• Locative Media: 32 km intercontinental / transoceanic wi-fi link Spain - Morocco.
• Spectrum Ecology: Redefining geography and architecture.
• Tactical Cartography: of the Straits of Gibraltar.
• Endocolonization: at Fortress EU´s southwest border.

...about the construction of new territories crossing over the Schengen borders... to think of and to take part in the conflicting intensity of the border as the place we live....

FADA'ÍAT>> Through spaces at Fortress EU´s southwest border.

"Project´s codename is Fada'íat, which means "through spaces" in arab. The word Fada'íat is also used to mean satellite dish and space ship.
After many months of preparation hackitectura and many diverse collectives are working on the field: a very tense and militarized EU border. Our location now is a medieval castle in Tarifa, in front of a detainee migrant camp at the southeastern point of continental Europe. In a few hours we will try the wifi link to Tangiers, Morocco.
More than Fada'íat as a poetic virtual bridge project, or as a symbolic north-south free network link (after Perejil island conflict and the 11-M bombings in Madrid).....The aim of Fada'íat no border temporary media lab is to remain as a permament public media interface, part of the counter hegemonic cyborg that we imagine at the gate of Mediterranean sea." >> as published at Smart Mobs 22 june 2004






Transactions/fada'íat (http://fadaiat.net) was an event that happened in June 2004, between Tarifa and Tangiers: i.e. on the border between Fortess Europe and North Africa. Continuing with the Multitude Connected project, (La Rabida, Huelva, 2003), it was a social, political, technological and artistic laboratory that brought together a wide group of activists.- migration, labor rights, gender, communication...-, political theorists, hackers, union organizers, architects and artists to think about the relations between freedom of knowledge and freedom of movement in a society of globalised information production.

However, it wasn't only about thinking, but above all about doing: Our aim was to construct a complex situation traversed by a multiplicity of counter hegemonic flows, of bodies and data, with the potential to become a nodal moment in the multitudinary processes emerging in the geopolitical territory of the Straits of Gibraltar: An event able to multiply the rhizome, to multiplex the assemblages, to construct new unconscious, to produce new desires... A catalyst and accelerator of genetic algorithms of new worlds...













The participation of the hackitectura crew focused on the organisation of a decentralised No Border Media Lab, composed by a network of nodes situated on both shores of the strait. The highlight of the media lab consisted in the wi-fi link between Tarifa's castle and Tangiers´ Marshan. The media lab was conceived like a generating device of a brilliant geography, a deterritorializing cyborg of the frontier connecting the other components of transactions/fada'íat, including the following projects:

• Digital Archive of artistic practices related to the Straits of Gibraltar (http://transacciones.wewearbuildings.cc).
• Critical cartography of the geopolitics of the Straits of Gibraltar, (also known as the Madiaq territory).
• Freedom of knowledge / freedom of movement encounter between collectives from both shores.
• Zemos98 tv- Transactions: A two day tv-broadcast on Tarifa's local channel.

Direct actions of disobedience against the border regime took also place: A blockade of a Civil Guard bus with migrant detainees that had just arrived to Tarifa's beach, and a demonstration outside the Foreigner Confinement Centre in Algeciras, that culminated with the liberation of two groups of Subsaharian migrants who would have otherwise been illegally deported.

Fada'íat media lab was thought out as an experiment in the construction of the connected multitude - based on heterogeneous and turbulent horizontal networks, collective intellect, cooperation with out command -. Participantes included a diverse array of people linked to indymedia estrecho, canarias and barcelona, psand.net, global telesat, riereta.net, offtv, straddle3.net, artefacte, onnirik, xicnet.com, dregs, zemos98, casa de iniciativas 1.5, casa de la paz, colectivo aljaima, fadaat, hackandalus, elegant mob films, riereta the film, tarifa town council, bnv productions, unia arte y pensamiento, hackitectura.net...












From our personal perspective, fada'íat was a new attempt to implement a logical mechanism based on the universal language of symbols, allowing, in a few hours, the emergence of a spacial configuration emancipated from techtonic elements: architecture as hardware for the development of processes.

The departure from tectonics is part of what we consider the first phase of "solidification" of other communication options beyond the already corrupted nucleus of people/minds/happiness exchange that the network of networks is becoming as built by the new economy. In a first instance, the departure from tectonics is due to the need to work in the only contemporary framework providing for solid tools of counter-hegemonic action. It is just a new battle field.

In our work we try to subvert the scheme imposed by the infoeconomy in which a swarm of machines, working minds and infocapital organised around a myriad of micro-processes determines the stabilisation of a global state of balance that strengthens hegemony and weakens communication.

This architecture has its principal pillar in the mental gap that can be stolen from the system for the non-production of infocapital: the generation of algorithms of free global communication. Its contribution consists in its potential to create specific spaces of human communication via the reconfiguration of the clouded plasma of data fluxes.

We consider that, for a few hours, in fada'íat we were able to deprogram the system of automatisms which we usually react to the reality of geography with. The flux of anonymous data generated by mediatic cooperation achieved to feed a geographic algorithm, free code produced and supported by multiple nodes that managed to fly over and across all directions of Europe Southern border.














The local nodes of fada'íat, nomadic, simultaneously and/or successively, flowed between Tarifa (clusters at the Castle of Guzman el Bueno and at the Beach of Lances) and Tangiers (University Abdelamlek Esaadi and terrace by the Marshan cliff - next to the Cafe Hafa, a mythical place for the beatniks-). Servers in Seville, the USA, Buenos Aires and London, and comsat Astra 1H, - stationary over the 19,2E meridian some 33,000 km away from Earth, -, connected the system to the Net. The combination of cyborg nodes - hardware, software, wetware- and flows of information constituted a fluid and reterritorializing geography that united both borders to each other, and with web surfers all over the world.

