Since Manuel de Landa's book 'War in the Age of Intelligent Machines' we are quite aware of the driving force of military and economic factors in the development of technology. Take a close look at Silicon Valley's lay-out. The geographic relationships are very telling. B.I.T. has acquired a marvellous piece of Cold War technology in order to literally bring its analyses of developments in new media to a higher plane. With the Bitplane, an unmanned miniature spy plane, they make reconnaissance flights over the potentially hostile area of Silicon Valley. Bitplane is a small, remotely controlled airplane that is fitted with a digital camera at the front that continually sends back images. The 'pilot' controls Bitplane via a head mounted display like a virtual rider. Because it is so small, Bitplane doesn't register on radar screens and goes about its business undisturbed. Bitplane made a number of sorties over Silicon Valley and the result on tape looks somewhat like a mixture of a promotion film by the arms industry, a guided tour of pieces of information and a spy movie. We get a tour, for instance, of all the major players in the computer industry. Facts about Bitplane's features are mixed with historical facts about the garage where Hewlett Packard got started and the place where Doug Englebart gave the initial impetus to the development of personal computers. Palo Alto and Mountain View, CA thus unfold like a sort of 'historyscape', a data landscape of information technology under Bitplane's all-seeing digital eye. It is quite wonderful to see how a piece of technological brilliance that was originally designed to keep an unobtrusive eye on the enemy (i.e. everyone) is now deployed against its developers. Bitplane creates a small ripple in the system that is normally controlled invisibly by the 'newconic' big businesses. Even literally, for it turns out that Bitplane's passage causes small distortions on computer screens.
– Geert-Jan Strengholt |
Bureau of Inverse Technology, formation: 1991, Melbourne (Australia)
Incorporation: 1993, Canaan Islands
Live and work globally
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