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The 2009 edition of Transmediale has been by very far the gloomiest i've ever lived. Nothing to do with the quality of the programme, the works selected for the exhibition or anything that could be blamed on the organization. I just didn't manage to make it to Berlin until the last day of the festival. Transmediale was the event where, 5 years ago, i discovered new media art, it's the place where i meet the new media art crowd of Europe, that's where we talk, exchange views about the new direction taken by each edition, disagree and sometimes change our minds. Transmediale is not the biggest new media art festival but, in my experience, it's the one where the most meaningful discussions take place. So here i was on a Sunday, last day of the festival, arriving at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, looking for friends who had all vanished from the premise and feeling immensely stupid. The conference was over, the artists were busy enjoying their last day in the city before dismounting their installation and because my mind was still completely wrapped up in the workshop i had just left, over there in sunny Alicante, i felt disconnected. I did my duty, i visited the exhibition, walked through some presentations and left for some new adventures.
Then something happened. You know when you go and see a movie, walk out unconvinced but over time that movie grows on you and you catch yourself talking about with other people? Something similar happened with Transmediale. I just flipped through my notes, photos and the catalogue and realized that that damn Sunday had to be re-appraised.
This year's exhibition, titled, Survival and Utopia: Visions of Balance in Transformation, was all about climate change, its symptoms, contexts and possible outcome. And because Transmediale is a festival about new media art the delicate and sometimes absurd relationship between nature and technology was at the heart of the reflection. I've seen a fair number of exhibitions that engaged with a similar theme over the past few years. Issues of climate change and other eco-conscious topics have been explored time and time again and although there were some good projects at Transmediale, how can the sum of them compare to exhibitions where the medium, new or old, did not play such a key role? That said, i know i had a very partial view of the event, i missed the performances, the lectures and, as i mentioned above, the discussions that they never fail to generate, so don't mind me too much, ok?
Post Global Warming Survival Kit by Petko Dourmana propels visitors into nuclear winter. A nuclear war, it is predicted, would prompt extremely cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or years as large amounts of smoke and soot would be injected into the Earth's stratosphere. Post Global Warming Survival Kit is a two-channel-projection but because you supposed to walk through a space covered in ash, you have to wear night vision goggles if you want to see it. The images shows pictures of the North Sea as an apocalyptic scene.
What you can almost distinguish with your naked eyes though is a 1930s caravan. You will need to don the night vision goggles to see that it contains basic living goods, and technical equipment so that contact can be made with any other survivors who might be out there somewhere. The artist 'provides the viewer with the opportunity to experience other visual worlds or parts of our reality which would remain invisible without technical aids. Without technology, we would be blind in an ash-covered world. Dourmana ironically perceives the "nuclear winter" as the only concept which man has come up with to prevent global warming: a dystopic look at politics and our future.'
More images.
Jana Linke's Click & Glue was the absolute crowd-pleaser of the show. A big white balloon filled with helium moves and floats through the air and within the perimeter of a small room. The balloon is connected to a nylon thread and a mechanism that distributes glue. As the balloon moves and bounces against the walls, it leaves a small deposit of glue that momentarily functions as an anchor before the balloon continues its movement through the space. Thread by thread, the installation generates a web that eventually entangles the balloon and prevents it from moving. In this way, Click & Glue becomes responsible for creating a network that locks itself in. I didn't get what all that was about but, Lord, was it lovely to witness it.
Urs Dubacher's performance Specialità di Silicio, melted-down hardware is turned into almost edible-looking food. In his mobile kitchen, similar to the one of a takeaway vendor, the artist melts bits of computer hardware into realistic-looking culinary meals. His work reflects on our so-called 'throwaway society', commenting on recycling, the exploitation of electronic products, and technology's seemingly unstoppable development.
In Trilogy, Marco Evaristti travels to various parts of the world to comment on the themes of territorial boundaries and environmental pollution. Using fruit color and fabric, Evaristti spray-painted red an iceberg in Greenland in 2004. In June last year he was arrested while trying to perform a similar trick on the peak of Mont Blanc which didn't prevent him to head off to the Sahara and turn a dune red.
Oh! was about to forget: I did get to see some results of the Climate Hack workshop that playfully reframe the issues at stake using methods outside the traditional political rhetoric. One of the projects developed proposed visitors to make and bake candy based on their own carbon footprint. The impact of your country is symbolized by spoonfuls of sugar. One spoonful can be removed or added to the total amount based on the estimation of your life style. The more you use the earth resources the bigger the candy you have to face. Hop! My picture set on flickr. Image on the homepage is 5VOLTCORE / Christian Gützer (at) - Grow - Fruits of Kronos (2007.) Also exhibited at transmediale: Extreme Green Guerrillas, Tantalum Memorial. |
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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.
