*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. *laughter*
(Video starts playing) *Music*
*loud heartbeet*
*laughter in the audience*
*sound of a shot*
*applause*
*music*
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*
*postroll music*
subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!