Résumé: Un court essai qui introduit des idées questionnant le lieu où se développent l’information et les technologies, comment leur développement peut être lié aux problématiques industrielle et coloniale, de quelle façon cela forme notre perception et notre approche du monde et comment en tant que femme pouvons-nous poser un défi à ce que nous avons hérité perceptuellement et épistémologiquement.

Depuis 1996 je recherche comment les technologies numériques altèrent nos mouvements dans le monde, me concentrant sur les problématiques de l’incarnation et de la présence, sur le virtuel, la simulation, et / ou les qualités illusoires des technologies technocratiques – que veut dire être présent physiquement ? En 2007, nous avons toujours les mêmes questionnements que j’avais en 1999 et sous cet angle, nous pouvons nous demander ce qu’est le progrès et comment sommes-nous mobiles / immobilisés ?

Pour .dpi8 : Cultiver la mobilité, ce texte se réfèrera à de nombreuses problématiques – par perception numérique altérant notre mouvement dans le monde je veux dire le mouvement dans tous les sens – pas seulement la façon dont nous marchons, parlons, dormons, embrassons et baisons; mais aussi qu’est ce qui informe ce mouvement ? Par informe, je ne veux pas dire littéralement où nous nous branchons sur internet pour obtenir de l’information mais plutôt la façon dont Roland Barthes lirait Fragments d’un discours amoureux – en analysant le langage, la structure, la phéménologie et l’épistémologie pour interpréter ce qui arrive à tout moment, à la vitesse et à la mobilité fugace du virtuel, et ainsi répondre de sa présence – être éveillés et attentifs à ce qui se passe ici et maintenant, ce de quoi nous sommes témoins, participants, de ce qu’on organise et de ce quoi nous sommes responsables.

Abstract: A brief essay introducing ideas questioning where information and mediating technologies evolved from, how this development may be linked to industrial and colonial issues, how they shape our perception and approach to the world and how we as women are to challenge what we have perceptually and epistemologically inherited.

Since 1996 I have been researching how digital technologies are altering our movement in the world, concentrating on issues of embodiment and presence, the virtual, simulation, and / or deluding qualities of digital technocracy – what does it mean to be bodily present? In 2007, we remain with many of the questions I had in 1999 and in this light, we can ask what is progress and how are we mobile / immobilized?

For dpi8: cultivating mobility this text will refer to numerous things — by digital perception altering our movement in the world I mean movement in all senses – not only in how we walk, talk, sleep, kiss, fuck; but also in what informs that movement? By informs, I do not mean this literally where we log onto the internet to acquire information but by how Roland Barthes would read a Lover’s Discourse — reading language, structure, phenomenology and epistemology to interpret what is happening in every moment, at the speed and fleeting mobility of the virtual, so as to respond with presence and embodied being — being awake and alive to what is happening here and now, what we bear witness to, are active, organize, and take responsibility for.

I originally wrote this text in 1999 and it was published by the Herland Film and Video Festival in Calgary for their festival program. Since 1996 I have been researching how digital technologies are altering our movement in the world. I have been concentrating on issues of embodiment and presence because of the virtual, simulationist and / or ‘deluding’ quality of digital technocracy – what does it mean to be bodily present ? In many cases, it just means being awake and alive to what is happening right here and now. And being alive and awake means experiencing fully all phenomena of feeling, joy / suffering, in what we bear witness to, are active, organize, and take responsibility for.

In 2007, we remain with many of the questions I had in 1999 and in this light, we can ask what is progress and how are we mobile / immobilized in relation specific conditions of progress. My belief is we cannot have progress — radical revolution where each of us are liberated and empowered equally — without first crucially correcting the structural and epistemological bad habits / bad behaviour we have inherited from Colonialism, empire building, racism, Orientalism, industrialization, feudalism, Patriarchy and their desires for wholesale possession (possession of other lands, other people, wives, objects, wealth, immortality, etc.)

The theme of this issue of dpi8 : mobility can be considered in this text as referring to numerous things. When I talk about digital perception altering our movement in the world, I mean movement in all senses – not only in how we walk, talk, sleep, kiss, fuck ; but also in what informs that movement ? By informs, I do not mean this literally that we log onto the internet to learn how to kiss, but I mean it semiotically in context and relation to how Roland Barthes would read a Lover’s Discourse. It is a skill of reading language, structure, phenomenology and epistemology to interpret what is happening in every moment, at the speed and fleeting mobility of the virtual, so as to respond with presence and embodied being.

