ilias

It has been an interesting year here at Goldsmiths. I arrived with expectations, which weren’t met, only to stand a few meters away from the exit as a changed man with new aspirations. When I applied for the MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, I was under the impression that I would be learning about new media in a market-oriented, practical and theoretical level. As it turned out that wasn’t the case, but that’s a story for a future post, probably the last I will write as a student.

Now that I have submitted all my essays and the documentation for the ‘Libyan Drops’ project, it’s time to work on even more inspiring things. For the following months I will be engaged in three tasks:

1. Dissertation: my theme is content curation as a form of precarious labour in the networked economy. Content curation is one of the latest online trends, abutting location based apps, which was brought into prominence after the launch of social news applications for mobile devices. Nowadays, services, such as Storyful and curated.by, are used from people all around the world in order to gather information on specific issues from all sorts of sources. Curating, as a practice, is not the first to jump from the realm of art and culture industries into the commercial settings of online start-ups.
2. Major Project: I will be developing an Android application that will be exploring the relationship between open data collected by the Department of Health and policies drafted and implemented in the the metropolitan area of London regarding obesity. My intention is to expose the mechanisms using open data, as raw information, in the context of political decision making.
3. Imiant.org.uk: Our new website will be hosting the progress the students make towards July’s expo, named ‘Disconnect and Punish’. My role is to co-administrate the website’s operations and provide technical support to my peers. Through my involvement in imiant.org.uk I have started to become even more familiar with HTML and CSS, and learn how to work with content and database management systems such as Drupal and MySQL.

Because of the above, I needed to repurpose this blog. Since I will be documenting my major project’s progress at imiant.org.uk, the current space will be employed as a scrapbook for things relevant to the tasks at hand. If you would like to contribute to my research, please leave a comment below.

In retrospect, there are a few things I would have done differently. First of all, I would have tried to create a more immersive experience by mapping out, according to key dates, the events in Libya, using not only USB flash drives, but also printed materials, such as pictures and texts. Then, I would have contacted members of the Libyan community in London and ask them for their opinion and, if they agreed with the project, their support. In particular, I would have asked them for material (videos, photos and audio files) that never made it into popular media sharing websites and the news for the ‘drops’, and poems and parts of literature from their hometowns for the prints. In addition I would have invited them to make the trip from ‘drop’ to ‘drop’ and discuss the history of Libya, the uprisings and their hopes for the future. Secondly, on a more technical level, I would have explored the possibility of ‘planting’ wireless drops, as shown in the ‘DeadDrops’ blog: http://bit.ly/mwVCqG and http://bit.ly/lmyuRm. Furthermore, I would have embarked into different forms of intervention such as ‘planting’ printed updates from Twitter in other public spaces like supermarkets around London or print pages of testimonials and place them into the pages of free newspapers found in tube stations.

On a final note, despite the project’s shortcomings, I felt some sort of gratification. After months of inaction, I managed to process a concept, experiment and discover a method of application and go through with it while trying to be aware of its problems. It wasn’t comfortable, but I enjoyed the labor. As Graham said to me during one of our meetings: “You are on the verge of crippling yourself; you have to stop overthinking. Start doing things.”

After uploading Bartholl’s manifesto, my text and the folders of videos in every USB flash drive, I used a thin-edged screwdriver to break the plastic covers of the drives. Then I wrapped the exposed memory board with white tape and covered that part with a molded piece of epoxy putty. Afterwards, I ‘planted’ the drops in the locations mentioned above and used a web application for the iPhone (http://gpscoords.cinnamonthoughts.org) to determine the precise coordinates of their position. Next, I cut a small piece of white tape and attached it a few centimeters above each drop to function as a signifier. At the end, I took three photographs, as Bartholl requests, and uploaded them on the ‘Dead Drops’ database: http://deaddrops.com/dead-drops/db-map/:

To jumpstart the operation of my offline peer-to-peer network, I started working on developing and choosing the appropriate content for the ‘drops’. Next to Bartholl’s manifesto, I wrote my own text with a brief explanation of the project and the idea behind ‘Libyan Drops’:

