VIDEO

Cartography of the Stain: Two cities, One work, Many Aspects.

Cartography of the Stain makes a comparative trip of two cities, Karlsruhe, Germany, and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Beginning with the comparison of the two cities in a quick area view at 5km high, going through everyday aspects until reaching situations that already happen. unnoticed by the accelerated pace that we live today, from the macro to the micro.

This work tries to create awareness in the viewer, each action we do, decision we make, has direct or indirect repercussions, the management of resources, mobility, it is the responsibility of each inhabitant of the same city, at the same time, the viewer it becomes part of the work.

On Exactitude in Science

… «In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied a whole City, and the map of the Empire a whole Province. In the course of time, these Disproportionate Maps were found wanting, and the Colleges of Cartographers elevated a Map of the Empire that was of the same scale as the Empire and coincided with it point for point.

Less Fond of the Study of Cartography, Subsequent Generations understood that such an expanded Map was Useless, and not without Irreverence they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of Winters. In the deserts of the West, tattered Ruins of the Map still abide, inhabited byAnimals and Beggars; in the whole Country there is no other relic of the Disciplines of Geography»…

Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658 (Borges 1946)

Starting in the place start every city: Town Hall

For what it represents, we decided to start in the Town Hall, each one would take scenes from all sides and then we would assemble them, we discovered that due to the differences in the cities, they move at different rates, marking the times for their people.

Same vehicle, different roads

More and more cities are promoting the use of bicycles, a means of transport with zero emissions, however, there are still many roads to go or do. Road safety education corresponds to all of us.

...Rivers...

Urban public trasport: New technologies,more demand; many challenges.

Garbage: everyone's responsibility.

Straight line to the north

To compare the size of the cities, and see how they have expanded, we decided to go in one direction at different kilometers, starting from the town hall used in a symbolic way to this, as the origin of the cities.
1,3,5 and 10 kilometers to the north, we did not know what we were going to find exactly, we did not generate expectations, we only thought that being there, we would take pictures of the surroundings.
As a curious fact, municipalities still have in some way, a direct road, street or main avenue that connects them with the outside of the city to others, we also note that many cities have grown uncontrollably, limiting green areas and generating differences notable among the population.

Other types of "Stains", other types of art expression

…»Grafitti, Art or Vandalism? I don’t care, I see many street artists who use graffiti as a way to express themselves, they are part of this society whether we like it or not, they are part of what makes cities, some way, they are becoming the portraitists of the time and the reality that we live, sadly, much more than other people who are present in galleries, in digital media or that are public figures.
Deconstructing the graffiti of Karlsruhe to recreate icons of the city of Guadalajara, in the end, the people are the ones who give the aesthetic value to the works, to the things, to the monuments».

Paris Díaz

…»Grafiti, ¿Arte o vandalismo? No me importa, yo veo a muchos artistas callejeros que usan el grafiti como una manera para expresarse, ellos son parte de esta sociedad nos guste o no, son parte de lo que hace a las ciudades, de alguna forma, ellos se están convirtiendo en los retratistas de la época y de la realidad que vivimos, tristemente, mucho más que otras personas que están presentes en galerías, en medios digitales o que son figuras publicas.

Deconstruir el grafiti de Karlsruhe para recrear iconos de la ciudad de Guadalajara, las personas somos las que le damos el valor estético a las obras, a las cosas, a los monumentos al final de cuentas.»

Paris Díaz

Many faces, one reality.

We are immersed in a digital environment which significantly influences our behaviour. In the current digital developments, we must think critically and recognize that technology is not neutral, it depends entirely on content. The programs program us the new technologies alter and transform our cognitive processes. In the age of digital information, it is impossible to block its dissemination, especially on topics that were kept out of popular knowledge. And with the impossibility to continue containing these flows of information (WikiLeaks, Panama Papers, etc.), the new mechanisms of power and control, are resorting to alternative techniques: disinformation, filter bubbles, echo chambers, fake news among others. These tools somehow exchange the old ignorance to which much of society was subjected for new, and perhaps more effective resources: confusion and lack of critical thinking.

We now have much more information in our grasp than ever before, which transforms the way we process it. Technology is very useful, but we can also get lost in it. For D.J. Boorstin: The fog of information can weaken knowledge. How is it possible that in the age of digital information and its great dissemination on the Internet, it would end up paradoxically becoming one of the most effective tools for developing ignorance and lack of critical thinking? How can we overcome these new control techniques?

It is important to consider three concepts: reflection, interpretation and discernment, in other words, critical thinking. The key is the neurocognitive development to assimilate, interpret, discern and synthesize the great amount of information we receive. We must reflect on the implications that these new tools of communication are having on us and how this transforms our behaviour. For Douglas Rushkoff, we must take the reins of this explosive evolution of practices and thoughts, this digital recognition, is to try to raise awareness of the new possibilities and consequences implied by the new technological tools of communication and not leave this task, once again, to an elite that, unlike the majority of the population, has enough clarity in the management of these digital tools for large-scale psychosocial programming. The one who controls, through understanding, the practices that the current programs promote, will undoubtedly be safe from being programmed.

This acceleration has led to greater inequality. Turbo-capitalism, people move faster and faster, but still feel stuck in the same place. Today, we wear twice as many clothes as 15 years ago, and we keep them half as long. We have built a society in which there is confusion about how to achieve well-being. So how do we stop this spiral? By consuming or using what we already have for as long as possible. It is not more sustainable to get rid of everything and opt for new ecological products, but to extend their life. We have forgotten to reuse and also to repair. With planned obsolescence a use and throwaway society has been established.

The world is accelerating. With advances in communication, transportation and information processing technologies, it is clear that the pace of events in global politics is speeding up. Will acceleration lead to a more interconnected, productive, peaceful, and humane world; or a nightmarish descent into ecological devastation, economic exploitation and increasingly violent warfare? Their life, while for others it is precariousness and lack. In 2018 about 821 million people in. For some people hyperconsumption is part of the world suffered from malnutrition, or in other words, 1 in every 10 human beings. In fact, hunger and malnutrition are the main health risk in the world, while one third of all food produced worldwide is lost or wasted. The world is accelerating, in this with advances in communication, transportation and information processing technologies, it is clear that the pace of events in global politics is speeding up.

Excessive consumption has led to the massive exploitation of certain raw materials. Coltan is one of the main components of smart phones. It is extracted mainly in some African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Ethiopia, which is then transported to contemporary slave factories, where their workers, mostly women, produce the new devices.

These products end up in our shopping malls and, due to programmed obsolescence and/or consumer society marketing, we soon discard them, with this behavior we restart the cycle of hyperconsumption. The superconductivity and its resistance to corrosion and heat make it a key mineral for the military and armament industry.

The control of this type of strategic raw materials has caused many wars and millions of victims.

This benefits the weapon industry. At the end of 2017 there were approximately 857 million firearms and in 2018 it left profits of 420.00 million dollars. 500 people die every day from firearms. 15 billion bullets are produced each year worldwide. One in 10 people in the world suffer from malnutrition and there are bullets to kill twice as many people on the planet.

(Nolasco 2020)

Faceless people

…»How sad that your life is summarized in a couple of things, many times I have wondered, of objects without value for others, but sadder is that as society prefers to look the other way instead of doing something when we see a homeless person, and sometimes we forgot the also they are part of society, persons»…

…»Homeless people are a reality and a disease that grows more and more in cities»…

Probably, the new fossils

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Ecclesiastes

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and its fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging) – as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.*1 Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. In fact, even inverted, Borges’s fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographers mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

(Baudrillard 1981)

City to City