36C3 preroll music
Herald: Our next speaker Régine Debatty
will help you and explain you the Internet
of rubbish, things and bodies and
basically everything around e-waste. Thank
you very much and welcome. applause
Régine Debatty: Can I get ... can I get
less light to my face?
Herald: Slide in your face?
RD: Less light to my face.
Herald: Slide?
RD: Light. Can I get less
light in my face?
Herald: OK. A little bit less light for
the speaker.
RD: Yeah. Hello. Good evening, everyone.
First of all, I want to say thank you to
Nora, to Gregor and to everybody, at the
Chaos Communication Congress for welcoming
me again this year. So I've been tasked
with the mission, just like in 2018, to
present to you some of the most
interesting and exciting works in art and
technology of this past year. And just
like last year, I kind of went on my own
way and went on a tangent and started
adopting a tunnel vision. And for some
reason I realized I was obsessed with
e-waste. So you're going to hear a lot
about e-waste and nuclear waste in the
coming hour. But still, I promise it's
still going to be reasonably interesting,
hopefully. And most of the projects are
anyway from 2019. So why did I get
interested and why did I think it would be
a good idea to talk to you about e-waste?
First of all, there was the the theme of
this year's Congress "Resource
Exhaustion". I just decided to put some
more, let's say, ecological twist on it.
And then the second reason why I wanted to
talk about e-waste is that a couple of
months ago, I went to see an exhibition of
a Swiss photographer who has spent four
years, something like that, traveling
around the world and trying to understand
why transhumanists wanted to change and so
called augment and improve their body. And
so he documented everything he found and
how humans nowadays are changing their
bodies, either to go from disable body to
able body or from able body to superable
body. And one way you can augment your
body is, you know, is with RFID chip that
you can implant and that allows you to get
access to offices, open your car door or
even pay for public transport. And I've
been told recently that RFID chips are the
new tattoo. And then you can also get
magnets implanted underneath your finger
that allows you to sense electromagnetic
fields. And actually, the first time I
heard about this, I was at least 10 years
ago, it was one of the first Chaos
Communication Congress I attended in good
old Berlin. And there was this this
journalist called Queen Nocturne. And she
came to explain that she had just had a
magnet implanted and explained that the
new experience and how she felt magnetic
fields. Anyway, I could multiply the
example. But of course, the people who are
really at the cutting edge of body
improvement and augmentation are the
Transhumanists. This is one of them, Igor
Trapeznikov is part of the Russian
Transhumanists Community. He had a number
of implants, you know, the usual RFID
chips, but also a device that turns its
sights into sound, which is usually useful
for people who have a vision problem or
who are blind. And then, of course, they
are addition to the body or correction of
the body that are there for to a
particular reason. That's how some find
themselves with bits of titanium in the
knee or in the shoulder. And they use this
kind of screw. I think that's one of the
images in the series that I found the most
impressive, the idea that when I get
older, I might get these kind of screws
inside my body. Pacemaker, of course. And
what makes pacemaker interesting is that
it was one of the first electronic devices
that found its way inside our bodies. So
it became kind of emblematic of the coming
mechanization of the human body. And then,
of course, there are the other devices that
communicate with electronics that you
insert in the body and that communicate
with phones and computers. So that's why
so much talking about the Internet of
Bodies, you know, after the Internet of
Things, there ist the Internet of Bodies.
So this is a bio artificial pancreas for
people who suffer from Diabetes Type 1.
There are so many smart devices that can
be added on your body or inside your body.
I've heard about smart contact lenses and
also smart prosthetics. And after seeing
this exhibition, I started looking at
people around me with a different eye. I
am wondering who else had bits of metals
and electricity and electronics inside
their body. So that's where my obsession
with with e-waste came because my
immediate question after this is what
happens after you died? What happens to
that? I don't know if you're interested,
but I had to do some research. So if you
are buried the traditional way, you buried
with with all your gadgets and gizmos and
anything orthopedic. If you're cremated,
you're not cremated with your pacemaker
because it contains batteries that could
explode. And then I learn about the new
very interesting service. I mean, to me,
it sounded quite interesting. It is that
when you are cremated, of course, the
titanium or any metal, they do not burn.
There is this company who retrieves all
the metal that is found among the ashes.