The result was a rhizomatic constellation of places, temporalities, spatialities and modalities of presence difficult to think with the epistemologic tools of architecture, urbanism or geography as we have understood them until the end of the XXth century.. Another life is desired; other concepts are needed to think it...

The media-architecture devices: satellite antenna, wi-fi link across the Straits, movable units... worked like a luminous mirror - reverse engineering of the SIVE - the Surveillance System of the Straits (http://http://www.guardiacivil.org/prensa/actividades/sive03/index.jsp) -; a machine of the multitude conceived to unite and to construct, to defy and to possibly replace the imperial apparatus designed to control and to separate.

Components that were installed:

> Intercontinental wi-fi connection (802.11) between the node in Tarifa (castle) and the node in Tangiers (Marshan). The link was in operation, in an experimental mode, Tuesday june 22 in the evening and at night, periods during which we were able to send and to receive streams of audio/vídeo. Technical details of the connection can be seen in http://www.flakey.info/tarifa and slashdot. The connection was possible thanks to collective and the selforganized collaboration of manifold analogical and digital, technological and political, individuals and organizations of both borders, converging in the desire to question the differences, and to disobey the separation, that the borders impose.

> Bidirectional satellite connection to the Internet from the castle of Tarifa (june22) and from the beach of Los Lances (23 day/night of San Juan).

> Wireless LAN throughout the castle.

> Videoconference between Tarifa (castle) and Tangier (University/ENSA)/june 23, in collaboration with college students of the Escole National de Sciences Appliqués and people of the social movements of North Africa. Software: Gnome-meeting.

> Connection with Parc Central, Barcelona, a left lot recovered as a park by the neighbors in spite of the opposition by the City Council. The initiative is part of the citizens campaign against Forum 2004. The Bonfire of San Juan was celebrated there at the night fo the 23rd; the plan was to give voice to the Assembly of Immigrants of the city. In their fights the "people without papers" had occupied the Cathedral and two churches the days before. Insufficient satellite downlink in Tarifa to load the 80kbps stream, prevented the videoconnection between Barcelona and the Straits. See http://parccentralpark.net.

> Live Streaming (audio/vídeo) of the event in the castle of Tarifa /june 22 and 23 (both in mov and ffmpg formats). The workshops, round tables and other activities that took place in Tarifa were continously relayed. Simultaneously to the webcasting, transmissions were received from other geolocations: Tenerife, Tangiers and Seville. The main stream was produced in ffmpeg format, using an ffserver server and vlc as client for reception.

> Use of free software for the management of the local network, servers and real time multimedia applications - emphasizing the use of ogg/theora for video encoding the transactions digital archive and the use of ffmpeg for video stream-. Sessions of audio/video with PD-PDP-PIDIP, projected locally and streamed to the Net / june 22 at the castle & june 23 at the beach. Pure Data is a graphic programming enviroment susceptible to be used for distributed live multimedia productions, that several groups at fadaiat - dregs, artefacte, xicnet, riereta.net, hackitectura - are applying to the development of gollum/al-jwarizmi. See http://al-jwarizmi.sourceforge.net











Transacciones/Fada'íat, eventually, was a foundational festival, in the anthropological and original sense of the term; festival as a form of knowledge, a form of producing new subjectivity, imaginaries, worlds. It was like a rite presenting the new myths of origin of the multitude in the Straits of Gibraltar; - which is, indeed, a place that is not isolated from the world, but a central node in the global fight between Empire and the multitude...













After the attainment of the civil thelematic bridge connecting the northern and southern sides of the border (and its symbolic meaning in the prevailing warmongering logic of the clash of civilizations), several action lines will continue exploring this territory, constructing new relations between communication, mobility, organization and work:

• Intercultural Border Lab "Observatory of the Straits"; a project presented to the award contest of the Castle of Santa Catalina (promoted by the Tarifa City Council), that would allow us to install the wi-fi link as a permanent infrastructure.

• Final 2004 version of the biopolitic cartography of The Straits.

• Mutation of madiaq indymedia towards a post-textual system, with the implementation of a live streams open administration system integrating "live maps" locating webcasters. See the interface at: http://gollum.artefacte.org.

• Collaborative support in the organization of new indymedia nodes in Tangiers and Larache, Morocco.

• Participation in the organizing team of Hackandalus, the 5th Spanish hackmeeting that will be taking place in Seville - October, 28-29-30th 2004.

• Comission from the DASH-meetings coordination team (against racism and the xenophobia) to organize the next DASH European workshop in Spain, to take place in the spring of the 2005. Proposed topic: Internet live multimedia production networks.

• Critical contribution to the executive meeting of the UNO's World Summit on the Information Society, to take place in Tunis in november 2005.

• Research on the deployment of d.i.y. computers - aluminium boxes, solar visors, photovoltaic cells -, in Southern Europe and Africa - a hardware project lead by Josep Saldaña / context.

• Development of the concept "Fada'íat" as an epistemologic tool to upgrade our understanding of geography, operating at the convergence of the physical and digital space; but also in the Islam/"West" breach.

Jose Perez de Lama, aka osfa / Pablo de Soto aka osirak / Sergio Moreno aka chaser
Published at rixc.lv


This work licensed under a Creative Commons license