The border film project by Brett Huneycutt. Victoria Criado and Rudy Adler has some amazing pictures online. The project distributed hundreds of disposable cameras to undocumented migrants attempting to cross from Mexico into the US of A (they also distributed them to so called minuteman vigilantes trying to stop the immigrants from coming there). The migrants used the cameras during their travels and then returned them to the project. Pictures are still coming and the ones already available on the website give a very impressive (and intimate) insight into the process of crossing borders.

One of the more prominent themes at CeBIT this year was the whole security/surveillance/biometric systems complex. hall 6 and 7 where full of companies demonstrating that you can stick an RFID chip on just about anything in order to then read it and know where just about everything comes from or goes to or belongs to or how much it costs. (only thing they did not show was that thanks to RFID you can now infect your cat with a computer virus).

On extremely popular sub-genre of things you can slap an RFID tag on are passports (interesting to think of what happens if your passport gets infected by an RFID virus transmitted by the cat of your host in a far away country, but i am getting distracted here…) and lots of countries showed their ePassport systems on the floor. The booth of Pakistan’s National Database & registration Authority (NARDA) was extremely entertaining not only because they had these wonderful multi identity passports to demonstrate their machines but also because they where extremely detailed in explaining their system and allowed me to take photographs of just about everything. As a good-bye present i got a bunch of brochures including one about the ‘Multi Biometric e-Passport Project’ currently being implemented in Pakistan:

The aim of this project is to create a highly secure integrated system encompassing immigration - Automated Border Control and passport issuance […] while ensuring the genuinenness of the holder as a valid Pakistani citizen. […] The system requires minimum human intervention that ensures transparency while maintaining ease of exit/entry of citizens without the ordinary people being harassed unnecessarily.

While i do not want to contribute to unnecessary harassment of the ordinary people (unnecessary harassment should be strictly reserved to criminals and terrorists who can easily be spotted because they have a beard?behave differently?will not get a passport because they are not ordinary? …??) i do have a slight suspicion that either the system minimizes human intervention so much that the operators get bored that the operators do not really regard security as their prime concern. otherwise it would be difficult to explain why a number of screen shots in the brochure reveal that next to the Pakistani passport system application the machine is running a anonymous web based chat client (see the iloveIM.com and x7.iloveim.com tabs in the task bar):

I am not sure if it really makes sense to develop a highly secure system and then have the operators IM with unidentifiable others while having access to the sensible data in plain text. On the other hand being on IM is getting a more and more important part of the social fabric and why should one not use the connectivity provided by the employer for a chat or two?

Have been hanging out at the CeBIT IT trade show for the last 2 days and that is a pretty much brain wrecking experience. Among other things this means being exposed to a overkill of stupid advertising slogans. One that especially caught my attention was on a poster at the stall of WYSE computing (the self proclaimed leader in thin computing). Obviously inspired by thomas friedman the company seems to be on a mission to flatten the world. problem is that at least in my case that can evoke unintended connotations:

[photoshop is your best friend if you are off-line waiting for the tv-screen to be taken away so you can finally leave the booth and escape the your crazy neigbours]. And yes it looks like i have a 9/11 obsession lately. Further proof can be found here and here.

Have seen one and a half war movies today. First i went to Neukölln to see ‘Kurtlar Varsi: iraq‘ (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq) and then tonight on TV i ended up watching the second half of ‘Tears of the Sun‘.

For those who have not followed the hysteric discussions in Germany in the last month: Valley of the Wolves is the Turkish Blockbuster that depicts a Turkish secret service agent’s mission in Iraq. He is on a (unofficial) mission to kill a CIA operative who was responsible for arresting and humiliating a dozen of Turkish soldiers who were stationed in northern Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003. Having the soldiers arrested and taken away with bags over their heads apparently caused an enormous nationalistic trauma in Turkey and our hero (the tagline of the film is ‘Some Men Are Born to be Heroes’) is here (or rather in Iraq) to take revenge (and to break the hearts of local women).

