and welcome to the E-tribal art project blog.

The aim of this blog is to make the streams of thought flowing around the e-tribal art project visible to us, participants.

It’s a multiauthor blog. Please register. Please post.

Much fun,

Istvan

Every turn and twist in our story follows some spiritual meaning, however erratic and apparently born out of a common senseless search for truth and tribal knowledge in Prahova region in the age of technological servitude. Facing endlessly protracted e-liberation and online social networking we discovered true friendship among ourselves.  The impossibility to immediately and faithfully join the new tools offered by twitter accounts, facebook and myspace brought us many good things.  Even the fact that we constantly seem unplugged and logged off has to be seen as a return to nature. We became a team without an immediate wish to be a team. The struggle to find the stones, the tribulations of our search and the problems we encountered made us from a group of like-minded friends – a true team!

One week ago, we started searching after the fabled stone on the Strada Cascadelor in Bucharest. Strada Cascadelor lies near a famous Flea Market and a lot of Home Appliance and Home Interior Decoration mega-markets in the Western part of the city. We woke up really early in the morning, took a tram to the Valley of the Cascades Street and started wondering for hours trough dust and kilometers of sand stone. Artificial sand stone colored in all the colors  of the rainbow and mostly in the earthen, khaki, brown colors of the earth and the land. All this miles of artificial sand stone samples are ready for your selection. You can choose any style or color you want to have in your apartment. We might say that the artificial sand stone and the Termopan window system – are the single-most impressive addition to the post-communist house environment. Beside the domination of sand-stone canyons there were bathrooms and kitchen design models. There were streets full with just the same samples and the same kind of sand-stone over and over again. Finally we ended up in a warehouse with natural stone deposits. It was stone used for the new gardens, for alleys in the new gardens or monuments or rich peoples houses. It was mostly marble of every color and shape. The kind lady smoking and guarding the stones gave us a sample of stone to try it out. In fact we had an ecologic and feng shui hammer of my father with us and a sculptor’s chisel. Well it didn’t work, the marble was too hard and out of hardship we found a way. Why buy the stone? Why invest in an industry that slowly erodes and destroys our mountains and pollutes our rivers? Why should we not go to the land itself, search for natural remains, search for the bounty of the land and the glory of our rocks found in real nature.  In fact without actually knowin we were revolting against the dominant sand stone that imitates natural stone or the join-up of e-tribalism that imitates real friendship.

Thus Cobilanschi told me lets go to the rivers and moutains and ask for somebody to record and film our endeavour. Cobilanschi who lived in the Militari neighborhood  for a long time and barely holding back his emotion of seeing the communist flat were he stayed. We decided to take the train and to go to the town of Campina, as well as to go in the hilly sourroudings of the Cornu village.  Our artist-friend and kind cameraman was Simion Cernica, a native of Drumul Taberei, living near the International Post Office. The fourth party of our group is an unnamed person. He wishes to keep his identity secret, so i will call him our friend from now on. I can only tell you that he is a student at the Geology and Earth Sciences University in Bucharest. He was actually our guide in the search for the natural stones and he helped us develop what we call the “ZACAMANT” concept.  ZACAMANT would be actually the perfect word for our whole entreprise. It is more than a simple geological deposit, more than oil fields. We were digging for the sense of this word conected with another related Romanian word – ASEZAMANT. ASEZAMANT would be a place of cult, a place of importance, a place from the national or international patrimony, a cultural space, a cultural headquarters for everything that the land has more preciouss and important in cultural terms.

ZACAMANT is the natural counterpart of ASEZAMANT. It is the natural heritage, the bounty of the land, the natural reserves of your country.  ZACAMANT is the proof that the country is still rich, that the bounty is endless, that the reserves are hidden, that they are to be searched for. The ZACAMANT could well be under your feet, it could be one hour with the train away from the city.  We extended ZACAMANT to mean the creative power of the country and its people.  ZACAMANT could be the final recongnition that the land has everything we need right here right now.  ZACAMANT is the treasure of the tribe, it is the inheritance for the future, for an uncertain future and the means of survival of that tribe.  ZACAMANT is the things we have to cherish and protect. We managed to wake up and take the train and from Campina we went directly from the train station to the Prahova River.