There's just a couple of companies around
the world who do that. They just recover
all the metals, they divide them according
to the types of metal. And then they melt
them down into ingots, which they sell to
the medical industry, but also to the Car
Industry and the Aeronautical Industry. So
that means that parts of these bodies are
going to become part of a car or a plane
one day. And I also started imagining that
probably in the future, archeologists will
find skeletons with e-waste. We will be
buried simply with our e-waste. They will
find bits of metals in the shape of bones
and then the rusty electronics. So that's
really what set me on the path of starting
to see e-waste absolutely everywhere. I
never miss an opportunity to show my dog
because I realized that he has an RFID
chip and apparently all pets are buried
with them. Anyway splendid animal. So
since I'm thinking about e-waste it's
difficult not to mention one of the icons
of e-waste. It's Agbogbloshie. I'm sure
you've seen the picture. I'm going to show
images, but I'm not going to tell you the
whole story because I'm sure you've seen
all these images. It's located in Accra,
the capital of Ghana. And that's where
full containers of electric and electronic
trash end up. And the press really like to
talk about it and say "Oh, this is where
your data and your your devices go to
die." It's a huge place. And you've seen
the images of these young people who spend
the whole day dissecting your devices and
trying to separate different types of
precious metals such as aluminum, silver,
copper, etc.. Of course, they're working
in terrible condition. It's very toxic to
work there. They all suffer from terrible
headaches, difficulty sleeping problem,
respiratory problem, untreated wounds,
etc. But it's really usually the way the
press is depicting what's happening and
what the press is really not depicting
the full story and that there are bits and
pieces missing in the narratives. First of
all, I think we are not conscious enough
of these people playing a really important
role for us because they retrieve metals
and we have the feeling that metals are
everywhere. But on the surface and
underneath the earth some of them are
going to be more and more difficult to
retrieve. This year, UNESCO's declared the
year of the periodic table. And you can
see on this periodic table that the dot
seen in red and orange are the types of
elements that are going to be more and
more difficult to mine and to retrieve.
And I like to show these graphics a bit.
It is all not very precise, but it shows
the trend. So if ever you have a child or
brother was born in 2010, by the time your
child or your brother or your sister is
20, there will be no antimony, no lead
left to mine. Very little indium, very
little zinc, very little silver, almost no
gold. These elements will still be there,
but it's just going to cost more and more
energy and more and more money to retrieve
them. So that's why you have this project
of mining very deep into the ocean or even
mining asteroids for the same kind of
metals that we need. And I think it was so
that we kind of have a blind spot for
metals. We forget. We take them for
granted. And when we think about the
challenges of the environment, we tend to
focus on energy. And energy is important.
But when you think about renewable energy,
we have the feeling it's zero emission,
but it still has a big impact on the
environment. And I like to talk about
these solar thermal plant. It's a famous
one. It's a very, very big one. It's in in
Southern California. As you can see, it's
vast and actually, when it was built
conservation biologist were very concerned
because essentially it was built on a
really environmentally intact desert
habitat for a number of animals which were
in danger, such as tortoise that had to be
moved by hands and put on a truck and
relocated elsewhere. Some of them died out
of stress. You might have heard that, too.
So birds and bats by the thousands every
year, they did die because of the heat and
the radiation. And also you see the
surface of the earth that this is
occupying. It's really huge. And they
think it's not a coincidence if the
opening sequence of the sequel of Blade
Runner 2049 starts with these seemingly
endless landscape of solar panels that are
necessary to power modern life. As I said,
I think we we don't perceive the
importance of materials and how many
components extracted from the earth are
inside any object that surround us. So I'm
going to show a couple of example of of
design work and artworks that try to make
it visible, the elements that are inside
our electronics or electric objects. So
the first one is by these designers Studio
Drift. They have a series where they
decompose all kinds of objects. I'll show
a few of them. They can be bikes. They can
be a mobile phone. In this case, it's an
iPhone model from 2010. It can be hovers.
I'll show a few examples. They dissect
them and they analyzed the elements that
compose them. And then they reconstruct
these elements in the form of these
geometrical shape. I want to show a few of
them. So that was the iPhone. That's good
old Nokia from 1999. When you see them in
an exhibition, they're really tiny. And I
think we saw that some elements are simply
not represented. If you think about rare
earths, some of them are presenting in
smartphone in really tiny quantities like
less than half a gram. But I couldn't find
another image. But this is very big. So
this is the representation of a Volkswagen
Beetle from 1980. And so that took a lot
of space. And you see an element appear
that I was really not expecting, such as
horse hair and also corc. This is an
electic cable. So, you know, a bit of
copper and a lot of plastic for one meter.
