joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

James Patten’s Corporate Fallout Detector is a device that allows identifying producers by scanning barcodes on packings. It checks a (local) database and gives an acoustic rating (much like a Geiger counter) of the companies moral and political correctness. It was shown at Transmediale 05 in Berlin. The detector is bulky, heavy and consists of two parts (= requires two hands). That is fine, because it’s a prototype.

What I really thought was questionable: There is no way of reading entries in the database. The user doesn’t know anything about the database (who collects the data, when was it last updated etc.) and it is stored locally (I suspect that one has to dismantle the whole thing in order to update the database: There was no USB socket and I don’t believe it comes with WLAN or Bluetooth).

Clearly Patten invested most of his creative energy and technical skill into building a thing that can read the producers name from packages. I suspect that he also invested much of it in creating a thing that looks and sounds spectacular, with it’s crude soviet design and the Geiger counter noise it makes.

Of all the problems to be solved in order to empower the customer and give him more instant information while doing his/her shopping, it seems to me that reading the producers name is the smallest problem. Usually it can be found in human readable notation on the package.

Here are some outlines of an application that could actually work and that would be more than just a gimmick:

• a smart application for existing cellphones and other mobile devices is designed instead of a whole apparatus with primitive software
• the application allows to enter a product or a company name and responds with a graphical representation of the company’s and the product’s rating in different categories (health, environment, social responsibility, etc.)
• optionally detailed information along with the development of a company’s rating can be viewed
• the database can be downloaded or can be used online, if the device is capable of connecting to the internet
• ideally the user is can choose from different databases (maintained by different organizations). this means organizations need to be encouraged to start databases that to the application’s standard
• in order to make entering product and company names quick and simple a special T9 system that recognizes both is integrated in the front end application

The weirdest event I saw at Transmediale was a meeting to discuss adding the term “media art” to wikipedia. The discussion was moderated by the director of the festival, according to whom the wikipedians that were supposed to hold the thing had cancelled about an hour before the discussion was scheduled (?!).

Discuss adding a new term to wikipedia?? Yes you heard right! I was almost waiting for them to start creating a comity. Maybe multiple comities for the different fields of media art.

Why do I have a feeling, that the very desire to define that term can only come from people who are likely to organize a (pseudo academic) discussion about what they should add to the ongoing discussion called wikipedia?

I must say that media art does not seem like a very useful term to me at all: It distinguishes where I would prefer not to and it does not distinguish where I feel distinguishing could enhance the understanding of different artistic positions and strategies. I must also say that for me the term “art” always felt like it was a bit to small. What a nightmare it must be for artists to find themselves being called media artists on wikipedia.

Just like last year, this year’s Transmediale started with an annoyance for me: I had forgotten, that the opening was for press and invited people only. I wasn’t invited nor did I organize a press pass for myself. Despite the prospect of hearing Catherine David speak in French (1) (instead of not at all), I was clearly not prepaired to stand in line and talk my way in.

Abschreckung statt Aussperrung!

I wonder what kind of policy this is: Locking out people because they don’t have a professional relation with the event. It seems in an odd contradiction with the ideals otherwise promoted at the festival. I can’t imagine that it is so difficult to determine a ticket price, so that not too many people actually buy a ticket (or better even: so that a big enough space for everybody who’s interested was affordable).

As a compensation I got to see the sky ear performance in front of the building, in which balloons filled with helium and equipped with LED’s and some cellphones were wavering in the sky above Tiergarten. The LED’s react to electromagnetic fields (caused by weather as well as by radio signals such as incoming phone calls to the cellphones ‘on board’).

This rather beautiful visualization of natural phenomena (weather) along with socio-technical phenomena (phone calls) was a nice synthesis of my afternoon visit to a couple of galleries in Berlin Mitte. At Johann König I saw “Dänische Schweine und andere Märkte” by Tue Greenfort. In one of his works Greenfort references Hans Haake’s Condesation Cube (2). Instead of just water, Greenfort uses Vittel (the empty bottle is placed next to the cube). The installation seems to say: The time when we could innocently look at natural phenomena is over - economical phenomena have become part of our environment with laws as inevitable as the laws of nature.

(1) It wasn’t the first time I saw a sign indicating that David will speak French - and I wonder if the sign is a political statement (I don’t speak english and I’m proud of it) of if it’s a sign of modesty (I know that most of you dear visitors don’t speak French). Personally I don’t care, because esthetically I like French accents almost as much as actual French. My comprehension of both is also sufficient in most cases. Talking about it: One of the coolest French accents can be heard taking guided tour in English at the cave of Lascaux.

(2) The work dates from 1963 and constitutes of a glass cube filled with a small volume of water, which evaporates and condensates on the screen (pretty much what I have as a permanent installation in all the double glass windows of my apartment). Obviously this was before Haake focused on social and political topics and before he replaced visualization and generative procedure with symbolic installations.

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