fadaiat chronicle, through spaces at Fortress EU's
10.Oct.04 - ...about the construction of new territories crossing over the Schengen borders... to think of and to take part in the conflicting intensity of the border as the place we live...
"Project's codename is Fadaļat, which means "through spaces" in arab. The word Fadaļat is also used to mean satellite dish and space ship.
After many months of preparation hackitectura and many diverse collectives are working on the field: a very tense and militarized EU border. Our location now is a medieval castle in Tarifa, in front of a detainee migrant camp at the southeastern point of continental Europe. In a few hours we will try the wifi link to Tangiers, Morocco.
More than Fadaļat as a poetic virtual bridge project, or as a symbolic north-south free network link (after Perejil island conflict and the 11-M bombings in Madrid).....The aim of Fadaļat no border temporary media lab is to remain as a permament public media interface, part of the counter hegemonic cyborg that we imagine at the gate of Mediterranean sea."
as published at Smart Mobs 22 june 2004
Madiaq Lan Diagram, geography from satellite view and global connections
FRAME OF ACTION: A LAB ABOUT LABOR, POLITICS AND ART ON THE FRONTIER.
Transactions/fadaļat was an event that happened in June 2004, between Tarifa and Tangier: i.e. on the border between Fortess Europe and North Africa. Continuing with the Multitude Connected project, (La Rabida, Huelva, 2003), it was a social, political, technological and artistic laboratory that brought together a wide group of activists.- migration, labor rights, gender, communication...-, political theorists, hackers, union organizers, architects and artists to think about the relations between freedom of knowledge and freedom of movement in a society of globalised information production.
However, it wasn't only about thinking, but above all about doing: Our aim was to construct a complex situation traversed by a multiplicity of counter hegemonic flows, of bodies and data, with the potential to become a nodal moment in the multitudinary processes emerging in the geopolitical territory of the Straits of Gibraltar: An event able to multiply the rhizome, to multiplex the assemblages, to construct new unconscious, to produce new desires... A catalyst and accelerator of genetic algorithms of new worlds...
Planning of the wifi link, as sent to ITU Morocco Office for permission
DETERRITORIALIZING LIGHTNING
GEO: Tarifa >36 00,1' N 05 36,5' W / Tangier >35 43.4'N. 05 54.6'W DATE: 22-23 June 23 (midsummer night's eve)
The participation of the hackitectura crew focused on the organisation of a decentralised No Border Media Lab, composed by a network of nodes situated on both shores of the strait. The highlight of the media lab consisted in the wi-fi link between Tarifa's castle and Tangier's Marshan. The media lab was conceived like a generating device of a brilliant geography, a deterritorializing cyborg of the frontier connecting the other components of transactions/fadaļat, including the following projects:
* Digital Archive of artistic practices related to the Straits of Gibraltar.
* Freedom of knowledge / freedom of movement encounter between collectives from both shores.
* Zemos98 tv- Transactions: A two day tv-broadcast on Tarifa's local channel.
Direct actions of disobedience against the border regime took also place: A blockade of a Civil Guard bus with migrant detainees that had just arrived to Tarifa's beach, and a demonstration outside the Foreigner Confinement Centre in Algeciras, that culminated with the liberation of two groups of Subsaharian migrants who would have otherwise been illegally deported.
Fadaļat media lab was thought out as an experiment in the construction of the connected multitude - based on heterogeneous and turbulent horizontal networks, collective intellect, cooperation with out command -. Participantes included a diverse array of people linked to indymedia estrecho, canarias and barcelona, psand.net, global telesat, riereta.net, offtv, straddle3.net, artefacte, onnirik, xicnet.com, dregs, zemos98, casa de iniciativas 1.5, casa de la paz, colectivo aljaima, fadaat, hackandalus, elegant mob films, riereta the film, tarifa town council, bnv productions, unia arte y pensamiento, hackitectura.net...
Meeting table about Freedom of knowloge, freedom of communication. Transactions / Fadaļat. Castle of San Guzman, Tarifa
Tangier. North Morocco groups and teachers meeting,ready to transmit the other side.
FRAMEWORK: FROM THE SOCIAL TO THE TECHNOLOGICAL, FROM CODE TO GEOGRAPHY
From our personal perspective, fadaļat was a new attempt to implement a logical mechanism based on the universal language of symbols, allowing, in a few hours, the emergence of a spacial configuration emancipated from techtonic elements: architecture as hardware for the development of processes.
The departure from tectonics is part of what we consider the first phase of "solidification" of other communication options beyond the already corrupted nucleus of people/minds/happiness exchange that the network of networks is becoming as built by the new economy. In a first instance, the departure from tectonics is due to the need to work in the only contemporary framework providing for solid tools of counter-hegemonic action. It is just a new battle field.
In our work we try to subvert the scheme imposed by the infoeconomy in which a swarm of machines, working minds and infocapital organised around a myriad of micro-processes determines the stabilisation of a global state of balance that strengthens hegemony and weakens communication.
This architecture has its principal pillar in the mental gap that can be stolen from the system for the non-production of infocapital: the generation of algorithms of free global communication. Its contribution consists in its potential to create specific spaces of human communication via the reconfiguration of the clouded plasma of data fluxes.
We consider that, for a few hours, in fadaļat we were able to deprogram the system of automatisms which we usually react to the reality of geography with. The flux of anonymous data generated by mediatic cooperation achieved to feed a geographic algorithm, free code produced and supported by multiple nodes that managed to fly over and across all directions of Europe Southern border.
20XX, WHAT'S NEXT
After the attainment of the civil thelematic bridge connecting the northern and southern sides of the border (and its symbolic meaning in the prevailing warmongering logic of the clash of civilizations), several action lines will continue exploring this territory, constructing new relations between communication, mobility, organization and work:
* Intercultural Border Lab "Observatory of the Straits"; a project presented to the award contest of the Castle of Santa Catalina (promoted by the Tarifa City Council), that would allow us to install the wi-fi link as a permanent infrastructure.
* Final realese of the biopolitic cartography of The Straits.
* Mutation of madiaq indymedia towards a post-textual system: locative interface + live streams open administration system.
* Collaborative support in the organization of new indymedia nodes in Tangiers and Larache, Morocco.
* Participation in the organizing team of Hackandalus, the 5th Spanish hackmeeting that will be taking place in Seville - October, 28-29-30th 2004.
* Comission from the DASH-meetings coordination team (against racism and the xenophobia) to organize the next DASH European workshop in Spain, to take place in the spring of the 2005. Proposed topic: Internet live multimedia production networks.
* Critical contribution to the executive meeting of the UNO's World Summit on the Information Society, to take place in Tunis in november 2005.
* Research on the deployment of d.i.y. computers - aluminium boxes, solar visors, photovoltaic cells -, in Southern Europe and Africa - a hardware project lead by Josep Saldaa / context.
* Development of the concept "Fadaļat" as an epistemologic tool to upgrade our understanding of geography, operating at the convergence of the physical and digital space; but also in the Islam/"Western" breach.