THE ERASERS: March 2006

drog_A_tek

New project about silence from drog_A_tek and friends at Trianon on the 16th of April.

Στατιστική Άρπα και Άλλες Μηχανές

New sound installation by Coti, Voltnoi, Evgeniou, Charitos @ Cheap Art Gallery. Await for further instructions.

disappear

The 20th century may have been dominated by the spectacle of the image, but the 21st century will witness the disappearance of the image into digitality moving at the speed of light.

Infomobility and Technics

The (re)production of territories -- Marrakech, Morocco 5/05/05

What is really at stake are the radically new possibilities of
projection that are offered by digital devices of tertiary retention.
If what we are dealing with is nothing else but real space, it must
be an extension of the device by which the world projects as
double.

The places I visit become "smart" by virtue of my presence. I bring
information with me to this place, and this information mediates my
experience; the territory surrounding me serves as surface of
projection for data. I am sitting inside the mud-brick ramparts of
Djemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech, surrounded by a jumble of
storytellers, jugglers and snake charmers. In the stall beside me, a
woman pulls a raw sheep's head from her bag, skewers it through the
eye socket and rolls it across the grill. The intermittent song of
the Muezzin (Arabic call to prayer) sounds strange to me, and the air
is filled with a mixture of French and Arabic, neither of which I can
understand. I have no guide book, and I cannot find my way out of the
labyrinthine medina. Yet I am not lost; using GPRS roaming, my device
brings access to directions through the cobbled streets and alleys,
to an explanation of the song in my own language.

Every street and building has a layer of virtual graffiti I can
summon in an instant; my experiences will in turn be archived and
will form part of this collective inscription. Although I cannot see
these records on the walls and artefacts around me, they are not
immaterial; they "cannot be accessed except via the mediating
processes of the devices that represent this information" to an
otherwise unequipped consciousness. Using my device, I retrieve
243 entries for Cafe Toubkal on the East side of the square; if I
squint my eyes I can see it through the jumble of stalls. As I make
my way across the market I capture images of my approach, I rehearse
my own inscriptions in this collection; my experience has been
formulated in advance of my arrival. In this sense, the place I am
approaching is already the future anterior, it is already memory. A
mobile device promises not simply, or not only, perpetual
connectivity; it promises access to this sedimentary layer of
information that has built up around the globe, and the ability to
add your fragments to it. This exceeds the knowledge of human
individuals, it exceeds the territory it covers.

With every step, I emit a smog of data; my journey is being archived
too. Every few seconds, my device "pings" the network and receives a
response; my location zone is then recorded in a log. I am conscious
that I leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs for Maroc Telecom through
the ancient city, that my position could be triangulated within
metres based on my distance from nearby cell stations. I have become
data "travelling through data landscapes" ; I have become a
roaming subscription number. As my feet slide upon thousand-year old
stone, I am at once travelling through networks and central servers
back in Australia, my details handed on via invisible network
handshakes across the globe, my trajectory recorded. I am not lost, I
am identifiable; I am a string of information events.

As I travel through the city I leave other traces too, traces which
will be incorporated into the global digital retention system. Every
ATM I visit and every credit card transaction I make will be
recorded. But my mobile device is a nomadic object; it literally
locates me within an electronic reproduction of the territory I walk
over.[6] The network coverage area is known as a "footprint", and
like any inscription on real space it has finite physical limits and
dimensions; my trail through it will be marked as one marks the
surface of page. At the same time, this data trail I am creating is
already memory; by the time the network locates me, I have gone.

On the opposite side of the round world you are asleep now, and your
device will vibrate silently with the video I have sent.

Belinda Barnet

CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 28, NO 3
http://www.ctheory.net ***

musika

Ten for Today

1. Sateily / Radiation: Pan Sonic
2. Epicycle: Jani Christou
3. Narcotic: Muslimgauze
4. Transrapid: Alva Noto
5. Mwandishi: Herbie Hancock
6. Bili Rubin: Einstürzende Neubauten
7. In Amsterdam: Moondog
8. Asci to VU sample 2 (unreleased): Coti
9. Zurif Moussa: Muslimgauze
10. Enta Omry: Oum Kalthoum

moments in time too

Omonia square, toomorow.

moments in time

Omonia square, today.

bios

Bio-experiments, bio-life, bio-mechanics, bio-money, bio-banks, biohazard, bio-terror, bio-government, bio-real-time, bio-communication, bio-genetics, bio-politics, bio-history, bio-science, bio-presence, bio-culture shops. The replica, the duplicate, the clone, the non-organic, DNA, RNA, the helix, the coaxial, the bio-cell, the molecular, the fact that we ‘re human, demolish the science of metamorphosis, progress, the meat is not murder, is it meat or machine? Global economies, social systems, immigration patterns, information exchanges, mobile and wireless communications, stock exchange, computer-analysis, population analysis, micro chip, nano-chip, macro compute, devices of control, demolish ethics, exterminate agony, delete the presence of this world, codes, passwords, data, files, numbers, binary, beton arme, structures, post structures, meta-mo-struct, abstraction, regardless ideology and philosophy, the improper and the proper use of what we call life, pull for emergency EXIT, erase the terror, the great terror of all mankind, this is the drama of the human, it is a drama that is by turns tragic and absurdist. This drama, producing dadaist mammals, extra ears, pigs with wings, activist crops, and 'fuzzy biological sabotage'. Biological life: microbes, epidemics, endosymbiosis, parasitism, swarms, packs, flocks, a-life, genetic algorithms, bio-pathways, smart dust, smartmobs, netwars -- there is a whole bestiary that asks us to think the life-multiplicity relation. What is life? Life is X. Whatever X happens to be, eidos, mechanism, life-force, selection, code. Life is...resistance... Life is X…Life is…resistance... Resistance is to erase…

erase memory

Erase memory, scratch disk is full, data flow inefficient, gigabyte, terabyte, the disk is full, names, enemies, friends, affiliates, numbers, files, libraries, words, pictures, sounds, jpgs, wavs, docs, certificates of birth and death, data entries, you are a number mister, the disc is full, optical discs, mini discs, floppy discs, magnetic discs, cd roms, dvd roms, the disc is full, erase data permanently, decimal, binary, codes, passwords and passports, access denied, no available space, processors, predecessors, how to install, Motorola, Intel, technologies of suppression, the disc is full, erase memory, proceed, exceed, you are a machine programmed to program in real time, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, MHz, GHz, THz, the politics of speed, the aesthetics of disappearance, you are a tape recorder set to record and play back in real time, the disc is full, erase memory, don’t think about it, forget about it, ease memory, there is nothing to remember, erase memory, erase history, there is nothing left to memorize, erase memory, erase, the disc is full.

The disk is full, words on words, sounds on sounds, pictures over other pictures. This is the Noise War. Push the button. Drop silence.