Guys. The end is nigh … Unless the revolution starts now. No wait. It should have started yesterday! … There I go again, falling into my pessimistic outlook.

But really, is it already too late to save the world?
We can only speculate, only time will tell.
At any rate, profound change needs to happen and fast, now, yesterday, or it will certainly be too late.

So what do I think is wrong? What needs to change?

Well, where do I start? We managed to create such a mess on this planet, that it’s quite difficult to decide where to begin.

We are the 99 %

The deregulated financial market has gone out of hand years ago. It is a miracle, that it has not collapsed yet. The gap between the super rich and the poor has increased to perverse levels. The greed of some of the super rich seems to know no limits.

Any economy that declares certain companies “too big too fail” will sooner or later be in real trouble. At that point the power shifts from the state to the corporations and we no longer live in a democracy. The super rich and their companies hold all governmental bodies by the balls. Democracy has turned into a de facto oligarchy.

While most of the super rich stay in the background and influence politics through lobbies and campaign support, some of them get openly involved in politics. In Switzerland, just as an example, one of the richest guys in the country, also runs and probably pretty much finances – we don’t know for sure, since there is no obligation for transparency – the Swiss People’s Party, running on a populist and xenophobic agenda that is about as right wing as it can get before turning brown. His main goals, deregulation and social cuts, typical neo con fair, thinly disguised underneath the immigration issues and xenophobia that he uses to scare and mobilize the masses. Who profits from his politics? The rich and super rich? Yet who supports Blocher and his party in Switzerland? The farmers and socially disadvantaged. It is so frustrating to watch and rarely so obvious, but in Switzerland money really does buy political influence.

In Switzerland 1% of the population own 59 % of the wealth. That is an even more extreme ratio than say in Germany or the US. This ratio is as extreme as the one in Columbia. The problem in this country, the “poor” people here are still pretty well off, unemployment is low, social services function, the wealth somehow seems to trickle down. But even worse, we are all collectively responsible for this situation. In a sense all Swiss citizens profit from big business and the banks, these same banks that generate their blood money by offering tax haven and banking secret to the super rich from around the world. Name one of the recently toppled dictators who didn’t have a Swiss bank account … The Swiss are collectively caught in this scheme, which leads to reactions from shame to cynical boasting.

Meanwhile a mixture of guilt and outrage over deregulation and social cuts has finally brought a timid group of people here in Switzerland to join the international occupy movement in protest.

But will we be able to reach a critical mass and motivate any real change? It’s late in the game … We are already in extra time.

We are a cry from the heart of the World

Even more grave, and of course totally related to corporate greed is our environmental situation. Our planet is overpopulated and it’s not looking as if population growth will slow down anytime soon – sauf catastrophe.

Human population was able to grow out of proportion, because of medical advances and industrial agriculture. Big agriculture relies on fertilizers made from and produced with fossil fuels as well as a distribution system that relies on oil. Most areas where Big Agriculture grows corn and wheat would no longer yield anything, unless more and stronger fertilizer keeps getting added. The top soil is pretty much depleted, should we stop to add these fertilizers in these areas, we would be left with a pile of dust that would blow away in the wind.

Meanwhile many scientists claim, that we have already moved beyond Peak Oil, meaning our oil reserves will start to run out soon, with the immediate effect that fuel will get more expensive. Fossil fuels also contribute heavily to global warming and other potential ecological catastrophes. We look at overpopulation made possible by a resource about to be depleted, and at the same time this is just one of the mechanisms, that might well lead to the demise of our species.

We poison our food with chemical agents to preserve it, make it look better, fluffy, shiny, white or what not. On the markets we speculate on food, pushing the price of corn and wheat to record levels, which in turn contributes in large part to world hunger. Of the 7 billion people on this planet 1 billion are poor, which means they can experience catastrophic famine at any moment.