We started thinking that everybody should admire and love what we forgot we could love. We  started collecting the local wild Sea-buckthorn. From all the species of buckthorn, the common Sea-buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) is by far the most widespread, with a range extending from the Atlantic coasts of Europe right across to northwestern China. Grown widely throughout its native China and other mainland regions of Asia, sea-buckthorn is an herbal medicine used over centuries to relieve cough, aid digestion, invigorate blood circulation and alleviate pain. In Mongolia, extracts of sea-buckthorn branches and leaves are used to treat gastrointestinal distress in humans and animals. Bark and leaves are used for treating diarrhea and gastrointestinal and dermatologic disorders. Topical compressions are used for rheumatoid arthritis. Flowers may be used as a skin softener. For its hemostatic and anti-inflammatory effects, berry fruits are added to medications for pulmonary, gastrointestinal, cardiac, blood and metabolic disorders in Indian, Chinese and Tibetan medicines. Sea-buckthorn berry components have potential anticarcinogenic activity.  In Romania it is called “catina” and it is clearly an instance of  ZACAMANT! Around the banks of the river Prahova we started finding strange signs of somebody actually preceding us there. Somebody else had started collecting stones from the river, braking them and leaving their remains there. Who was it? When did they do it? It is great to follow in the steps of somebody that was there before you.

Well we walked up the sourrouding hills, between bountyfull gardens full of fresh apples and ripe fruits, in the blazing sun, sweating like oxen, and up up we went. We drank water from the fresh, bubbling, icecold springs. Have you ever pourred some spring water on your foot after hours of sandaled walking in the end of the summer? It is bliss. Going beyond the city-people villas guarded by the locals, the swiming pools, the surveillance cameras guarding the orchard, the fancy cars looking for the next motel, straight to the top to the monastery of orthodox nuns. This is a new monastery lying just on the abrupt edge of the hill, nearly sliding down on the other side into the chasm. Here, the young  nuns were busy building the monastery. On one said, like a sign from above, we found the stones! The ZACAMANT was there on top,  gathered by kind people for the good of the monastery, for its foundations and for building new cells for the nuns. After we chose the two stones for our tablets, we started walking down the hills trough the wilderness eating wild berries and wild apples. Thus, we got back to Campina to meet our friends Raluca Voinea and Eduard Constantin, both of them living in this town and glad to walk us through its surroudings and terraces.

Please follow us also next week, while we return to the fabled Prahova region for a memorial tour to the place were Aurel Vlaicu, the pioneer of Romanian Aviation, the Romanian Icarus of our technological destiny has crashed after trying to fly over the Carpathian mountains on the 13th of September 1913.

I thought also about the spiritual improvement of this blog and the sectorulcultural.info so i decided to add each time i make an entry a book that had impact on both the Romanian readership after 1989 and on us as participants in the e-tribes project:

After the revolution of 1989 one of the most influent books that had a profound impact of the rediscovery associated with the Orient and India in particular, in a vein going back to the Romanian-born historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, was the novel Der Pilger Kamanita/Pilgrimen Kamanita (1906, i.e. The Pilgrim Kamanita) by Karl Adolph Gjellerup. Probably many have followed this path.

the book

This project takes as its focus local and global environmental crisis.We have seen in 2009  a new pandemic and dangerous form of collective hallucination – rippling throughout the countries of the world, known generally as PIG flu. In this project we suggest that there is a direct correlation between the name PIG (which also stands for the advent of a Post Internet Generation)  and ‘the  trembling world’ where there is no guarantee of human survival beyond the niddle of this century.  Those who live now and who will live into the next fifty years have their  psyches marked, scarred and touched by the  environmental and ecological imbalance which faces us all.  Our project will help to profile the wisdom of the Mamo – an incredibly important tribe living in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Colombia who are facing a deep environmental crisis caused by the theft and destruction of  sacred stones and invasion of sacred places in the landscape which they believe they must uphold and preserve to help maintain the harmony and health of the whole world.  Reaching out to the world – using contemporary technologies – we will seek to recuperate and heal their landscape…..and to draw attention to their wisdom and vision. One of their Leaders said earlier this year:

‘Our sacred sites, such as Jukul-wa, are not part of the commercial world.  We have always respected what is sacred.  We cannot go freely to these places and these sacred sites cannot be bought and sold.  This is not a new message, we have been saying this for years. Ah…
The world may begin to tremble.

We do not know who is going to fall sick first, but we are expecting pandemics, and because these are manifestations of the sickness suffered by nature itself, it is going to be hard to find drugs that can cure the coming sickness.

Negative forces are going to continue to grow stronger, so we ourselves must continue working positively so that the consequences can be averted.  We must work together with the Younger Brother, and now that species are disappearing we must explain what is going on.  This is happening because they are acting against the sacred sites that are Owners of these species.
This is what we know from our long analysis, and we must not only show this to the Western world, but to other indigenous peoples.  They must decide what they must do within their own territories.  Each one of us must decide what we are going to do. More and more indicators appear, like the birth of deformed children, as sacred sites are interfered with.  That is our thought and this above all we will continue saying to the world.  This is why we were born and live and this is what we declare.  We invite other indigenous people and all people in the world to grasp the situation in which we now live’.