This text touches only a few issues I find of importance and curiosity. It is an earlier text in my research and thus it deals with fundamental contextual issues written from a view of one who uses technology while can also happily abandon it. For this version, I have mainly updated my sources and references, saddened to see the acceleration that has occurred, but relieved to know that political, social and environmental activism of specific issues is now less invisible, undermined and/or marginalized.

http://news.bbc.co.uk

What is information?
“Even though information provides the basis for much of contemporary society, it is never present in itself.“
N. Katherine Hayles [1]

I am reminded regularly that we live in an Age of Information. This news always makes me feel nervous as I try ‘to put my finger on it’, to pin information down, to figure out how it provides the basis for what I do and know…

This inability to pin it down triggers unpleasant memories for me. Memories of bureaucratic evasions and/or withheld information in the colony [2] where I grew up. Memories of control the white apartheid government had over other races for whom there were intricate laws keeping everyone in place. Memories of the propaganda and disinformation that was regularly churned out so as to locate and arrest those active against the regime and to discourage many from joining the liberation movement. This too was an information society.

Culturally, I am told, we are in a “critical transition”[3] — a movement of values inherited from an industrialized, tactile culture shifted to an information, digital, culture. I can see how a tool such as my pencil becomes obsolete when I transfer my activity of writing to the language-based system of the digital computer. I can also see how sitting here at this ubiquitously homogenous keyboard, monitor and mouse where I can do virtually anything — write, make movies, send communications, shop, bank, have relationships, make music, draw, paint, etc. — that I’ll still be sitting here without having had any variation of tools to use or of geographic experiences or of direct human interactions. My body remains sedentary and stationary, patient and waiting, while my brain, hands and eyes are active. It is an epistemological shift that changes how our lives are led, how we express ourselves and how we produce cultural meaning. It changes what we know of movement itself – we assume we have become a more cosmopolitan and mobile culture with our cell phones and blueberries. Yet it is also an homogenization of experience and dependency where without fail you can look to any person on the street and see whenever they have a moment they are checking their cell phone or any other digital prosthetic. When I see this, I see how much time it wastes, how much wonder it wastes, how desperate the activity has become, how essentially lonely it is.

In this, I’ve wondered not only to what extent the tool shapes us, but also how the tool shapes the task [4] predetermining what is expressed.

© BASEL ACTION NETWORK

In relation to our economic and political environment, we can read this shift as a change of value systems at the end of late-capitalism. The transition becomes one from production through mechanized industry to production through language-based information. What this means is that many ‘objects’ become translatable into language-based codes. This is what the ‘digital’ does. Before, we could hold a photographic image on paper in our hands. It corresponded with the image we saw when we took the photo. Now we have a disk which holds a digital image built of a coded language. We cannot hold this image in our hands and we cannot see this image unless we have the appropriate media technology. The image does not physically exist. We can only see it when the digital code informs the proper sequence of pixelated lights on our monitor. We all know the feeling when we are unable to open a file on a disk or when a file is corrupted so we cannot access an image. What does this mediation— this dependence on technological prosthetics [5] — do to our sense of self, to perception, creativity and expression? What happens to self-empowerment ?

This is the epistemological shift. It is one where we can have no direct experience of an object when mediated through a digital technology and there is no direct correlation with what we do and the result. For example, hammering on the computer keyboard when writing a letter in anger and the resulting homogenous pre-designed type on the monitor displaying no physical evidence of anger. The visceral and velocity are erased.

© BASEL ACTION NETWORK

From analogue to digital, from tactile to language-based codes, from physical to cerebral, from difference to homogeneity — there is something happening to our perception, to the way we do things, to our value-systems, to consciousness.

For a number of years I have been perplexed by the meaning of our cultural shift. It may have started years ago with acquiring a habit of questioning what is being assumed within a society rooted in instituted racism or sexism. Growing up under apartheid such assumptions were hazardous. Being a Chinese girl in Southern Africa who also happened to be a tomboy, a queer, limits were placed on me by the patriarchal system and the law, yet, I learnt being an outsider enabled me to observe, question and learn creatively within my limitations.