As if these potential disasters were not grave enough add to these nuclear waste, water scarcity, and the many more toxic and poisonous materials humans have produced and discarded into landfills, and all this why? To satisfy our greedy consumerist lifestyle …

Nature is pretty much fucked. We should have started to unfuck it years ago. The timid attempts to protect nature that were initiated over these last years just did not go far enough. Is there still time to save the planet?

This is the beginning of the beginning

The past few years I have been compulsively checking my Twitter feed for messages announcing impending doom. I had pretty much lost all hope that we can turn this mess around. Ask me then, I would have answered, it is too late, we have let things go too far.

But instead last winter and spring I read about the arab spring, then spain, and in summer I found #occupywallstreet, and all this has given me hope. I might project too much on it, but here finally are people who are saying enough is enough and doing so in a non-violent, creative, constructive ways. It took off in the US and when it came to Switzerland naturally I joined. It’s been fun and constructive, but I keep wondering why there are not more people getting involved.

I am grateful to see the occupy movement taking a stand and I fully support it. But how can we affect real change? We are looking at such profound changes that need to happen, many of us, even some protesters, will have trouble to accept them. Consumerism is everywhere and some of the stuff money buys is so fucking cool.

Create the Change You wish to see in the World

The deregulated global economy? It needs to collapse.
Corporations effectively running our governments? That needs to stop.
Or their greed will simply kill us all.
But every single one of us need to be willing to make huge sacrifices individually and change our ways.

In my own life I have tried to change to a very careful and respectful life style. But there is only so much I can do, and, if I am perfectly honest, so much I am willing to do. I grow my own vegetables, eat only organic vegetarian food, use public transport, no longer own a car, we even moved to a so called ecological development, that turned out to be one huge disappointment, but that’s another story. But so much is wrong with all the things i currently do, much of it does serve not much more of a purpose, than to appease my own guilt. For instance, I can only grow food because I got lucky and happen to live in the small area on the earth, where that is even possible, right climate, enough water, good topsoil. Move me to central Spain or Africa, and my project goes bust. In other words, I am privileged on so many levels. And then I still love my gadgets, my plasma TV and my hip clothing way too much. Just last week I bought some winter boots “Made in China”, knowingly. Yes. i felt guilty, but I still bought them.

The annoying demand for demands

Some people will read this and say “duh”. Others will reject it with violent denial. Most won’t ever read it, since I am just one small voice on the huge internetz adding to the noise. Even I wonder, why I would suddenly feel the need to state the obvious here?

Everybody, the press and everyone else, keeps pointing out that the Occupy Movement does not have a list of clear demands. We are confronted with a ferocious demand for demands. But look at the state the world is in, look at all the problems we have to address, so much is going wrong. If anything, we have too many demands. And as naive as this may sound, we mainly just want a better world.

And this quote might also explain it:

you can’t just say, we demand a world of peace, demands have to be specific. [yet] anything that people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse. and that entire political discourse is already too small. and that’s why making explicit demands kind of reduces the movement and takes the heart out of it. that’s a real paradox, but I think the movement understands that [source: the revolution is love]

Here’s how I would say it: If humanity is running straight into the open knife, do we need to stop humanity from running or do we have to take down the knife? Probably both, and that is why this task feels sooooo enormous… It feels overwhelming. I am confused and I don’t have the solution. But I am willing and exited to start the process and to look into possible ways, and to learn how to find consensus and interact with others in a non-violent, democratic way. Let the change we want to see in the world be the guideline of how we go about it.

Only tribes will survive

Food, Energy and Finance are the three main areas where huge shifts need to happen fast. However we could get there faster by starting at the other end, by building tribes, by organizing ourselves in our neighborhoods, to grow our own food, share our resources, our fridge space, our kitchens, to reduce our collective carbon footprint, etc. asf.

Maybe the shit really does need to hit the fan before things start to change. Some of the solutions we now develop might well have to be for post-apocalyptic times. It might well have to be the end of the nation state as we know it and the dawn of a new way to organize humans into smaller, localized communities and tribes. “Small is beautiful”. “Bolo’Bolo”. Localized, regional economies and live-work units interwoven with each other, in touch with nature and socially responsible must replace the nation state.

