Well, i suppose we should be a little tidier in our archival trails, this is now the 3rd visible Transmigration of Cinema (TOC) remix version posted here cause we keep re-arranging the directives for our next round of touring in November… and this text for the Prague exhibition at the NOD gallery has been a challenge. And it seems useful to use the podopolog for thinking aloud, even if it hasn’t yet developed into a forum as yet. As we were trying to come up with that ursprung and backround for the XLTs … we were reminded of that strange, intense beginning, when the concept arose from a mix of deep personal changes, outrage, and despair. Hopefully it is not too annoying to read the multiple versions. And to ease the repetition this preface is a bunch of footnotes laid out in the nettime sun to sprout more wings of fire and fury.

1997 was the year a very important friend left our world right there in the hands… the first death we ever witnessed actually. It was the first and only year we participated in that Weimar-ish vibed Burning Man festival, and the moment NASA opened our eyes to the lunacy of big budget realworld sci-fi which would have us all playing Extras in their grand theater of deadly futurist games. You can read a small synopsis of that last scenario in these TOC remixes. These were some big seeds that landed upon our consciousness that felt at the time like Ikarus hitting the ground with a thunderous SPLAT.

Actually the title that first emerged was OYO MEBO which meant “own your own media blackout” . Kinda hard to explain all that now , but if you’ve ever seen “Die Fetten Jahre Sind Vorbei” - aka “The Educators” in the U.S - you might grasp what we were getting at. Oh but to Really get it you’d best watch the less-edited European version , but nevermind that’s another story. OYO was nothing more than a desparate flyer looking for collaborators for a zine ( that never came to be) that was dripping with bloody rage and renewed energy and seeking new outlets for truth and justice and a new “navigation system” for us terrestrials getting the lie-upon-lie , the shaft , that same good ol boys’ business as nauseating-usual. The flyer had a pretty similar design to the that antennaed teeth-baring earthling that u see now in Zulah’s far more advanced form on the front page. Inspiration springs revisited and with up-to-speed kick! The new one was used for a project in Germany called Radio Orgs Unite, which isn’t all that well archived, but there’s a compa here who is actually working on the audio archives , so we’ll be sure to post that when the time is right.

1997 was also the first we ever saw of the midland states as we toured across the country through the south and the 66 route, including stops in those precious Other Lands like New Orleans, Arizona and New Mexico … and a gagging taste of wastelands and strip malls and displaced indigenous cultures all along the way.

Ah and then we were back home in that San Fran bubble. And we think it must have been the time we started to archive the public lectures at Naropa Institute ( also known as The University of Creation Sprituality ) in some very heart-pouring ambitions for urban renewal in the hard-hit downtown Oakland. Funny last year when passing by there, an army recruitment center had moved in just across the street to replace what might have been the copyshop(?). It was a sign of what sort of economic opportunities were being created in these last years. And no doubt the good peeps of this unique university will still vigilantly dream about “meaningful work” and ” spiritual renewal”, concepts that were delivered in a variety of passionate forms, but it was a most powerful sign and reality check of what challenges are ahead.

Stasys Eidrigevicius poster for Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia

XL Terrestrials, Bird’s-eye Migration

The idea for XL Terrestrials (XLTs) as an organism for arts, activism, and
a communications medium first began during a disturbing meltdown in public
and corporate media in 1997 as NASA was launching the Cassini Mission from
Cape Canaveral.  As part of its payload the space probe had 72 pounds of
plutonium aboard. To the public, NASA declared straight-faced that there
was no danger, and yet information leaked that there actually existed an
evacuation plan for nearly the entire state of Florida in the event of a
malfunction on the launch pad. Acclaimed physicist Michio Kaku was one of
many who pointed out a number of unnecessary risks to an even greater
population should failures occur higher up in the earth’s atmosphere, and
that its Titan IV booster rockets had a failure rate of 1 in 20. Favorable
enough odds apparently for NASA, that glorious pinnacle of post-modern
military science/roulette.

Needless to say there was an enormous bundle of complexities there to
unravel and debate,  but perhaps more shocking than the military and
scientific arrogance and its disregard for (human) life was the inability
for mass media to grapple significantly with these critical and
fully-loaded issues. More than just a six billion dollar over-budget
project at stake, but a nuclear industry’s future relationship with space
exploration, the event revealed how the media inevitably becomes one more
player in such highly bankrolled business agendas; their role to obscure
and sabotage the concerns and dissent from socially conscious citizens and
scientific communities alike was called on cue to the stage.

Sound familiar ?! Nearly a decade later, there are now occuring rather
predictably a variety of media hijackings related to everything from
military agendas in the Middle East to big business as usual in automatic
denial of environmental impact and humanitarian issues, all endangering
the earth’s delicate balance and precarious relationships between races,
religions and bordered nations.

After some years engaged in frequently unwinnable mass media struggles it
seemed a ripe time for the XLTs to step further out and examine the bigger
picture such as the educational misdirections and the effects of new media
environments as a whole, and to consider how to bring up-to-speed a “media
ecology” critique, whereby we might assess the tools we use to see,
portray, communicate and understand our situations. And how might we deal
with a negative exposure of the new digital culture and its virtual
migration in progress.

The XLTs current project called THE TRANSMIGRATION OF CINEMA is an
“xtra-theatrical” presentation of film clips from a wide swathe of
consumer/art fliks to serious resistance media to the new digital drive-by
infotainment in order to pose the questions: What exactly will it take to
drop a Spectacle-buster in the age of the digicam herds,
my-(panoptic-rectal-exam)space, vloggers, netflix, data-miners, disinfo
consolidated, embedded journalism, the military entertainment complex and
the multi-billion dollar pixelated dream colonies? IS THERE a Next Level
of MEDIA activism? And must we now contend with the “digital bantustans”
of the fully-equipped and networked 1st world, spreading like a wildfire
virus to enrich the lives of all those „impoverished“ unplugged
communities who may have another plan altogether on how to sustain the
home planet?