As we see the emergence of PIG flu this year in manhy countries we wonder if the Mamo Leaders’ words are coming true.  There is evidence that those suffering from this flu have had treatment by drugs  which cause nightmares and that we suggest that these can add up collective nightmare (beyond a hallucination). Over time this can lead to the loss of memory of what is important…..perhaps even the arrival of a Post Internet Generation…. PIGs will lose memory of activities, actions and rituals which are in 2009-2010 commonplace…from networked media to mobile technologies. Sometime in the future, a search will take place to recall this lost knowledge which will contain warnings about how to avoid disaster and wipeout in the future. The key task now will be to  to help the future generation and we seek to do this by helping to restore the sacred stones to the Mamo tribe now…..it may be the last act of the internet generation.

We propose to work with a group of people living across the network working collectively together – with branches of the bricolabs list helping to spread the word out speedily in the next few months – to build a collectiveintelligencyagency and new source of aid for the Mamo people….We have help already offered from the  e-tribes in Brazil and I will be meeting some of them when I visit Brazil in November.

Our approach to helping to create the codes/content will be:

Write an essay announcing the project

Do an inventory of where the Mamo sacred stones are around the world (recruit people to help find these and upload the information onto a new website) and show on a map where they lie

Recruit legal help to advise on returning the stones to their rightful places

Work with the Mamo leaders and the Trust which represents their life (which is London based) to communicate through online stories and images to progression of this work…to reach out to others around the network…to think and dream together to create awarenss of the Mamo belief systems which hold important messages for the whole world facing environmental degradation and ruination…..to prepare a set of narratives and drawings and tales to bring to the E-Tribal exhibition next spring…..

Hold onto the Trembling World…!

Bronac

the account corpse muji zapedzki has finished a demo version of a kind of advertising website for the project „the last days of second life”. here it is:

www.movement-for-account-corpses.de/expedition.html

your comments, suggestions or objections are very wellcome. (apart from „the read stroke on the picture looks digustingly ugly”. muji knows this already)

next week muji will start to spread open calls for the project around the world. if you could help spreading this call even wider (to mars for example), this would be wonderful.

(soon but not yet), the project websites will be:

www.the-last-days-of-second-life.de
www.die-letzten-tage-von-second-life.de

cheers from muji zapedzki & sus

ps. still in the secret planning phase is a cross project extension to the project of iana and katia

12 August 2009?
delivery – description of art projects
(project idea, format, members of the project team, resources needed for production, timeline for production)
please send to: office[-at-]altart.org

15 September 2009
delivery – documentation for the E-Tribal Art publication

26 July – 1 October 2009
research and artwork production

15 October 2009
delivery – functional artwork (beta version)/online publishing

15 December 2009
delivery – description of the format of the presentation of the work in the Cluj festival

February 2010 (exact dates to be confirmed in advance)
E-Tribal Art Festival, Cluj

The artworks should deal with the topics of electronic tribes and should contribute to test new ways of reaching electronic tribes, the way the art discourse is altered in this context, and the difference an artwork can make in an electronic tribe. The artwork should contribute to exploring new perspectives on communicating with audiences and bringing electronic communities a deeper understanding of the new social structures engaged.

The artworks should be designed to work and be primarily exhibited in the virtual space, in electronic communities. They have to be interactive and may take the form of/include video, installations, photography, performative acts, text, augmented reality without being limited to these forms and media.

We will provide a production budget of 500-1000 EUR per artwork. The exact budget of the artwork will be agreed upon once the art project concept and format will be finalized.

Whom to get in contact with?

For matters concerning the projects themes and content, please get in touch with the curators:
Istvan Szakats, istvan[-at-]altart.org, mobile +40 724 510464
Thomas Dumke, dumke[-at-]cynetart.de, mobile +49-173-9492981

For project management issues, including production costs for the artworks, please contact:
Rarita Zbranca, rarita[-at-]altart.org, mobile + 40 723 263072

Project timeline

24-26 July 2009
start up meeting, Sofia

12 July 2009
delivery – description of art projects
(project idea, format, members of the project team, resources needed for production, timeline for production)
please send to: office[-at-]altart.org