What lies lurking behind information?

In 1989, I realized the impact of information technologies on the lives of Asian and Third World women in the writing of cultural critic Joyce Nelson.[6] I had never believed that a post-colonialism nor a post-industrialism exists and although most of my work uses computer technology I’ve never fully embraced nor trusted how such technology shapes my perception and consciousness nor how it affects my communities.

From Nelson I learnt of the factory environment of micro-electronic parts workers. Many are women in Asia and they daily endure the extreme cold air conditioning necessary to protect semi-conductor parts. The work of bonding microchips means peering through a microscope for ten hours or more a day to solder gold filaments to circuit boards. This includes working with tin and lead solders that emit highly toxic fumes. The combination of severe eye-strain and daily exposure to toxic solders means that within three years a woman bonding microchips is no longer capable of doing the detailed work. Having earned from one to three US dollars a day — without work security, health/pension benefits nor career alternatives — many women are laid off by the age of thirty as they cannot continue due to failing health from unsafe and toxic working conditions. It is estimated that within fifteen years some six million third world women under the age of thirty have been used and discarded by these multinational employers .[7] These were statistics from the 1980s. Even though such statistics are increasingly available because of organized labour such as the Asia Monitor Resource Center based in Hong Kong,[8] increased international solidarity between environmental and labour movements in the East and West, and heightened awareness of health issues around technological industries, environmental wastes and health ergonomics, not much has changed in relation to who makes these components and who suffers the effect of its obvious pollutions – women, children and the poor of developing nations and in production zones such as in Silicon Valley (see The Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition web site, svtc.etoxics.org/site/PageServer)

http://news.bbc.co.uk

© BASEL ACTION NETWORK

FROM EDWARD BURTYNSKY www.edwardburtynsky.com MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES www.mercuryfilms.ca

Added to this are the ecological costs of micro-electronics. At Intel’s microchip factory which can make 5000 silicon wafers in a week : the production of every single six-inch wafer uses : 3,200 cubic feet of bulk gases, 22 cubic feet of hazardous gases, 2,275 gallons of deionized water, 20 pounds of chemicals, and 285 kilowatt hours of electrical power. And for every single six-inch wafer manufactured, the following wastes are produced : 25 pounds of sodium hydroxide, 2,840 gallons of waste water, and 7 pounds of miscellaneous hazardous wastes. In addition to this, it takes more than 700 compounds to make one computer work station. And then designed for near instantaneous obsolescence, more than twelve million computers (300,000 tons of electronic junk) are disposed of annually. Some of these tons are shipped every year to China to be incinerated producing highly toxic pollution.[9]

Such is post-industrialism. It is where labour practices and the exploitation of natural resources continue in the legacy of industrialization. Production in our post-industrial economy has forged a trajectory producing technologies for global use that can be understood as a logical progression of post-colonialism. Here we find multinational corporate agendas creating ideal manufacturing conditions in third world countries where the use of cheap and expendable labour can be carried out without discovery or burden of conscience. More recently, we find that it is not only in the third world where such practices nor health and environmental risks occur. Cancer clusters and high miscarriage rates have been found among high-tech workers in factories in Scotland and the Silicon Valley, California.[10]

I had imagined the computer and information to be clean, to be environmentally friendly. It seems magical how it is contained in its plastic box on my desk not spewing out any malicious fumes like factories of our previous generations. Now I know this is not so. In our contemporary post-colonial legacy of ‘domination’,[11] the push towards digitising technologies is intricately linked to questions of power and control [12] : ‘who has it?’, ‘why do we want it?’, ‘at what or whose cost?’

