Divanik, Conversations and interviews about media art, culture and society

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part of the loop, which has turned out to be a much longer loop, and that what we call hyper-mobility is just one element. There are consequences to leaving out the rest of the loop, which means that in order to have this moment of complex process that you call hyper-mobility, it takes a sense of place, it takes building environments, it takes not only professional workers, but also low-wage workers. I want to recover these things and thereby enable actors and the notion of place that are made invisible, or they are sort of evicted from the account if you just look at hyper-mobility. So, for me it’s a way of saying that low-wage immigrant workers who may never have used a computer are still part of the infrastructure that it takes in order to have hyper-mobility, and I want those immigrant workers to know that too. I always do this in all sorts of finance, I’ve mapped finance in Manhattan, which is mostly global finance in terms of all the workers that it needs, including the truckers that bring the software, the toilet paper, the light bulbs, and whatever, and where they live. So then I said: ‘OK, this is New York City’s global financial sector. Yes, it has Wall Street, and it has global circuits, but you know what? It also has these immigrant neighborhoods – these neighborhoods of white working class women who are clerical workers, the truckers. It needs this industrial zone to do a lot of the servicing – the industrial servicing.’ I do the same thing with hyper-mobility. And then I talk about these imbrications, in other words. What is mobile and what is immobile, and it’s not that they are hybrids, they are very distinct moments. I use the term imbrications to be suggestive, that they need each other to build upon each other. And added fixity, capital fixity will add hypermobility, so there is dynamism. It’s not binary. Q: It’s not an opposite, it’s like different aspects. A: Exactly. Nor is this, in this case hybridism, it’s not that there is a blur. The digital is definitely different from the walls of the building, and I don’t want to inject hybridism into that representation. So, that is more of the idea for me. It’s both reality that is distorted by just being enamored with hyper-mobility, and it is an account representation that evicts all those other actors. So you have the information ‘haves’ and information ‘have nots’, which is also a distortion. Frankly, a lot of the NGOs in the global south are way ahead of the global north NGOs in terms of using those technologies, because they’ve needed it, because the telephone wasn’t in operation, and the fax was too expensive, so they were way ahead. And it seems to me that the global north has the hardest time understanding that. Out of the limited resources in the global south, these NGOs have developed capabilities so that they are not just consumers. They have invented new ways of intervening in the technology that makes it work for them, because they have low bandwidth and slow connectivity. And out of that disadvantage, they have developed capabilities. They have created technological innovations in the software, and the global north is very often a passive consumer. So it’s not just disadvantage in information; it’s just a messier map in a way. Q: Is India a typical example? They have a lot of people developing Open Source and Free Software.


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