Anselm Kiefers show wasn’t even on the official map. But his work rocked the Biennale.
Anish Kapoor is not as overrated as I thought.
Urs Fischer is much much MUCH more overrated than i thought.
Hirschhorn is a brilliant man that makes me proud to be Swiss.
Someone told us that we were probably too heterosexual to understand a video.
The food in Venice still sucks.
I finally seem to understand how sleep deprivation torture works.

Say what?

Sorry. Yeah let me take that again from the top.
Last week we went to Venice for a few days to visit the 54th Biennale.
It was as awesome and as annoying as usual. My love-hate relationship to this art festival in particular and to this city in general has yet again peaked. Like every visit. It is kind of pointless to write a review at this point, the Biennale has been going on for some months already. These then are just some pretty random thoughts to add to the noise…

One of the totally interesting things when visiting the Biennale in Venice is to try and discover trends between the various national contributions. Every nation sends the art they think currently represents them, this happens independently between nations. But if then there are strong parallels between the contributions this seems to point to something like zeitgeist.

Many Pavilions this year went for a strong construction site look. The amount of construction materials reused as art was staggering. Some of them went for the messy look (England, UAE, Swiss), others for a cleaner approach (France, Turkey, Israel). But all of the artists used construction materials as the basis for their installations.

For us this culminated when we stumbled into what must have been a janitors room and were unsure if this was art or in fact just, well, a janitors room. To this day we don’t know… We has a good laugh. I kept wondering while puzzeling over these piles of pipes, styrofoam, concrete, bricks, mortar, some of it was great art (Hirschhorn, Nelson), what would an actual construction worker say to this if you brought him here?

“Is this just a mess or is this art?”, became our running gag.

Another thing that struck me was the aggressiveness and violence of most of the ex-yugoslavian contributions. Why is that? Year to year they seem to go to more extremes. I have no explanation for this.

One of the weak spots again, as is often the case at the Biennale, was the Arsenale show, where one big shot curator gets to fill the huge rooms. This does not work for me. If you don’t like the curators choice, you get nothing, and you just walk and walk. And you usually notice this during the first few rooms of the show. As an international festival this makes no sense. On one hand you have all the national contributions from around the world, which represents a very democratic model, and on the other hand you have this huge Ego-trip curator in the center, a dictatorial model.

The curation by Bice Curigere was the weakest I have seen in all my visits to Venice Biennale so far, the art on show was much too decorative and purely textural. Anti-narrative. Anti-political. Just shapes and effects. To me this is empty and blah. The Urs Fischer piece at the center of the Arsenale show summed this up perfectly. Total fail.

A very interesting counter-model of this One-Curator Ego-trip was actually presented in the Padiglione Italia. Art Historian Vittorio Sgarbi had asked 250 Italian Intellectuals to each pick their favorite piece of art. The result was a very busy, if not overcharged exhibit, chaotic and raw, a sort of Wunderkammer, that first overwhelmed you, but later started to inspire more and more. I must have spent more time in these rooms than anywhere else. This also is a pretty great way to crowd source curate an art show. Very Democratic. The title of the show says it all, “L’Arte non è cosa nostra”, Art is not a mafia thing. It keeps growing on me.

Padiglione Academia was another highlight, that showed something like 200 young italian artists, that all finished their art school degrees in this century. Again, the work shown was quite varied, but also very exiting, fresh, innovative. What especially pleased me were the many painted works, much less video, installation than you’d expect from young artists.

Anish Kapoors Ascension is as amazing as somehow brutal. The pipes that lead into the San Giorgio Maggiore church from the outside make it such an offensive statement, yet inside the church, the clash is minimal and the effect huge. Three Anselm Kiefer Pieces were shown in a small museum that wasn’t even on the official map. Loved them. I might be a Kiefer groupie.