The film has been wildly accused of anti-semitism and anti-Americanism in the German media and while does indeed use anti-semitic clichés to a level where it is hard to not leave the cinema i would not call it anti-American. The film rather portraits the the American aggression against Iraq from a viewpoint that is not identical with that of the aggressors (and the western media). While in general the story-line is at best absurd (like in most of the films starring Chuck Norris) and the dialogues are extremely weak, the film does give you an idea how the global war on terror can be perceived if you have been born on the wrong side of the either-you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us rhetoric.

The most striking scene of the movie is the re-enactment of the 2003 Abu Ghraib torture photographs which makes some of the pictures (the dog & pvt. England) come alive on screen. You can argue that this is a cheap trick (like two young leftists in the subway station did), but it also is the most realistic scene of the entire movie as it is undoubtedly based on real events. In the end it is this scene what keeps the movie form being a bad, anti-semitic, pathetic and pseudo religious piece of crap as it it gives it some credibility. To me it almost feels like the rest of the movie just serves the function of tying the Abu Ghreib scene and the arrest of the Turkish soldiers together. The interring question is if the film would have had the same success without the blatant anti-semitism…

Tears of the Sun, to the contrary, features Bruce Willis as a cynical American special force commander that goes into the jungle to save a (attractive female) american doctor and (being under the influences of her charms) ends up disobeying orders (and losing a couple of his men) in order to protect (her and) the 70 or so refugees, whom his superiors considers ‘excess baggage’.

Valley of the sun (just like Kurtlar Varsi, where the Turkish super agent finally manages to kill his American counterpart but looses the beautiful chick) does have an happy ending (complete with a copy of the palm tree napalm air-strike scene from apoclypse now) in which the black hawk helicopters arrive to take the exhausted special forces soldiers and the refugees home while smiling african kids wave the helicopters good-bye as they depart into the afternoon sky…

While i cannot help to feel relieved when the black hawks arrive in the sky this particular combination of films makes me wonder how many people outside of the first world are left to muster the optimism of thinking that help is on its way when they see a black hawk helicopter approaching in the sky…

Ok it seems his has been around for a while (my pal bjorn blogged about it 4 days ago) but it seems that the british online music distributer OD2 (a.k.a loudeye.com) is canceling some of the licenses it has given out a while ago. initialreports suggested that the music bought (downloaded) under the 10-cents-per-song-for-unlimited-playback-on-one-computer-license option ‘possibly will no longer play’ after 1 jan 2007. the quote is taken from a translated letter to users of this licensing model, in which one of the resellers of the OD2 licenses even boasts that they have ‘succeed in allowing you to play the music until January 1st 2007’.

Today this story has been picked up by the Dutch daily het parool which claims that in the case of the 150.000 users of KPN music stream (another of the dutch resellers of OD2 and self-proclaimed market leader in online music distribution in the Netherlands) the licenses will be terminated on 3 april 2006, thereby rendering the DRM crippled files unplayable.

How sick is that? first they (and they is not some shady russian eBay operators, but a division of the biggest dutch telco) sell you a song for unlimited playback and then they disable it at whim. the article quotes the spokesperson of the biggest dutch consumer rights organization stating that at time of purchase it was not communicated to the users that this would be possible. KPN itself claims to be innocent (as they are only a reseller and OD2 apparently decided to terminate this license type at the pressure of the mayor record companies).

They do seem to understand that this situation might not be entirely welcomed by their customers and as a compensation they offer 10 euro vouchers (independent of the amount of songs downloaded under the old licenses) that can be used to buy songs from the OD2 catalogue with a license permits unlimited playback on one computer plus burning and playback on mobile devices (for 99 eurocent a song). Yeah right! Great deal thank you so much you responsible corporate entity! and when they cancel this type of license they will most likely offer you another €5 voucher that you can trade in in order to listen to your whole music library one last time before it autodestructs…

This is exactly why i have never downloaded a DRM crippled file and why i will NEVER do this in the future. This whole story actually makes me feel much better downloading music from the peer2peer corners of the internets (which is still perfectly legal in the Netherlands). The music industry has repeatedly equated downloading with theft which of course is bullshit. But maybe selling something to you for unlimited use and then taking it away from you should be considered theft? Sadly we are living in times where this kind of behavior is more likely to be called an ‘innovative business model’ instead. So i suggest going here for all your music needs.