That's my favorite, the Kalashnikov. You
see the the bullets in the front. And when
I went to see the first time this
exhibition and if I didn't look at the
label, I had no idea what was what, I
could not recognize anything. So it shows
the level of ignorance of at least people
like me. But that I could recognize - a
pencil. That I could manage. So that's the
last one. That's a light bulb. That's one
way to visualize the elements that
surround us. It's very designy, quite
elegant and charming. But I also like
artists who adopt a more brutal strategy.
So Dani Ploeger also wanted to show the
inside - well, that was one of his
objectives at least - to see the inside of
electronic devices. So the first part of
his project started back in 2012 and 17 he
infiltrated Phillips and got hired, as you
know, this guy. You see them at these
consumer goods fairs that try to sell it,
to sell you gadgets and say what is going
to change your life? And here is what this
can do. So he was he was hired to to sell
a highly sophisticated shaver for men. And
the reason why he wanted to be there is if
you wanted to understand exactly what were
the dynamics and the logic behind the
constant rapid innovation behind our
electronics. So that was the first part.
He got his hands on confidential material
that really explain how people at Philips
have these teams - I say Philips but I'm
sure it's the same elsewhere, of course -
they really analyze the different types of
consumer that we are and find the best way
to to trick us and to lure us and seduce
us into buying new products. And then the
second part of his project was this year
where he bought this machine. It's a
machine that is called industrial stress
testing machine. So it's several of these
machines, you can buy them. He bought this
one on Alibaba in China. And they're
usually used by makers of whichever mobile
phone, whatever, and they simulate all
kinds of accidents that can happen to your
device like you walking on it or dropping
it. I'm going to show a video of this one.
video of machine in action is shown
So that's our poor shaver inside. I like
the machine because, you know, it has a
bit of a vintage feel inside. The object
that it tests are quite sophisticated and
very, very much 21st century. But when you
see the the control panel, it seems to be
stuck in the mid 20th century. It has
these kind of old design. Apparently it
was a nightmare to get it shipped to to
Europe. It costs more to get it shipped
than the machine itself. And if you're
like me and you could watch this video for
hours of the arm rotating and breaking
things, and if you live in Leipzig, the
machine is going to come to the Museum of
Fine Art in March as part of an exhibition
called Zero Waste. So the reason why he
did this, like, obscene display of
destruction of luxury goods was that you
had two reasons for doing that. First of
all, the first reason was, is that usually
when we think about consumer culture and
how we consume too much and throw away too
much and and waste and the onus usually is
on the consumer. You know, the consumer is
wrong, and yeah, we are wrong. We buy too
much. But then the wrong starts actually
much further upstream. It starts
everywhere in the line of production and
especially in the design and research and
development teams who engineer constantly
new ways to seduce us and to convince us
that we have to update. And then another
reason why he did this project is that is
that he wanted to to make a comment on
maker spaces, which, you know, are very
interesting, but still feeding on this
vocabulary of entrepreneurship,
innovation, progress. But they never
really, truly and deeply and and they
don't really challenge in a systemic way
consumerism. So he saw this laboratory of
electric electronic aging as a kind of
make up space for unmaking things. And
also you get to see what's inside this
piece of electronic. But I would like to
go back to Aghogbloshie again, because if
there are people who know very well what's
inside our electronics and what they are
made of it's the workers of Aghogbloshie.
And sometimes, you know, when we think
about this kind of place and I think the
example of Aghogbloshie, but as I'm sure
you know, there are equal sites elsewhere
in Africa, in Asia and Bangladesh et
cetera. We have the feeling that this is a
big junkyard and that it's a kind of huge
mess and it's it's dark and it's dirty.
