In the era of the apparent and inexorable (dis)integration between man and machine and the inevitable absorption of media universe into the connective meta-media, someone feels the need to focus on the breaks rather than on the multiple and simultaneous processes of simulate synthesis and real-time embedding.
This is the attempt of the 25th edition oftTrasmediale “In/compatible”, whose title clearly shows that still there is a part of residual in the network-numerical-policy paradigm that several users/ global citizens are experiencing from a psychic-pragmatic point of view.
On the other hand, we live in times of crisis. And tears, less and less faint, bob up from the transparent and immaterial mud that, in its own way, generated them – unexpected products, unforeseen reactions waste, irrational combinations of emotional states and technological skills that plunge into no longer controllable tsunamis of incompatibility – just think to the global economic crisis fall of subprimes since 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis) as a techno-emotional and financial phenomenon.
trasmediale 2012 speaks the alphabets of the breaking, that is noise rather than sound, the one you hear when the mechanical gears do not fit and when the attempt to force them together creates voids and cracks -like in a puzzle poorly done-, when the code lines do not produce the expected results and the software does not work, when the software is cracked and the site is hacked, when the clefts in the tectonic faults crack and potholes are the result of a random and inconsistent chain of heterogeneous elements, not recognizable in the process but only in the final “Incompatibility”.
“Incompatibility” is the unsatisfied gaze of someone who is not satisfied with the cover, but look for the implication: it is not the inside opposed to the outside, but instead the adherence of the rest (see Bataille) and the residual to the algorithmic-binary mathematics of the network and to the emotional formatting in progress as (in)visible watermark.
“Incompatibility” is synonym of doubt and critical look. It is not fear, quite the opposite, patient anxiety to plunge into the faults / TAZ unexpectedly cracked from the man-machine-nature reactions in progress. Residual parentheses not yet recyclable by the system and convertible from an innocent-looking / lateral-thinking in behalf of a playful pragmatic contrary to the static acknowledgment of rifts.
A look capable of seeing in them the creative opportunities in the form of in/compatible alternatives to the current and in/coherent ab/use of the great potentialities present, for example, in the processes of digital subjectification and objectification, of collective knowledge (re)organization, of the assumptions of political and social formations (alter)native to the techno-anthropological transformations taking place.
The “Incompatible” look is the glance of who does not believe to post-moden universalizing-ideologic jokes. Every compatibility generates a rest, an in/compatibility to square up to, not necessarily neither casually derivable as in a bijective function, rather as an abnormality, a quantum leap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_electron_transition), a discontinuity, a not-expendable entropy, a writing off (see Klossowsky) – like that of a child that lighting up match without using its flame.
This is perhaps the first step of the incompatible, that of Anonymous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)), and Wikileaks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks), cheerful and positive Nihilism that searches in the breaks opportunities and alternatives, renouncing to the priority control of what is busting, but ready to modulate the leak from breaking, looking for solutions into it rather than outside of it.
“Incompatible” is living (in) the break, in the minority conscience, in the onomatopoeic and untranslatable language that eludes algorithm, the genetic one, too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm).
“Incompatible” is being aware that nuclear waste is not recyclable and their radioactive potential will not be extinguishable before hundred thousand years (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk), beyond the human capacity to envision what kind of living beings (if there are any) will have to deal with potentially and definitively destructive, and how to communicate them this risk. Incompatible.