… if you are in berlin on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday (8,9 & 10 March). Back to the Present is the first work of Constanza that i have seen (in the original version that played in the summer of 2003 in and abandoned, turn of the century warehouse in Berlin). This version was followed by a slightly adapted stage version that played at Schaubühne and was shown in among other places in Avignon, Bangalore, Madras and New Delhi and Tokyo. Now it is back in Berlin after more than a year and i am really looking forward to see it again. I just browsed the dorky park website to find a picture (but as it is all in flash that is more or less useless…) and came across a pdf document that claims to be a synopsis of the piece, which is somehow hard to believe, but it does contain a number associative gems that somehow capture the spirit of the show (text by Kevin Slavin):

Spirit. Meantime, we got robots on Mars. Just browsing. Just looking. We call one Spirit, and the other Opportunity. I’m not making this up: Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit is a disaster. It’s sending back signals, and the signals are garbage. If it’s communicating with something, it’s not with us. And another thing: it’s staying up all night. Spirit was supposed to sleep every night, to recharge the batteries, otherwise it will run out of power and die on Mars. Sleeping robots. What we don’t have, we make. What we have already, we make again. That it fails is no surprise. That ten million miles from home, a robot stays up all night, it’s no surprise.

Many years ago, Chicago was young, and pissing in the water it drank from. A fullgrown city dumping its garbage in the river it was built on, drinking from the river it was brushing teeth with. The water went foul, there were epidemics, people died. Come 1900, Chicago wakes up, builds a wall. Blocks off the lake upstream, turns that river around. Let’s be clear on this: they reversed a river.They turned a river around, so they could drink from upstream, so they could drink from the lake and piss in the river, now heading down- stream to the rest of America. If you understand this, you understand America’s twentieth century. If you understand this, you understand what it’s like to crash, lying in the street with liquid shit running down your legs, you understand what it’s like to betaken to the hospital, hooked up to machines. Someone had to think of that, reversing the river to send Chicago’s shit and garbage down Mississippi, someone dreamed that up. Someone else dreamed the crash and the streets to crash on. Somewhere, someone else dreamed of the ambulance. BACK TO THE PRESENT.

And then of course there is the slogan on the BttP sticker from 2003:

Memory is fragile, garbage lasts for ever.

Best statement about life i have come across so far. Seriously! So go see this show!

I am sick, given all the pooh-ha in the media i one would like to assume that it is the bird flu, especially with pale ducks appearing on the u-bahn in Berlin over the weekend. i am feeling doomed….

… and why does the url of this site begin with www.voyantes.net?

[Answer:] long before i had this blog i started collecting little paper flyers from people calling themselves ‘voyantes’ that where thrown through the letterbox of my apartment in Amsterdam [later i also started to find them on public transport in Paris and Strasbourg]. On these cards individuals, who claim to have special healing powers and the ability to look into the future, offer their services. most of them also claim to be mediums and it is quite common that they claim to have inherited this powers form powerful ancestors. It seems that the people who offer their services on these cards are part of the social fabric of sub-saharan migrant communities in these cities.

I do not know why i got fascinated by these cards and started collecting them. it probably is the mixture of (in my eyes) absurd religious beliefs and the almost taxonometric lists of ailments these people claim to be able to relieve. another aspect is the strange mixture between blunt and poetic language:

Spécialiste du retour rapide et définitif de l’être aimé. Si vous voulez vous faire aimer, ou si votre ami(e) vous a quitté(e) il ou elle va courrir derrière vous comme un chien derrière son maître.