But this is a map done by architects,
designers and activist who spent a lot of
time in Aghogbloshie. And you probably
cannot read - well, you probably all have
better eyes than me, but it's still
written very small - they map the
activities in Aghogbloshie. And if you
read the map, you see that the there is a
maker space, there are spaces dedicated to
disassembling, there are places to eat, to
pray, to disassemble, to repair, to have
fun. And also, we have the feeling that,
well, these are just people discarding and
dissecting our electronics. But actually,
the way they work is very sophisticated
and very fine. So first of all, they get
these huge containers, that with content,
pretty much anything we don't want that's
electric or electronic, including entire
cars. And they divide them in streams. So
this is a heap of photocopy machines. They
also can detect when something can't be
repaired, but they also can detect which
part of the machine all the computer is
still, which component can be saved and
reused to repair something else. So that
also goes on another pile. I think they're
much better than us at differentiating
different types of plastics. They have
places dedicated to weigh in the kind of
metal that they retrieve. And I would say
that they're quite like you suddenly, not
like me. So when I have a computer and it
doesn't work. I think for me, it's a black
box. I'm never going to open it. But these
people, their job, their business is to
open our old computers and better than
that. Most of them, like not most of them,
but many of them, can repair and give them
a second life or really a new lease of
life, which, you know, it's important
because we think all these objects are
dead, but actually they give them a second
life and then, you know, they repair it.
They repair them, they sell them to
communities around Aghogbloshie or in
Ghana, or in neighboring countries to
people would otherwise not be able to
afford a new printer or new TV or a
computer. And then, as you can see, they
have places to have fun. And they, too,
are quite fans of the Premier League. So
the map I was showing, just before. With
all the activities in Aghogbloshie has
been made by architects and designers DK
Osseo-Asare and Yasmina Abbas. They spent
a lot of time trying to understand how the
community was working. And they designed
this kiosk with anything they could find
on the scrapyard. And it's a meeting place
where they invite the community of
Aghogbloshie to meet people such as
graduates or young students in science,
technology, engineering, math. And so the
students and graduates who have very, very
theoretical vision on technology. And then
they get to meet these people, who have
extremely sophisticated, very deep, know
how. And together they exchange ideas and
they've developed ways, for example, you
know, the traditional lead to to recover
the copper from the cable, they would burn
the cable, the plastic, which is very
toxic and also damages the copper. So they
find a way to recover the copper without
burning the plastic, which means that it's
less toxic, it's safer, and they can sell
the copper for more money. So it's kind of
a win-win. The aim was to develop together
new processes, new ways of working, new
tools. They also have fun. So with bits
and pieces, they found on the scrap yard a
couple of years ago they made these drones
that flew over the junkyard. So it's a
project I like a lot because it pays
hommage to the kind of work that doesn't
get a lot of recognition. But that's
really important, you know, when you think
of, as I said, the metals we are using to
make our electronics and also even the
solar panels and and the wind turbine et
cetera, and all our renewable energy they
also rely on the same metals that are
disappearing, at least are becoming less
available. So that's one of the reasons I
really like this project. And also, it
reminded me of this performance from
already forty years ago by Mierle Laderman
Ukeles. She kind of decided she would be
an artist in residency at the New York
Department of Sanitation. So that's the
people who collect the trash. So she spent
a year with them everyday. She was there
at six in the morning and she followed
them and she did, she had this gesture of
she wanted to meet every single one of
them. There were 8500 employees. So she
she wanted to shake them with them and
say, thank you for keeping New York City
alive. Which I think is a lovely gesture,
because suddenly this anonymous mass of
bin men you realize that there are
individuals. And yeah, she documented and
talked with them. It's a way to bring
attention to a profession that we don't
value a lot. And also, she wanted by
spending so much time among them to make
people realize that the work of these
people should be valued at least as much
as her own as an artist because of the
role they play for the collective society.
Yeah. Okay. I see. Still Agbogbloshie
but if I had time I would talk about other
projects in Africa. This one's a startup.
African born 3D that makes 3D printers
that at least a third of the components
come are found in second hand on second
hand, in discarded electronic let's say.
And I think what this show is, is a kind
of mindset and an attitude that should
inspire us. And it's going to show to show
you a few example of this attitude, I
think is really important is is trying to
make the most of what you have instead of
jumping on the next gadget and gizmo, but
really trying to to be as creative, as
innovative as possible. So in India,
they have this movement called Jugaad,
where even in the West we
translate it as frugal innovation. So this
is. Oh yeah. You needed. You had only a
motorcycle. You need a ploughing machine
for his land. So you adapted. The the the
is motorcycle. And you turn it into a kind
of.
sudden silence
RD: I can take a traveling mic
Audio technician: Dead battery.