PHOTOS: EDWARD BURTYNSKY www.edwardburtynsky.com

Where did our bodies go?
“We see our brains and our other products impelling us on a historical course of escalating technological domination; that is, we build an alienated relation to nature…
This logic leads to the superiority of the machine and its products and ensures the obsolescence of the body.“
Donna Haraway [13]

Our desire to push beyond our physical, fleshly limit to attain some form of contemporary enlightenment through information has evolved into a sophisticated level of bodily mediation and technologization. This can be witnessed in our methodical, technological movement towards a virtuality where a mathematical paradigm proceeds to make flesh, blood, bone — and the accompanying instinctive and intuition-based capabilities of the senses — insignificant, obsolete, and replaceable by technological parts and apparatus. Some may consider this mobility, others may consider it immobility, the question is not whether or not we are moving, but what are we choosing to move toward both physically and metaphysically ?
Today, information is a prime currency of exchange in its commodification. This can be seen in the increasing value of information-based products such as software, databases, and the production of archives of scientific information such as the Human Genome and the Visible Human Projects.[14]

Worst case scenarios are always imaginable with human inventions and some of these scenarios have taken place (Hiroshima ; Three Mile Island ; etc) — and with the Human Genome Project’s possibility of bringing to fruition the unpleasant agendas of eugenics supporters is not far-fetched. Similarly, with the Visible Human Project where with the funding assistance of millions of dollars, two cadavers one of a Maryland housewife, and another of an executed Texan murderer have been sliced into vertical pieces like cheese, millimeters in width, to be scanned and recorded for ‘medical’ purposes. As of 1999, this odd (disempowered) couple, paired together for eternity — the ‘Visible Man’ (an executed convict) and the ‘Visible Woman’ (a ‘housewife’) — were subjected to over 18, 000 slices which were scanned and recorded and to date thousands more have been added. Three-dimensional viewing is available on the World Wide Web confirming for me the weird fetishism found in many uses of imaging technologies.

In this digital world, race, class, gender and sexuality become homogenized. There is no difference. A slice of human will represent a slice of every human. There will be a gradual erasure of any expectation for difference. And in this bland future, we may be unable to discern or have patience for something that just is different.

A pause in the acceleration
As cultural workers and as feminists, how can we offer an alternative vision to create a perception and approach that counters this technological and homogenizing consciousness in which we find ourselves? It is not technology that is the problem. It is the means of production within this system (patriarchal, corporate, military-industrial [15]), its values of greed and exploitation, the disempowering and extinction of many marginalized cultures, the unsustainable depletion of natural resources, the hidden and blatant agendas of multinationals and the military, and, our complacence and acceptance of these conditions that are the problem.

How do we renew our feminist vision with ethics and conviction? As our culture is propelled to turn the physical body into text, it is with conviction that I return to retrieve the physical — the body of woman, the body of the other, the lesbian body, the body of colour, the body of sex — all that is different, uncontrollable, considered unclean, to be hidden – joie de vivre / jouissance. I return to this not merely as a representational vision where I circulate representations of these in the world, but as an embodied (post)structural being active within communities — conscientious of how I tread and mark this earth, conscientious and compassionate toward those around me, paring everything down so as to be present and accountable in every moment.

It is from this contemplative position – aware of the tools I use and the intentionalities of our socio-political constructions for their use – that I encounter a new approach to creativity every time.
L A I W A N 1999 / 2007