[note: this is the only card among 50 or so that tries to imply gender neutrality. on all the others the lost partner that will be summond back to ‘run behind you like a dog behind his master’ is generally assumed to be female]

When my collection grew to more than 50 cards i decided to make them accessible on-line, by building a little app that enables you to chose three problems you would like to have solved. based on the choice of problems, the app will present you with the card(s) that claim to offer treatment for the chosen combination of problems. At the moment i have 71 cards online. If anyone out there ever comes across one of these these cards i would really appreciate it if you could send me a scan (on a black background) so i can add it to my database…

Tonight, tomorrow and on sunday Constanza’s most recent piece ‘Sure let’s talk about it will be’ playing at the HAU1 theatre in Berlin. Next weekend there will be a three-day re-run of ‘Back to the Present’ in the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. Finally on the first weekend of april ‘Big in Bombay‘ will be shown at the same place. (Sorry for not linking to individual pieces but the dorkypark website is based on flash and won’t allow direct links to individual sections)

Since december 2002 I have been counting dead people. To be more specific I have been collecting news reports about migrants that have been killed while trying to get to Europe. Since i have started i have found news articles documenting a total of 1354 1356 deaths and these are only those incidents that have been mentioned in news sources indexed by google news or which I have stumbled upon while reading the newspaper (and this figure does not include the people reported to be missing after the many incidents involving ships, most of them can be safely assumed to be dead as well). In addition there are lots of incidents that never make it into these publications.

I never really questioned myself why i am doing this, I just started to do it once it became feasible without to much hassle (e.g when google news got launched). Clearly i am not expecting that someday someone stumbles across the page, realizes how fucked up the the european attitude towards migrants is and then changes the system. People generally do not care when people with a different skin color die, and i do not really think this will ever change.

Also I never really found other people engaged in the particular activity of counting dead migrants. So imagine my astonishment when i came across someone who does not only also count dead migrants but on top of it knows exactly why he is doing it:

Martin Kelly runs a ‘new occasionalseries‘ on his blog ‘the purpose of which is to record the deaths of migrant workers’. Now that sounds pretty similar to what i am doing, but our Mr. Kelly here has a real mission:

He is collecting migrant deaths in the UK to prove that mass migration is bad and because of this ‘common humanity dictates that somebody try and keep track of the casualty figures’ of the poor souls ‘who would still be alive if tighter border and labour controls were in place’. Thankfully for the rest of the ‘british victims of migrant criminals’ Mr. Kelly has come to the rescue and taken up the burden of recording these incidents so that someday someone will stumble across his blog and decides that ‘common humanity’ dictates that a wall must be built around british isles, because ‘until we are prepared to change our ways, such tragedies as happened yesterday will continue. As migration grows, there will be more of them…’

Guess you have to be pretty fucked up to come to this kind of conclusions when reading about a car incident. This guy really leaves me speechless… what a fucking idiot!

Here are some more argumentative jewels form his insane ‘Right-Wing Rants, Ramblings, Ravings and Ruminations from the West of Scotland‘:

That the process of identifying the migrants should be estimated to be ‘lengthy’ exposes the laxity and inadequacy of our migration controls. Yet consider also its inhumanity – these men died here, far away from their own homes and families, and there is no one official to whom the police can turn who will be guaranteed to know their names. […]

They join Jean Charles de Menezes, Karolina Mikolajewska [pk: a polish care worker murdered in Bristol in feb 2006], the october men [pk: no clue here] and the martyrs of Morecambe Bay in the ranks of mass migration’s victims; for they are victims, just as surely as any British victim of a migrant criminal.

If we had had an immigration system that worked, De Menezes might have been deported; but at least he would still be alive! […]

Now i can read heartfelt sympathy for all those victims from the quotes above. Almost makes me believe that he really cares for the poor victims. In fact he seems to care so much that he has another blog purely focussed on ensuring that the family of Jean Charles de Menezes will not be compensated for his liquidation by the Metropolitan Police.