With London, we’ve all known it for some time: if you travel around the British capital for one day, you will be registered on average by more than 300 surveillance cameras. But it is rather surprising to learn of the dense placement of so-called CCTV units in Helsinki and Tallinn, which are among the most heavily surveilled capital cities in Europe.1 For a long time now, however, the technical possibilities have gone beyond videographic systems – with the »digital turn«, these were supplemented by face-recognition programmes and integrated into a complementary network of different information technologies (RFID, GIS, etc.), whose output is increasingly linked up through databases.

At the 12th ISEA symposium, which took place in Helsinki and Tallinn at the end of August, the Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan, known for his tactical, civilian appropriation of these originally military technologies, implemented a further phase of his »project-in-progress« with the Makrolab UNTP set-up 2: a five-day »Tactical Media Workshop« was to discuss technical, aesthetic and political aspects of »locative media«, particularly GPS-based systems, and develop a relevant new open-source software.3 In view of the large number of recent artistic projects working with GPS – which often are so carried away by their joy in individual »mapping« that they disregard any sort of context –, it would seem time for some critical reflection.

Conceived as an information centre, the Makrolab installation in the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki functioned astoundingly well at a representative level: the combination of documentary videos, interviews and news feeds with graphics and timelines on the development of a civilian, unmanned aircraft provided a successful contextualization of the sometimes seemingly abstract, technical parts of the project. Very much in keeping with the »de-abstraction« of digital surveillance technologies demanded by Peljhan himself, their self-empowering potential becomes tangible. At the same time, an awareness of the limits of the concept of conversion is needed, since, as Brian Holmes has so aptly put it, »the questions of social subversion and psychic deconditioning are wide open, unanswered, in an era when world civil society has been integrated to the military architecture of digital media.«4

Collaborative working methods, sustainability and self-empowerment are also the fundamental strategies behind the Indian Sarai Media Lab, which endeavours to promote theoretical and practical engagement with digital media. This comprehensive approach was made clear by the variety of items the project presented at the symposium: in addition to an Asia Networking Session organized by Sarai - which, incidentally, did not do very much to relativize the usual western dominance – an exhibit and a panel, Shuddhabrata Sengupta gave an extremely interesting introductory lecture on the theme of the conference, »Histories of the New«. In his paper, »The Remains of Tomorrows Past«, Sengupta presented a line of argument that was as subtle as it was convincing, putting into perspective the hegemonic position of the West in the historiography of modern information technologies and highlighting parallel developments in South Asia. For example, he pinpointed the origins of the present-day communications infrastructure, with all its socio-political, economic and, not least, military implications, in telegraphy, which, like many 19th-century inventions, is marked by the blind spots engendered by colonial mechanisms of exclusion. By giving a detailed account of the creation of the telegraph network in India and examining one key figure, the now-forgotten William O’Shaughnessy, Sengupta not only exposed many of these blind spots, but also shed new light on the urgent question of the role of intellectual property, calling for a positive redefinition of the word »piracy«. In keeping with this form of »creative piracy«, the HTML-based exhibit contributed by the Sarai collective, »The Network of No_Des«, consisting of found material, film excerpts, research notes and other text-image fragments, is left conceptually unfinished and open for additions.5

http://www.isea2004.net
Makrolab and the Sarai Media Lab were awarded the UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2004 at the ISEA symposium.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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