THE WASTE LAND

A PARASITIC STRUCTION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE → GERMAN

The Dispersal of Data, Dust and Matter

»The grounds, ungrounds, and undergrounds of media infrastructures condition what is visible and what is invivisible. This is a question of power relations and contested territories. The earth is part of media both as a ressource and as a transmission.« Jussi Parikka

Der Ausbruch des Tambora-Vulkans im April 1815 bewirkt Unabsehbares. Megatonnen an Staubteilchen werden durch Luftströmungen rund um die Erde verteilt und führen 1816 zum »Jahr ohne Sommer«. Folge der Eruption sind neben Missernten, Hungersnöten und politischen Revolten auch Kulturartefakte wie die grandiosen Abendstimmungen in den Gemälden von William Turner.

Der Mikrobiologe Gottfried Ehrenberg beschreibt 1844 in »Passatstaub und Blutregen« den transkontinentalen Austausch von Mikroorganismen durch den Wind. Die Äquivalenzen im Anthropozän, also vom Menschen beeinflusste Partikelströme, sind nuklearer Fallout, ozeanische Inseln aus Plastikmüll, CO2 und Smartdust. THE WASTE LAND beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie Materie, Körper und Geographien neu in Verbindung gebracht werden können.

1. TWO ENVIRONMENTS

About 30.000 people live in Mokattam village/Cairo. Since the 1940s they run an informal system of waste collection in the megacity at the Nile. The Zabbaleen - which literally means garbage people (arabic زبالين) - recycle up to 90 percent of the waste that they have collected. They sort some 9,000 tonnes of garbage per day by hand inside of their homes. An essential component to the sorting system are the pigs they live with, who eat all of the organic waste. Animal excrement is sent to a compost plant in a Cairo suburb where it is processed and sold to farmers.

The situation in Eschbach/Breisgau looks totally different. The place hosts a hight tech garbage incineration plant at the foot of the Black Forest. The waste processing works highly automated and is solely run by machines. Like other Western recycling systems it has an efficiency of about 30 percent. The industrial complex burns 170.000 t garbage per year producing 15 MW of electricity. Within the radius of 5km a nuclear power plant and 450 refugees are located.

Meshes, waste and the parasitic are at the center of a current media ecology.

Which material and informational connections exist between the two chosen spots? Which exchange of things, signs and particles do occur? How does the observer intervene in this metabolism?

2. SONIC ECOLOGY

The artistic research project is transforming environmental data from two different garbage systems into a sensory experience. On both locations tiny sensor devices will be implemented as smartdust to quantify wind, electric induction and movement of humans, animals and machines. The wireless parasites stream their discrete numbers in an exhibition space, where the live data will be sonified. The installation explores the dispersal of microorganisms and data as dust in the anthropocene. Personal stories and a video assemblage are part of this metabolism.

»When a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing.«

Robert Smithson

3. THEORY

Meshes, waste and the parasitic are at the center of a contemporary media ecology. Which material and informational connections exist between these two chosen spots in Cairo and Eschbach? Which exchange of things, signs and particles do occur? How does the observer intervene in this metabolism and how can he change it?

Following the media theory of Michel Serres this research is focusing on the global circulation of heat and data. The actants and actions which are embedded in the two environments link the thermodynamic with the informational. »The universe is composed both of matter and information, which are inseparable in their relationship with each other.« THE WASTE LAND explores the aesthetic dimension of these multi temporal covariations and structural couplings by comparing Zabaleen and Eschbach. The experimental system can be regarded as a »struction«:

»A struction is the uncoordinated simultaneity of things and beings. It is the contingency of their co-affiliation, the scatter in the proliferation of aspects, kinds, forces, forms, tensions and intentions. 

: They all seem – instincts, reactions, irritability, connectivities, equilibria, catalysis, metabolism – intended to become entangled with each, to recognize each other, to detect each other mutually, to dissolve and to mix with each other.« Jean-Luc Nancy, »Von der Struktion«, in: Erich Hörl (Hg.), Die technologische Bedingung. Berlin 2011, 62

Meshes, waste and the parasitic stand for a new ontology and new cybernetics. A bio-medial ecology which is generating on the one hand spillovers and complexities, on the other hand extinctions, disturbances and contingencies.