RD: So I should keep ... watch out for my
hair, yeah.
Herald: In the meantime, the question. You
know it. Oh, no. I think the meantime is
over. No. So, uh, you know the question.
And you know the case 6-2-1. Someone? No?
So six hours of sleep a day. Two meals?
No. Oh, boring. Anyways, to remember it:
six hours of sleep, two meals a day and
one shower, please remember. And, uh, to
make some minor announcements, don't
forget the trash. Do we have audio back?
RD: I think so.
Herald: Perfect. Then, please.
RD: I can't believe you told people
to wash. Yeah. Yeah. This is answering
precise need instead of creating demand.
And sometimes, you know, it respond to a
specific problem. Sometimes it can be
scaled up. So this Indian inventor made a
fridge that doesn't use electricity, but
uses evaporation to to keep the food cool
simply because there are people who live
in a rural areas who don't necessarily can
afford a fridge or don't have continuous
access to electricity. And of course, the
best example and the most famous example
of Jugaad, is the Indian
space mission. Since 2014 India has is a
probe orbiting Mars and the Indian
engineers, and pretty much everybody in
India jokes about the fact that it costs
less money for them, that the space
mission cost less money than than your
average Hollywood blockbuster about space.
And, you know, it's not about making
things cheap. It's about reinventing
process, of designing, of manufacturing
and of distributing. Okay. I don't have
that much time. So I'm going to skip a few
things. Yes. So I've been to India,
Africa. Let's get back to to Asia, because
I really like this project. Say it's a
project by an artist who also saw images
from Agbogbloshien similar a
junkyards. And so he was interested in
e-waste as well. He found himself in
Taiwan and he found this really cutting
edge company that deals with e-waste no
one wants. So usually when you find a
company that deals with recycling midsize,
usually they focus on the nice metals, the
ones that are valuable like in a copper,
for example. And then you have pieces of
electronic waste that no one wants, such
as a I don't know the one that contains
lead or CRT monitors or glass fiber from
printed electronic boards. This kind of
thing that really no one knows what to do
with it. Well, they found a way. So the
company is called Super Dragon
Technology. And the trick they found is
that they just take all these bits and
pieces of waste that no one wants and they
crush them into a powder, they mix them
with epoxy and they make these splendid
objects out of them. And because I think
they're quite crafty, they can imitate
very well the appearance of bronze, of
marble, of porcelain, you know, very noble
material. And also they play with the
proportion of epoxy and this toxic powder
to make it so like feel like it's very
heavy if it's supposed to imitate bronze,
etc. And so they're decorative objects
with the particularity that they contain a
lot of lead. So you're not supposed to
manipulate them too much might be
dangerous. They also have in common that
they have a very peculiar esthetic. As you
can see, this is a trophy. And then have
these these wonderful little thing where
they actually they make fake rocks, which
looks absolutely eccentric and crazy. But
the story is that these are not just any
type of rocks. They're supposed to be
scholar stone. So during the tense 11th
and 12th century in China, there was the
dispassion for the so-called scholar stone
where an intellectual from China would go
in the countryside and admire the
landscape. And suddenly they would find
these rocks that were seemed to be
sculpted by the elements that had really
strange and interesting shapes. And they
thought it was the manifestation of the
creativity of nature. And so they would
bring them back and use them to
contemplate and meditate. And, you know,
now nowadays you can you can still buy
some of these scholar stones in auction.
They're quite valuable. But what I really,
really like is that these superb dragon
technology is the way they think. So they
can figure out that there's a difference
between applied art that makes you do
useful things like plates and furniture
and then fine art that makes basically
useless things and sees the ways no one
wants is useless. Well, that kinds of
fits with the requirement to make fine
art. So this way all these objects have
been shown showing to you. They call them
green art and they have a green art
gallery, and appearantly it's quite
successful. Tyler Coburn bought some of
these stones and actually accompanies them
with a text. So I know your narrative
where you have the story of one single
grain of sand that tells its many stories
how it started as a sand and then became
became a piece of electronics and then a
piece of trash and then and then ended its
life as art. Found it very charming. I
don't have time for this. Yes. Very
quickly. I mean, I'm famous for giving
very depressing talks. So now I'm trying
to insert a little bit of happiness in my
talks. Things are changing a bit. That's
why you have now repair cafes that are
quite successful, yet there are also shops
you can find where the people working
there and absolutely not affiliated with
with Apple, Samsung and Nokia. But they
found a way to give a second life to your
objects and repair them. So and usually
they are much nicer than the guys at the
Genius Bar. If you've ever had to deal
with them. There are more and more Web
sites that sell secondhand goods that have
that even come with a one year warranty.