"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. Learning to harness the mechanisms of conspiracy, or those of the conspiratorial act also empower us as creative individuals to better understand the irrational culture of fear and security being imposed on us."
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.
Video
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
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 Nataša Petrešin-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.
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.
The first part of Wonder Beirut, by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, tells the story of a pyromaniac Lebanese photographer named Abdallah Farah.
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.
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. |
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(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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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".
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. |
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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.)
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.
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*.
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: 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. |
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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.
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: 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.
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. |
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Alice Miceli is currently traveling back and forth from Berlin where she is based now to Belarus where her aim is to capture radiation images in Chernobyl's exclusion zone.
The pictures will be imprinted by the radiation that has contaminated this area, ever since the day of the disaster in April 1986. Although radiation is extensively present in the environment, it is totally invisible. The images she will produce will thus make visible this invisible energy that has turned the area into a "dead zone".
The Chernobyl project, requires the creation of a technology that will enable the artist to take pictures with invisible gamma radiation inside the Chernobyl Exclusion zone, in Belarus. I asked Alice to give us more details about the project: Your first visit to Belarus doesn't seen to have you back off from the project. Aren't you afraid that, when you see the extent of radiation in your pictures, you will be thinking "Oh! Man! What am I doing here?" On the contrary, when I first went to Belarus, I was already working on the technology to develop the camera for almost a year, but I had never actually been to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Being there, made me witness the humanitarian crisis that this situation has been causing in Belarus, over the years. Right after having returned to Rio, where I was then based, following nearly one year of research, I asked myself: how has this first trip altered the project? After crossing a big STOP sign and warnings in Russian about radiation, what has actually changed? It seems to me that the central issue is the visibility / invisibility of radiation, which is the core concept of the "Chernobyl Project�?. Physical visibility, considering that my camera "sees�? the invisible - it sees an invisible matter. But also social-political visibility, considering that even though the reactor is across the border, in Ukraine, contamination is at higher levels in Belarus, a country that is even less socially visible than its neighbor. Globally, the public opinion and the European countries fail to recognize, let alone address, this problem. Something that was not only a traumatic event in the past - it is a current, urgent situation, and it will continue to be for hundred of years.
What is it exactly that motivates your project and has put your health after your artistic project? How to look at a very intriguing place, the exclusion zone, in a specific way, specific to that place? I thought about what had happened there. This evil energy, where was it, where were its traces? Is it possible to sense it, to touch the immaterial, the invisible? It crossed my mind that this vast "waste ground�? had become a place where this invisible matter could not be contained any longer. The "Chernobyl Project�? attempts to make this visible. The issue of health: as in radical sports, in dealing with dangerous situations, there are risks that you have to take, but you do so in the most careful, prudent way, to an extent where the risks are almost inexistent. Of course they do exist, you can never be sure to be 100 per cent safe, but then, when are we actually TOTALLY safe anyway? But for something to happen to me there, I would have to be living in the contaminated areas for decades, as sadly many people do out of not having a choice.
Can you explain us how the specially created pinhole camera works technically? How challenging was it to develop it? Since I am not a physicist, I had to study radioactivity for this project. It was developed in collaboration with scientists at the Radio-Protection Institute, in Rio de Janeiro. Now it will be further developed at the Otto-Hug Radiation Institute, in Munich, before being tested in the zone. It is, so far, the most empiric, challenging thing I have ever done, as this process is a leap into the unknown, to something that comes to being, to a form, as we look at it. The basic optic phenomenon of image projection on the back of a dark chamber, created by a tiny little hole, is the same of a regular pinhole camera that works with light. For a "radiographic version�?, it was necessary to make adjustments in this basic principle: we built a steel box with a led cover. Led is one of the few materials that stop radiation. The box is a shield to attenuate radiation and protect the film. The actual pinhole (that goes inside the box), is a led square cube that measures 5cm x 5cm, with a conic miniscule hole. It prints "projected�? images of contaminated matter on radiographic film, adjusted to the specific energy of the radioactive matter. The radiographic film is individually wrapped. It is placed in the camera inside a sealed aluminum envelope, which stops the penetration of light, but not of radiation, so it is only exposed to radioactivity. Thanks Alice! Images by Charles Hawley in Chernobyl. See also: Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai-Fischer and Usman Haque's device that takes photos of wifi space. Related stories: A day trip to Chernobyl, Nuclear Nightmares, Design solutions for post crash civilization. |