Highlights:

- Padiglione Italia (read above)
- Padiglione Academia (read above)
- Hirschhorn, Swiss pavilion, the playful mess pulls you in and makes you wonder why you didn’t come up with this aesthetic…
- Mike Nelson, UK pavilion, the dusty workshop uncovers more and more levels
- Christoph Schlingensief, German pavilion, must read more about this dude, nice hommage, R.I.P.
- Markus Schinwald, Austrian pavilion, great work in reshaping the architecture and surprising art everywhere.
- Chewing the scenery, brilliant looped performance
- Michael Parekowhai, New Zealand pavilion, grumpy sculptures
- Hans Op De Beek, One of a Thousand Ways to Defeat Entropy, dark and moody as wel love it
- Anish Kapoor, Ascension
- Anselm Kiefer, Salt of the Earth [image above]

Lowlights:

- Arsenale ILLUMinations, weak, flat, empty
- Urs Fischer, dude, the show last six months, how can you show something that burns down and melts?
- Turkish pavilion, oh really, pipes?
- Egypt pavilion, closed

Misses: (things we wished we didn’t miss)

- South africa pavilion, with all the controversy. And we were right there… and missed it
- Karla Black, Scotland pavilion, again, we missed this by maybe one block.
- Norway pavilion, we couldn’t find one, then didn’t bother with the others.

No city in Italy gets away with a. having such shite food and b. such aggressive mosquitos from hell (during third night we had to kill 9 mosquitos in sequence = Sleep deprivation torture). Yet we keep coming back… Every two years…
See you in 2013. If the world hasn’t gone down by then.

“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” . Einstein (Cited by Paul Davies)

I just got back from Ars Electronica in Linz and here I am trying to sort my impressions.
This years festival left me with very mixed feelings.
On a personal level this was the first time in many years, that I did not visit Ars Electronica to blog and write about it. Of course i still ended up spamming twitter, flickr and instagram with the usual useless observations and crap photos.
I had skipped last year, and so this time I just wanted to go as a normal visitor, looking for exiting things, seeking inspiration.
I wanted it to be more like a vacation. Less like a job.
But that distinction is a vague one.
What I did notice is how I went after information in a much more casual way.
It should have been more, go with the flow, and follow where inspiration leads you.
In that sense i had hoped to enjoy myself more. The only problem was that not much really inspired me.

But uhm. This years festival was quite science heavy, and who would have expected otherwise reading about the theme and the announced collaboration between Ars Electronica and CERN. However, I do think that especially for the symposium there could have been more speakers who manage to draw a nicely drawn bridge between science and the arts.

Towards the end of the second morning session of the Origin Symposium a woman took the microphone to ask one of the last questions. “I am not a scientist, i am just a simple designer”, she started with a sheepish smile, “Can i still believe that all this research will eventually lead to some really interesting future possibilities, like beaming matter or replicating food or water. Can we hope for innovations that or is this really silly of me?” (paraphrased).

To me this woman’s question summarized the mood at the symposium this year. She apologized for being an artist! The scientist, Rolf Heuer from CERN, answered in a deadpan way, “Nope, won’t happen, not in my life time. and probably not in a few more life times to come” (paraphrased). And he added, he would not even want to be beamed from one place to the other. And there you have it, how could it happen, anytime, if it is not being pursued? But joking aside, let’s forget about beaming for a moment, maybe the artists could indeed ask these silly questions and inspire science to go after the cool futuristic stuff, that we stupid people want. Yay!

In that sense the talk by Malina was one the most inspiring ones. When scientists and artists work together, he cautioned, they should be careful not to mangle or equalize their approaches. Each should look at the problem from their respective vantage points. This of course assumes that the artistic and the scientific viewpoint are as clear cut and as far apart as they sometimes seem to be. In practice this may often not even be the case. But it is still a valid point to make from a theoretical point of view.