You've heard about the fairphone, of
course. And then brings me quite abruptly
to the other type of waste I wanted to
talk about, which is nuclear waste. I
thought I saw that I needed to talk about
nuclear waste because because it's waste,
because it's energy. And so it's very
technological and extremely problematic.
So what do you do when you have your
country and you have a lot of nuclear
waste? I mean, the most toxic can be toxic
for 100.000 years, up to a million years.
It's going to be very, very dangerous. You
have two choices. Either you keep it at
hand like buried, but not too deep so that
you hope that in the near future someone
will have a brilliant idea and be able to
we'll know what to do with it and how to
handle it safely. Or else you do like they
are doing in in Finland and in other
countries. And France is thinking about
that. You bury them very, very deep under
the ground in deep geological repository.
But then you have a problem because it's
going to be to be dangerous for thousands
of years. So how do you inform people,
like a future generation that it's dangerous
and they shouldn't go nearby. Either you
use text, but then languages change,
languages disappear. I mean, we might
think that, oh, everybody speaks English,
but everybody used to speak a bit of
Latin. And now if you are confronted with
the text of Latin, you might not find it
easy to understand, even if your mother
language is English. Dealing with with an
English text from the middle age is going
to be difficult. I speak French dealing
with the with a French text from the
middle age is difficult. So how about
having some nice icons such as the skull
and crossbones like everybody, you would
think that everybody associated with
toxicity. Absolutely not. It's quite it's
quite new. It's only since the 1800 that
the skull and crossbones have been
associated with toxicity. In the middle
age Christians when they saw Skull and
Bones they tought of renewal and
resirection. And I guess if you show the
children the skull and crossbones there,
they they're not going to see toxicity.
They are going to say, oh, cool, pirate's
Treasure Island. So you see, that's
tricky. Yeah, the symbols. So I am going
to show a couple of ideas that
semioticians and artists and philosophers
and thinkers have thought about to deal
with how to signal to very, very distant
generations that there is something
special there and you shouldn't go near
it. Oh yeah. Okay, I forgot this one. Even
if you found a suitable message, let's say
you found a suitable message. You also
have to make sure that people would take
it seriously. The thing, the coastline off
of Japan, there are these so-called
tsunami stones that basically say, please
don't build beyond this point because it's
very dangerous. There's been a tsunami.
They will come back one day and no one
paid attention. Anyway, let's go back to
my artist and semioticians idea. So in the
early 80s, a semiotician had the idea of,
you know, to preserve the memory of the
presence of a very toxic, very dangerous
nuclear waste, you have to make it part of
society to include it in the fabric of
society. So, he suggested the creation of
an atomic priesthood. So that would be a
religious order that would have as its
mission to keep the memory of the danger
alive, using rituals and myths and
folklore. Some artists thought, well, we
should plan the forest like a forest of
genetically modified trees on top of one
of those repositories, so that in the
autumn the leaves would bloom and become
blue and that they would fall and that
there would be a nice blue carpet. And
people like in thousands of years would
interpret it as: oh this is a secret
place, we should leave it in peace and
respect it. I really love this idea. I
find it a bit naive because, you know,
human beings don't have a great track
record of respecting beautiful pieces of
landscape. So, yeah, I'm not very
optimistic. Yeah, and then there is this
kind of cynical idea of modifying a cat so
that the cat would stop glowing or
changing the color of its fur in the
presence of high red. Oh, 20 minutes
again. Keep adding time. But I'm almost
done anyway. So that would be a cat that
changes color or glow in the presence of
radioactivity. This is not one of those
cats this is an artistic interpretation of
Marcel Rickli. So yeah, I think it's not
very nice. To be honest with you, I like
all those ideas of trying to transmit and
connect with very, very distant time and
with people who are living in moments, in
times we cannot even comprehend and
imagine. But I'm not totally convinced.