15 September 2009
delivery – documentation for the E-Tribal Art publication

26 July – 1 October 2009
research and artwork production

15 October 2009
delivery – functional artwork (beta version)/online publishing

15 December 2009
delivery – description of the format of the presentation of the work in the Cluj festival

February 2010 (exact dates to be confirmed in advance)
E-Tribal Art Festival, Cluj

transtribalism – otherness (ex. serbs in austria)
-the relation of the diaspora with the home community
-diaspora is developing its own aethetics (ex. videos, jokes)
-delay in spreading value from the mother community
-issue: creating a metaphor of the place

tools that can be used: weblog / print / more
icons and gods
church
15 minutes of fame turning to god for a week (e.g. Youtube gods)
religion (as a game)
different iconography
followers of the God or prophet (e.g. on twitter)

dealing with the phenomenon represented by facebook / twitter / pirate bay
- there is a corporation behind the corporation, a regime of market logic
dealing with mined data
- the necessity of porting
-developing cross platform stuff
method: faking up/downloads to draw attention
trust in pirate bay no more?
drawing attention and generating traffic: camouflaged torrent tracker
-”downloading from this link and this link is BAD. If it does not work, then downloading from this link is also BAD”

what bothers us with tribes (what sucks)
impression management
-easier done online than offline
-offline: mediated by the body (socially produced)
-online: rituals that can be manipulated
creating elements for creating succesful communication
why leechers suck
leeching exploited by corporations – corporations are leeching leechers
problem with leechers – giving the community nothing
how leechers are socially perceived (non-cooperative)
-demonizing leeching
the leecher manifesto

network / physical world
to create DIY terminals
gathering people with these terminals
ex. blowing in a hole – wind coming out of another hole
converting the “e” (ex. extend, emotional)
survival as a matter of now (not as part of a postapocalyptic scenario)

1. of tools
A tool (e.g. a club) is an extension of the hand. Generally, tools are the extensions of men. Tools open new dimensions for individual acts, and extended, open new dimensions for social acts. Internet is such a tool. Tools have limitations – some obvious, some hidden, and suspicion starts creeping in our social network hype that internet as a social tool may just not live up to our initial enthusiasm. There is still an oldschool charm in face to face meetings that virtuality cannot produce. The european knowledge society is not happening in the pace trumpeted by the Lisbon Strategy. E-democracies seem yet to be unimaginable. But there is hope. E-economies start to emerge in Warcraft. The social experience called Wikipedia is producing real-time negotiated knowledge. A feeble intuition of optimism seems to be justified.. after all life expectancy on Earth is rising.

2. of work
The tool called electronic communication lies at the very heart of our work processes. Work is becoming more and more immaterial and so does its result, the product. What used to be measurable in kilos and cubic metres is turning to intellectual services – and these are turning slowly to social services – more and more the articulation of the social instinct than of the intellect. So is now work social services based on electronic communication, producing the texture of society itself? Yes, but not yet. Russians don’t grow corn on motherboards and argentinian beef don’t feed on microchips. Chinese don’t produce everything else on flat screens. Social etopia is closer to Europe than to Africa. Still.. even their (work-centered or not) social organization is more and more optimized by electronic communication.

3. of tribes
Community is a word that got filled with egalitarianism -if not political correctness. Denying inequalities, hierarchical relationships, social ranks or power structures inside an electronic community is worse than lying: it is counter-productive. Tools like the stone hammer and the wheel made a difference – and helped producing tribes – at our beginnings. So can we claim we evolved so much that using our new fancy tool capable of producing the texture of society itself we will produce by default no less than civilizations? No. Chatrooms have a powerful vertical hierarchy. Collectible websites have their roles, functions and meanings are permanently negotiated. So what social complexity can a cluster of humans reach communicating in electronic space? Democracy? Feudal state? Tribe? Seem as it may like avatars playing society – in fact, it is people producing society. The word tribe shows the social turmoil beneath the screens.

4. of regimes
Communities rely on a common understading of what value and ultimately good is. Ways to attain maximum good are called right. Ways that attain maximum good over the sum of society define justice. But some members have a bigger capacity than others to construct and negotiate the meaning of good. These members are asserting power.  Political functions emerge. Relying on the meaning of good negotiated in a hierarchical tree of human nodes, regimes are born. Regimes are hierarchical too and often exploit each other. The regime called fashion is leeched by the regime called market which in turn is feeding fashion. But truth negotiated in one regime is not necessarily deductible in another. So in the case of a clash there is little hope of reconciliation as no translation of truth is available. When there is none, we have the ultimate war: the holy one.

5. of interventions
Interventions (disruptions or exploits) in technology can produce significant societal changes. So does the redefining or hijacking of truth, good, right or of meaning itself. So does the use or misuse of power. All this was no less true when our top technology was the club. It’s just that this technology is the one through which the social instinct itself manifests. In a material production setup the output object (like a book) generated social debate, then attitude, then action, then change. Control over the output meant control over the tool, over the production input, over the process, over production time.  Concerning internet, none of these are de facto controlled by anyone. And the chain to inducing social change is at least one seam shorter with the object output by communication technology is debate itsellf. Thus intervening becomes a unique privilege: never before has technology been so close to producing the texture of society itself.