Other than the Malina talk, Maturana and De Kerckhove would be the talks from the Origin Symposium that I recommend to watch on the Ars Electronica Youtube Channel. Maturana vexed me to no end with his almost cute stance that nothing is objective, everything emotional, lifting his shoulders, what else? His analysis of the human predicament was right on, the deconstruction was precise and accurate, but in his conclusion, he just leaves things hanging in eternal subjectivity. A lot of it is like Buddhists, pointing out that everything is empty and nothing is real, but without the potential for transcendence and objectivity that Buddhist deconstruction aims for. De Kerckhove convinced in his usual eloquent and witty style, but also amusingly struggled with his PowerPoint slides, that can be found here.

The most inspiring talks happened on Sunday morning during the morning session optimistically entitled “After the Revolution” of the Public Square Squared conference hosted by Sasaki/Mao. All the three woman were totally inspiring speakers, Lina Ben Mhenni on Tunisia, Zeyna Tufekic on Eqypt and Leila Nachawati on Syria and Spain, talking about this years protests in these countries and the role of socialmedia. Sasaki did a very nice job integrating the twitter stream in the background #square2 into the discussion.

What else? I saw many cute cute robots that i want to adopt.

i quite liked a theater piece consisting of a conversation on poetry between an android and an actress, Android Human Theater: Sayonara, safecast.org (I want to get involved) was there with Joi Ito et al. (Joi has since posted two interesting blogs that sum up somewhat the points he was making in his talks: Designing systems for transparency robustness, Safecast and CC0). Usman Haque spoke about pachube.com (I want to get involved). After seeing it in Geneva it was great to see Das Kapital by Christin Lahr again. Every day she donates one cent to save the national deficit to an account at the Deutsche Bundesbank, in the memo section the 108 signs are used to upload small excerpts of Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Oh yes and Metachaos by Alessandro Bavari, dark, delirious and pretty great animation won a Nica, and of course, any animation that can beat The External World, has to be fantastic…

METACHAOS from Alessandro Bavari on Vimeo.

When I made my way to the train station last night i started to speak to a taxi driver. This guy was ecstatic and right away he asked me, if i was in Linz for Ars Electronica? “I love this festival”, he raved, “best week in the year”. I asked him why, if he went see any of the the art or conferences? Nope. Just the fact that he could drive international guests to and from the airport. He makes more money than in any other week of the year. And oh yeh, he did go see the Fireworks/Soundwolke. So there.

[might add more stuff later ... too drowsy now]

A few weeks ago i finished reading Lierre Keith’ book The Vegetarian Myth – food, justice, sustainability – a powerful and very angry manifesto against the vegetarian/vegan diet. While I still have trouble digesting some of the information, I have to say, she does a great job collecting lots of facts, that I might already have read somewhere or other, but in their combination these facts form an argument that makes a very strong case.

I have been a vegetarian for 25 years, and as far as health, at least anything to do with food and nutrition, i am doing perfectly fine with this diet. I am fully aware that for some people (very often for women) it is not the most healthy choice to go vegetarian, I remain convinced that it is possible for many of us to eat lacto-ovo vegetarian diets and have no health issues what so ever. This would be a first point, where i disagree with Keith. She argues that this is inconceivable, anyone will start to run into health issues on this diet. If we limit her claim to the vegan diet, i would agree with her. But a smart vegetarian life style, eating local, seasonal food, supplemented with b12 vitamins, enough raw milk products and eggs, no problem.

I still believe, as has been my conviction for the last 25 years, that if more people would move towards a vegetarian diet, this would be beneficial for our planet from an ecological point of view. I would not impose strict vegetarian diets on anyone, but i think to limit meat intake to a few times per week, would help our planets ecosystem. For me personally, even if i wanted to get back to eating meat, i simply could not do it. I gag even thinking about it, the smell of burned meat repels me, the sight of it as well. I just do not like meat nor fish. Nor does my body seem to miss it. So why force myself?

Keith makes a compelling argument that big agriculture is just as harmful, if not more so, than the loathed meat industry. Of course it is horrendous how big agriculture depletes our top soil and how it bases its succes on fertilizer made from fossil fuels. When and if fossil fuels run out, our top soil will turn to dust. After reading her book, soy and corn/wheat are definitely no longer a valid option. This is where here argumentation holds up strongest. From an ecological point of view soy and corn do not make sense at all, the ecological foot print they produce is huge. and many vegans and vegetarians do base their diets on soy and wheat, thus contributing to the negative effects they have on our environment.