And I mean, they're charming, but I don't
think they would stand the test of deep
time, mostly because it just that the
periods we're talking about, like even
100.000 years, it goes beyond human
experience. How do you relate to it? It's
just so far away that it becomes abstract
and almost unreal. So I've been thinking,
you know, about this project. I've been
interested in nuclear waste for quite a
few years now. So I've been thinking other
projects, artistic or others, that can
relate to, like physically or emotionally,
with very, very distant past, but in the
distant times, but in the past, because we
don't know the future, we don't know what
it's going to be like. But the past, we
kind of have an idea. I couldn't find any
project that really, that I was convinced
could give a good experience, a good idea
of relating to a distant time in the past.
Until last month, there was this big art
fair in Turin and I found this butt plug
by a Swedish artist called Thomas Hämén.
And the particularity of this butt plug is
that it's made of copper light. So it's
basically dinosaur poo from around 140
million years ago. And that's where I
discovered that there is actually a big
market for the incredible, for fossilized
dinosaur excrements. You can buy it. I
checked. You can buy it on Amazon. I'm not
sure it's going to be an authentic, but
it's available on Amazon. So I thought,
yeah, that's it. I mean, if you were to
buy it and use it, you would actually be
in close connection with a living creature
that, I mean, in intimate contact, I could
say, with a creature that lived at a very,
very distant time. Okay. So, we are almost
at the end. I have three lines of
conclusion that I'm going to read. But
then I want to show you a film. And my
conclusion would be that all of this is
very fanciful, especially the end. But it
might still be useful to keep in mind that
something like renewable energy that keeps
us so, so passionate, is very often viewed
as a long term solution to the climate
emergency. But unfortunately, renewable
energy relies on physical resources that
are neither infinite nor renewable. And
right now, it looks like we are busy
implementing a future that was dreamt and
conceived a few decades ago. At a time
when society wasn't worried about
exploding climate crises, the erasure of
wildlife and growing material scarcity
accompanied by an unmanageable heaps of
waste. Anyway, I've just been talking
about the future and I would like to end
with a short movie set in the future by
Alexandra Lupashko, who is a young Russian
filmmaker. And I really wanted to show it
to you for several reasons. One of them is
that when I knew I would come back, my
first thought is that, yes, I'm going to
be able to show 2050, because I really
love it. And the second reason is that I
really didn't want to finish my
presentation with a butt plug.
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Yeah.. applause
Yeah. I forget to say it had nothing to do
with waste, but it was just irresistible,
I had to show it to you. Okay, that's it
for me. Unless you have questions.
Herald: Thank you very much, Régine
Débatty. applause As usual, if you have
questions, we have microphones over there
and microphones over there. Please stand
in line. And of course, we have questions
from the Internet. OK. In the meantime,
small thing. If you want to read, know
about.... Sorry, if you want to read more
about Régine. She writes also on a
website. It's called "We Make Money, not
Art dot com"
[https://we-make-money-not-art.com].
Which is, at least if I am concerned, a
brilliant title. And you write about what?
Régine: I've been writing, I mean, I think
is for almost 16 years about the way
designers, artists and hackers are using
science and technology in a creative but
more importantly socially engaged way. So
it's quite political, I like to think.
Herald: Which suits perfectly to this to
this event.
Régine: Yeah.
Herald: So questions? I see none so far.
None so far. In this case, we can...
Number four is this.
Microphone 4: Um.
Herald: Now in this case ... I heard an,
um. No question. In this case, we can chat
a little bit more about your website.
Régine: Okay
Herald: So if you want. If you want.
Régine: Yeah. It's not going to interest
people.
Herald: I'm pretty sure it does.
Régine: Okay.
Herald: Because I had a quick look and it
was pretty impressive. You write
about AI as far as I know.
Régine: That's the thing. When I knew I
was coming to talk about the best of 2019.
I was like, this year I've had to deal so
much with AI outside of my blog that I
said "no more AI" except maybe for the
film at the end, that, you know, is a bit
AI, but otherwise...
Herald. No AI?
Régine: Yeah. On my blog, there's been a
lot of AI. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a bit sick of
it. Actually, one of the last ... I wrote
about was by Julian Oliver who spoke just
before me now. Yeah.
Herald: Cool. In this case, no more
questions. Thank you very much.
Please, a warm applause for Jean.
applause
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