“You have accessed the ‘-name of the city-’ ‘dead drop’. This cache is part of the ‘Libyan Drops’ network, which is scattered around Goldsmiths, University of London in order to map out the five biggest cities in Libya. Each ‘drop’ contains user-generated content, distributed in social media websites, depicting the events of the recent uprisings in Libya and represents one of the five cities. This is content that people in Libya had difficulties reaching it due to the restrictions imposed by Gaddafi’s regime in contemporary communications technologies. If you want to keep the network alive and raise awareness over what is happening in Libya in an unconventional fashion, please do participate by updating the content of the ‘drop’ with relevant to the revolts photos, videos and texts, according to the name of the location it symbolizes. You can find the rest of the locations by visiting the following link: http://deaddrops.com/dead-drops/db-map/.”

In each ‘drop’ there is a folder including seven videos from each city. In this collection, there are videos identified as graphic content, due to recorded brutal scenes: ‘RAW, Libyan Protester Shot Dead in Benghazi (graphic content). 17th feb 2011′ in the ‘Benghazi’ drop, and ‘RAW, (GRAPHIC) Libya, Footage of soldiers shot for refusing to shoot their Libyan brothers’ and ‘Gaddafi Libya Revolution القذافي ان ليبيا الثورة Deaths Increase in Az Zawiyah Demonstrations’ in the ‘Az Zawiyah’ drop. These videos were ripped from YouTube, using keepvid.com and were not uploaded by major news agencies. In the accompanying DVD of this essay, there is a detailed list in Excel form of the titles and the links to the videos used.

The reason I used videos stems from the fact that online videos are more susceptible to legal restrictions than any other form of content. Music videos, TV shows and movies, although in abundance, are not freely disseminated across through media-sharing platforms like YouTube or Hulu. Very often users come across a message informing them that the content they are trying to access is not available in their country. It’s notable that peer-to-peer networks have been scrutinized by legal entities over their role in the distribution of copyright. However, this is not the case here.

What this project is trying to prove, among other things, is that the usage of a specific technology can carry various connotations. A technology, for example, used to infringe copyright laws can be easily employed to circumvent censorship and communications blackouts in autocratic regimes. This idea contains the promises of social change, peace and prosperity as it happens with the emergence of any new technology. What people hoped for the telegraph in the 19^th century was no different to the expectations people had from the Internet in the mid-1990s: change, democracy, wealth and freedom in a unified world.

Bartholl suggests the following instructions on how to make a ‘dead drop’:

1. Read the Dead Drops manifesto!
2. Get a USB flash drive of any size.
3. Dismantle the plastic cover. (It has shown the stick stays more stable if you leave it on, feel free to experiment!)
4. Wrap it in plumbers tape to seal it off.
5. Download the readme.txt and manifesto here (eng, french, esp, port, russ, dutch, ger, ita, chin, czech) , edit authorship/credits/date)and load it on the drive. [More translations are welocme!]
6. Use fast setting concrete to cement the stick in a crack or hole.
7. Make sure to make the wall look nice afterwards, eventually you ll need some color for touch up.
8. Make sure to place it in a way that it can be accessed directly with a laptop. (Not everybody has an extension cable)
9. USB ports locations on laptops are different from model to model. The ‘front side’ (2 holes of the plug) points up! Is the left side port and right side port on a laptop accessible?
10. Optional you could use epoxy putty to glue the flash drive to other objects.

Take 3 good pictures!
- Overview of the street/place, how does your city look like? - Approximate location of your Dead Drop, medium distance. - Closeup! We want to see your Dead Drop! (http://deaddrops.com/dead-drops/participate/)

For the ‘Libyan Drops’ I decided to use epoxy putty, which is easily molded, waterproof, portable, dries in ten minutes and can be applied on different surfaces without the necessity for a crack or hole on a wall. In addition I wanted to show the simplicity of the execution of such a project. An intervention in a public space shouldn’t always be an elaborate and complex activity; it can be something small, almost unnoticed, but still influential.

Finding the necessary materials proved to be a demanding task since I didn’t want to spend more than 100 pounds and most USB sticks were costing approximately 16-18 pounds, without adding the cost of the epoxy putty bars. Surprisingly, epoxy putty bars are not easy to find, not even in shops carrying plumbing and construction supplies. Eventually I found everything I needed at the Queensway branch of ‘Maplin’.