from the panel comments) Multitude is a creative thing – an eagle eyed view, seeing such long territory. To think that an idea or a word that is not ready to be used is quite a difficult concept. To try to get this long view back in the network  – where twitter is an example of the opposite, I’m doing this that, this, that etc, and a compulsive disorder in which young people are living in now.

(Endre Kiss) Yes. It creates stereotypical identities, a non holistic version of yourself, small chips are components that collide. Stereotypical components of one’s self. A stereo vision.

This Optimistic Mode, creativity, not the notions of “creative industries”, how can it work?

(Endre Kiss) To connect with historical events,  the discovery of the north pole, the idea that we have no missions, etc, to visit Russian literature – a middle European common place, to replay the 20th Century – a philosophical replay.

I don’t think it will be a reality, but the possibility is still there.

The session ends. i move to the salon.

IN THE SALON (workshop session)
Dominque Malaquais, Eléonore Hellio, Dicoco Boketshu and jaromil are discussing Critical Consumer Practice

Jaromil is talking about the use coltan in mobile phones, and reflecting about the implications of using these minerals, 25% of it which is mined in the Congo. This is a territorial issue that I haven’t really thought about in relation to my own project, being more concerned with bandwidth territories. Concerned with the matter of the immaterial I have forgotten it. I am glad that it is brought to attention. He is calling for actions to turn off mobile phones, computers, to stop supporting the death market – payment with arms, etc.

Some snippets from the dialogues …..

Sony claims that they are not using tantalum (chemical derived from coltan) – how can they know that they are not using these things? With a market is driven by death, there should be a world wide tax on coltan to disarm the people in the Congo. The drug market is only profitable if it is illegal. The same with coltan.

The rest goes too fast to transcribe …….

Now there is a performance by Mowoso, transmitted live from Kinshasa via Skype. Some people at Transmediale are complaining about the video transmission resolution. There is no 2 way communication with the Mowosos artists  – a typical remote performance problem. How to synchronize the clocks and keep all channels open – that is the question.

Miles away

far apart

Fathoms under

worlds apart

Hours beyond

seconds away

centuries yonder

miles under

time over

A part apart

And right now, a google search produces a message telling me that going to the search results may damage my computer …. is this a coincidence?

And then …….

End of transmission ……..

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