Notes:
[1] N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers”, October Magazine, issue 66, Fall 1993, Massachusetts: MIT. p. 70.
[2] “Most people during the nineteenth century were aware that the empire was something of a collective improvisation. In the heyday of the empire the Foreign Office was small and overworked…The work was often done by any educated person, however unqualified, working in whatever department, stationed wherever, who felt he had to do it simply because he was British. These people were painfully aware of the gaps in their knowledge and did their best to fill them in. The filler they liked best was information. From all over the globe the British collected information about the countries they were adding to their map. They surveyed and they mapped. They took censuses, produced statistics. They made vast lists of birds. Then they showed the data they had collected into a shifting series of classifications. In fact they often could do little other than collect and collate information, for any exact civil control, of the kind possible in England, was out of the question. The empire was too far away, and the bureaucrats of empire had to be content to shuffle papers.” Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso, 1993. p. 3.
[3] See Paul Virilio’s essay “A Critical Transition” in the anthology ReThinking Technologies, edited by Verena Andermatt-Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993. p. 9.
[4] See Ursula M. Franklin’s Every Tool Shapes the Task: Communities & the Information Highway, Vancouver: Lazara Press 1996.
[5] See Celia Lury’s Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity, London: Routledge, 1998
[6] Joyce Nelson, Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media, Toronto: Between The Lines, 1989
[7] Joyce Nelson, ibid. p. 105.
[8] A non-profit, pro-labour, non-governmental organization based in Hong Kong, Asia Monitor Resource Center (AMRC) www.amrc.org.hk also publishes the Asian Labour Update (ALU) a quarterly news bulletin on labour issues in southern and eastern Asia.
[9] These statistics were found on the website of Corporate Watch www.corpwatch.org/trac/feature/hitech/overview.html from the article The Environmental Cost of Computer Chips www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=3432 written by Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition February 10th, 1997
[10] Corporate Watch: ibid.
[11] “If our experience is of domination, we will theorize our lives according to domination.” Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991. Pg 19. Such theorizing will inevitably result into material manifestations of perception, imagination and enactment / creativity.
[12] I am highly interested in the idea that the computer is a contemporary form of an information panopticon. See Shoshana Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, New York: Basic Books, 1988 p. 319 -.
[13] Donna Haraway, op. cit., p. 22.
[14] The Human Genome Project is an ambitious undertaking on a global scale by government sponsored scientists to identify, document and archive all the genetic markers of the human race. Similarly see the Visible Human Project for digital activities related to the exploration of the human body reshaping moral and ethical boundaries at www.visiblehuman.epfl.ch and www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html
[15] Computer networks, the Internet, email, virtual and simulated realities, heat sensor imaging devices, cameras the size of the tip of the lead of a pencil, satellite communications / surveillance, and, other communications / bio-technology systems were developed by the military for the military. This martial agenda shapes and is shaped by a particular worldview. It is an aggressive global perception and sense of entitlement to possess and also kill – an image, an object or a body. See also Joyce Nelson’s The Perfect Machine: TV in the Nuclear Age, Toronto: Between The Lines, 1987

Additional References:
Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry
edited by Ted Smith, David A. Sonnenfeld and David Naguib Pellow, foreword by Jim Hightower
Temple University Press, 2006 www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1788_reg.html

Edward Burtynsky for the photographs included with this article go to www.edwardburtynsky.com , look to left menu click on: Works: China: Recycling also www.mercuryfilms.ca/misc/Man_Land_trailer.mov

BAN BASEL ACTION NETWORK www.ban.org
Images from www.ban.org/photogallery/index.html Journalists are permitted one-time use of photos that are posted here as long as the Basel Action Network is given credit with © Basel Action Network 2006. Photos may not be used without additional approval from BAN. Contact jpuckett@ban.org

Additional documentaries from BAN:
The Digital Dump: Exporting High-Tech Re-use and Abuse to Africa, a photo-documentary report exposes the ugly underbelly of what is thought to be an escalating global trade in toxic, obsolete, discarded computers and other e-scrap collected in North America and Europe and sent to developing countries by waste brokers and so-called recyclers. In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and ability to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment including computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local experts complain that of the estimated 500 40-foot containers shipped to Lagos each month, as much as 75% of the imports are “junk” and are not economically repairable or marketable. Consequently, this e-waste, which is legally a hazardous waste is being discarded and routinely burned in what the environmentalists call yet “another “cyber-age nightmare now landing on the shores of developing countries.

Exporting Harm: The High Tech Thrashing of Asia
The new hard-hitting documentary on the dumping of toxic computer wastes to China that continues to open peoples’ eyes to the true horror of the high-tech revolution.

Biography
LAIWAN is an interdisciplinary artist and writer of poetics and philosophy based in Vancouver, Canada. Born of Chinese origin in Zimbabwe, she immigrated in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. In 1983 she graduated from ECIAD and started the OR Gallery. She is well published, has curated projects in Canada and Zimbabwe, shown in many exhibitions and is an activist in lesbian, feminist and ‘of colour’ community organizing. She engages in panel discussions, gives solo readings and lectures, and teaches in the MFA Interdisciplinary Arts Program, Goddard College, Vermont, USA.

Recent projects:
DUET: ÉTUDE FOR SOLITUDES (2006) www.yyzartistsoutlet.org
www.imagesfestival.com

CALL NUMBERS: THE LIBRARY RECORDINGS (2007) thelibraryrecordings.eciad.ca