Aerial view on Mokattam 1904 from hot air balloon and 2015 Google satellite. The breaking edge is 40 Mio years in age – Middle and Late Eocene

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4. TRANSLOCAL INSTALLATION WITH PERFORMANCES, FILMS AND SYMPOSIUM

June 9-11, 2016 at Kommunales Kino, Freiburg

Performances with improvisational artists. Accompanying film program about Anthropocene/Ressources/Modernity, Lecture by J.-L. Nancy

In the exhibition space a sound and video installation – which is in pre-stabilized balance with the experimental situation – in the form of a media ecological system will be set up.

Live data mediated by sensors from Cairo and Eschbach delivers information about the local environmental factors there. According to the configuration of these measurements the signals will have a cyclical, linear, static, or random effect on the system. Cyclical data about the position of the sun operates the compository form over the course of the day. Against this further environmental data provides irregular values, which determine the volume, melody, synthese parameter, and spatial positioning within the sound field.

A permanently installed microphone provides signals of the exhibition room. These sounds will be musically interpreted. In this system there will be three evening performances with improvisation musicians Kimming, Kurth and Schröder, as well as a performance lecture by J.L. Nancy. Systematic catastrophe reactions* are thereby not excluded.

Begriff des Gestalttheoretikers Kurt Goldstein. Bei jeder Figur-Grundbildung des Organismus mit der Umwelt kommt es aufgrund von Phasenverschiebungen immer wieder zu Katastrophenreaktionen. Diese äussert sich in Form von Angst, bis sich wieder ein adäquates Milieu ausbildet. (Goldstein 1934, 235f.)

5. PEOPLE

Idea, concept and research: Daniel Fetzner and Martin Dornberg with Ephraim Wegner

A cooperation of Hochschule Offenburg with the Goethe Institut Cairo and the research group mbody. Kindly supported by MENA, a project of Goethe-Institut funded by the German Foreign Ministry

TEAM CAIRO: Mona Diab (Coordination), Christian Dootz, Lamiaa Khaled Diab, Amina Ahmed Shafiq, Tasneem Abd El Hamid Ali and Rana Hossam Allam.
TEAM OFFENBURG: Bernd Dudzik (Physical Computing), Jeffrey Schweitzer, Daniel Siegel, Sebastian Klemm, Katrin Phyllis Schneider, Nicola Götz, Viktor Säbelfeld, Mathieu Conrad, Yannick Knabbe, Sevda Yalcin, Daniel Baselski, Alaa Elbin Essam and Omar Kassen.

6. REFERENCES

  • Behringer, Wolfgang (2015): Tambora und das Jahr ohne Sommer. München: Beck
  • Caviezel, Falvia (2015): Times of Waste
  • Fetzner, Daniel/Dornberg, Martin (2015): Intercorporeal Splits. Leipzig: Open House
  • Dornberg, Martin (2013): Die zweigriffige Baumsäge. In Breyer (Hg.): Grenzen der Empathie. Paderborn: Fink
  • Ehrenberg, Christian Gottfried (1844): Passat-Staub und Blut-Regen.
  • Gurnard, Marion (2013): Cairo puts its faith in ragpickers to manage the city's waste problem. The Guardian
  • Harman, Graham (2012): The Third Table. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz
  • Hörl, Erich (2011): Die technologische Bedingung. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp
  • Lefebvre, Henri (1990): Rhythmanalysis
  • Miyazaki, Shintaro (2013): Algorhythmisiert. Kadmos: Berlin
  • Morton, Timothy (2015): Hyperobjects. UMP: Minneapolis
  • Parikka, Jussi (2015): The Anthrobscene. Minneapolis: UMP
  • Platel, Alain (2014) Tauberbach. Dance Performance. Kammerspiele: München
  • Reuss, Jürgen (2013): Kaufen für die Müllhalde. Freiburg
  • Serres, Michel (1980): The Parasite. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press
  • Smithson, Robert (1968): A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects. Artforum
  • Pacific Trash Vortex
  • Mokattam
PRELIMINARIES