Where i have a real problem with her argumentation is when she seems to suggest that the solution would be for everyone to go back to keeping some live stock, to use their manure to build up the top soil and eat the meat. We simply do not have the space for this model to work, the planet is much too crowded. She ignores the green house effect associated with live stock and the water wasted to raise them. But i agree with her that the statistics we often hear quoted by vegetarians, how many calories in grains are used to produce calories in meat, these are based only on meat industry practices, while live stock kept to eat grass would show very different numbers.

So where do i stand? Much less soy. Much less corn (except my dear, lovely, home grown sweet corn). I am still vegetarian. But i would never ever blame anyone for a reasonable meat consumption.

I want to finish by quoting a small excerpt from the book [page 266 -267]:

So if you need your personal fix, here are the three most effective things you can do.

Refrain from having children. That’s far and away the single most powerful lifestyle choice you can make for the planet. Understand there are at least six billion more people than the plant can support already here. I’m speaking as someone who likes children. I’ve got a green card in Narnia [...]. I’ve had the longing that feels like a physical ache. Never mind my mother’s craven lust for grandchildren. Yes, it’s sad, but what humans are doing to the planet, the endgame of ten thousand years of human entitlement, is much worse than sad. The children of polar bears are now starving to death on the shrinking ice. The children of amphibians as a genera are about to go extinct. The nonexistant children of the already extinct flowering plants in Szechuan are gone because humans have eradicated their pollinators. That’s 130 million years of evolution we’ve wiped from the planet. We have to measure our personal longings against the damage to our home and we have to let that damage be real to us, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. It’s hard to do this when our immediate needs are being met: the lights are on, the cupboards are full. Still, that is our adult knowledge now, and our final adult task.

Number two is to stop driving a car. You’ll quickly discover the structural impediments to car-free living. The entire built environment has been rearranged for the demands of the automobile, demands that are completely at odds with the needs of human community. Us Americans use much more fossil fuel than Europeans, not just because we are fixated on our individual entitlements, but because we were foolish enough to let suburbs, with their segregated distances between home, work and material goods like food, become our dominant living pattern. This pattern, with all its immense investment in infrastructure , will collapse as the oil age dribbles to a close. [...]

Number three is to grow your own food. The two thousand miles that your average bite travels has to shrink to walking distance before the oil runs out and the temperature rises any higher. Your backyard is as good as it gets. When you’re hungry enough, your dogs and cats will be replaced by pigs and chickens, and your sterile monocrop of lawn will become a polyphonous and intimate tumble of food. You’ll learn what i did about nitrogen and soul, animals and plants, or eventually be left with dead dust. Teach yourself, your friends, your neighbors: a few of them are nervous. The rest will join soon enough.

That i’ll subscribe.

aren’t people who talk loudly on their mobile phones in public spaces just the most annoying thing?

and it happens more and more it seems. for a while there was hoping, that it would decrease with the years, when people would get more used to technology, ubiquitous availability, novelty and that they would develop some sort of etiquette for using mobile phones in public spaces. but no such thing happened. it seems to keep getting worse. to this day people start to talk louder and get more stupid as soon as someone calls them on their mobile.

it’s like audio spam, another daily unsolicited annoyance.

well, recently i had an idea that might help to tone this down. crowdsourced shaming.

how about a website – to be created – where people can upload photos, movies and even written reports of such public mobile phone spam?

i mean, these people seem to think that whatever they have to say to whoever is on the other end of their phone call is SOOO important that a whole bus/train/cafe/whatever NEEDS to know about it. so why not take their cue, and post it on the internet for the whole world to see and hear… then crowdsource their names. and let’s see if this won’t tone at least some people down.

could work imho. thoughts?

have pity on me, pl0x