Ever elusive - transmediale

Ecologoies worshop- Earth observarory

There is this festival (on art & digitalculture since 1988, thus westgermany) called transmediale, i have attended every year, cause there is something interesting (and for free) to see. the truth is i just let myself be inspired, most of the time i dont quite get the grasp of what am gonna see from the description, i go anyway. this lead me to the third weekend workshop this year, i really wanted to attend the other one which took place in Ver.di (the biggest german trade union that unites, supports and coordinates trade unions accross the country, this particular worshop dealt with datafied politics and digital populism)but that weekend i had my cut and construction workshop (for that another post).

The workshop took place at silent green, that was my first motivation to attend, this is a former (and actually the first in Berlin) crematorium now turned into a cultural center.

Ecologies features new artistic research into the messy, disperse ecologies that now characterize life on the planet as it is re-contructed in flows of data, capital and natural resources. Understanding how planetary systems work requires multidimensional thinking, and so collaborative and interdiciplinary frameworks will emerge throughout the excursion. By embracing the topic from a geopolitical perspective, the problematics of scale are brought into the foreground, and ways for connecting the micro-the -macro political in DIY artistic practices as well as interdiciplinary research projects will be proposed. The program also deals with the resource heavy realities of technology and its impact on the earth from a geological "deep time" perspective, and looks at new approached to the earth's own media such as mushroom* and rocks*.

The people in leading the workshop were Jamie Allen and Martin Howse, from the beggining they said though they didnt want to have much of frontal lecture but a discussion. anyway, cause we had so different backgrounds they started giving us input on lay lines , radioactivity, we also talked about the unavoidable anthropocene and also about colonial espistemologies, this somehow i havent heard in this constellation, it has do to with having the knowledge that something is there, that something exist and somehow once you "know" this you can not avoid but to want to "explore"* it. We also talked about the middle of germany, and how the "need" for mapping this across time and different mediums to do it has lead to different places clayming to be "the center". There was also the mention of the "Superfunds which brings us back to the anthropocene and the places that have been so affected/contaminated by human hands that they are deemed dead. we were asked to question what are direct consequences of the anthropocene in our dayli lives? - Jamie tolds us that once in Paris in a polluted day he was told he was not expected to pay the ticket for the metro. It made me think of my time living in Santiago and how besides the "visual spectacle" of having to live under a grey cloud of smog, i never was affected in the sense of not beeing able to go somewhere or not being able to do sports, i guess in the 00 years things were better already, or?

hands on

we got express trained into how to find.. let call it lay lines just for the fun of it. we had to built our how pendulum. The pendulum was a radioactive stone from the south of germany; martin placed the stones in front of a radioactive measuring divice, it produced that particular sound that you hear in chernobil documentaries, i mean, they were real BUT not harmful. We could pimp our pendulums with gems and copper (cooper works as a blocker of radioactivity, so we thought we can "direct" the energy of the pendulum deppending on the way we place it on it.

so we found our inner lay lines, we place a shovel on the spot and then we went inside to hear a talk about the launch of the Mycelium network society. after we went out to perform the "array activation ritual" here we made a hole in the ground in the same spot were we before stuck our shovels, there we put a seed, and in the center of our array (or where we started the search for the lines) we had a box made of concrete were we sepulted our pendulums, so we have our radioactive center conected by lines to our seeds =).

References

• movie: Merchants of doubt
• movie: Into eternity -about Onkalo in Finland
• Reader: read till the end!

Mycelium

Parallel to the workshop and the talks there was a tiny exhibition happening on the balcony of the mourning hall of the crematorium, there one could have kombucha or tshroom, then i remember, i had one when i was tiny! but i didnt drink it, it was a sort of community network though, cause everyweek you where supposed to give one to someone, and after 3 weeks you were supposed to let it dry. am very clear about the fact the my tshroom was called natacha, and that once dryied i kept it in an envelope. Well, now i have my own new tshroom, its quite big and tastes good.