ART WORLD

Once upon a time we came upon a couple of walls. The wall dividing Mexico from the United States, but more specifically a wall dividing what was pre-approved by the art-world and what wasn't. A bunch of San Diego based art students reminded the organization behind Borderhack that borders are human, and before being physical they form somewhere in ourselves. They approached the project with the idea of what they probably considered collaboration, but what was understood as something akin to a corporate take-over. They applied for self-serving art grants, and ended up not doing work in the actual physical border but in downtown art-spaces, not in the actual border. You know, reading manifestos and showing political artwork. Nothing out of the common. This was to eventually help them navigate their way to jobs in the US academy, using the most PC of language. In Mexico City as well, we noticed how new media art (as in 'vogue' as it was 20 years ago) was barely managing to afford us rent, subway rides and food, but nothing else really. We were worried the most about old-age, health care, because as difficult as this was, we knew they were the best days. Even when international agencies and institutions were inviting us to events, Mexican institutions clearly didn't put up with us  except when it came for us to 'form' a new generation of students. For me this was just a sign that it was a matter of time before the (in)discipline was co-opted. Sold by some of us in exchange for money for rent, and in the best of cases, a seat in the latest upgrade of the status quo.

BORDERHACK

Borderhack was a festival of hacktivists, border activists and people related to cyber culture. It was a symbolic event that happened right in the western corner of the Tijuana-San Diego border, to try and find out how the system worked. It happened right on the beach where both countries gave way to the Pacific Ocean. The goal of the event in part was to hack the border using all sorts of tools: art, cinema, computers, music, physical, radio, but most important real border activism by the protagonists who were working on the field: in the desert, in shelters, in policy, in solidarity. It was a space organized for the different voices among them to come and meet. The event was part of ‘Kein Mensch Ist Illegal’, a European network of activists that 3 years before came up with that now famous phrase which translated to English is ‘No human is illegal’, or ‘No one is illegal’. During the actual event, a tent with computers and other sort of media was fed electricity by a very long extension that led to a solitary lighthouse, where the officer in charge plugged it for a modest contribution. 

That in itself might have been the foundation of social engineering upon which the whole festival stood. The officer might have earned so little money that he was willing to sell us electric power, to upend his living. The festival went on for a couple of years (maybe 2000-2004, although we had a preliminary event there with net.artist Alexei Shulgin in December 1999) and one of the works I did for it (besides organizing it) was an online exhibition called Borderhack Attachment, where tons of new media artists and writers participated. This was part of the kind of body of work we produced, but it didn't make sense to Mexican official culture, or even to artists. In fact, in a spiritual sense Mexico City didn't even care for the border wall until the Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump “humiliated” them globally in 2016 (?) by saying that if elected he was going to build a wall. But a wall was built sometime in 1993, by the Democrat husband of Hillary Clinton: Bill. And no one really cared about it, or yes, but it wasn't such a public outrage and scandal till 2016, so 23 years later.

Not caring about this or anything else, one of the hacks setups by the ‘Borderhackers’ was a public ISBN connection that probably is still right in the border up to these days. For days in a row it would provide free telephone calls for as long as they wished to migrants who needed to communicate back home or to contacts in their projected destinations. For us, this was the kind of art we were into. Eventually for a few months in 2002, there was a chance to work part-time in Mexico City's premiere new media institution of that era, and we found out that projects like Borderhack were not a topic for art or culture or technology or nothing really. White-noise was more important for it, as its gaze was focused on ignoring reality and imitating and recreating European ideals, just like it has been for artists in this part of the Atlantic for the better part of 500 years. And so that year we did another 'hack', along with the U.S. Department of Art and Culture (a Washington D.C. based group of new media artists that used official-looking stationary), we announced the border-wall would be opened during that year's Borderhack.

Reforma newspaper covered it, and then Notimex (Mexico's government funded newswire) reproduced it, so it was printed all over the country. But it was just a media intervention inviting people to do a reality check. Another important thing is that we never played the binary game that names Mexico City the victim, and Washington D.C. the villain. For us it was something more complex, where actually the whole process works as a safety valve that helps the Mexican Government get rid of people that can organize and become bigger problems, but by going away actually end up sending dollars than are spent in the businesses of the oligarchy, creating for them an almost perfect economic cycle. If a nation was to blame, that would be Mexico and the traitor class in power. Mexico is a land of 2 civilizations: the Indigenous and the Spanish, they inhabit the same space, but don't always agree on how life should be lived.

Coffee was the perfect synthesis and it made everyone have a role in what had the potential of being the most powerful underground production unit. So, we started to orbit around it, like a lot of other people at the time. But it was hard to get. Production was irregular, and it was very difficult to purchase, as for once there was an issue with the concept of sale that seemed to irritate and upset one of the parties involved. It was almost as if the word itself was dirty. As if there wasn't a long history of indigenous people trading with the settlers, or with mestizos. As if sometimes that was not the only possible form of communication and relation among them. With a very few you can do projects, with some you can talk, but with some your participation goes only as far as trade. And that was maybe more symbolic. Silence is powerful. Actions for a change, please.

DELETE .TV

Borderhack ended right when the first big march of migrants happened in the US. That was the moment when we thought our job was done, and we could do something else. This meant we could go back to our real project: Delete.TV. The homepage of a bedroom lab that was experimenting with lots of sorts of narrative media: interactive cinema, interactive fiction, hypertext, net.art, video games, streaming media, that more mainstream format known as weblogs, and so on. We were producing online political telenovelas that mixed science fiction, with the contemporary problems of the time: the disappeared, hacktivism, organization, media, indigeneity, the city, transgenics, pop culture, and so on. But we faced a big problem: the more our website was visited, the more bandwidth was used, and the more expensive and unsustainable the web-hosting expenses became. The cyberpunk phrase that says “Information wants to be free” started to haunt us. We could barely afford to produce such information, yet the people that were more ready to consume and implement it in our cities were academics whose life ironically depended from the privatization of information, that is, teaching at private colleges. And so, we remembered that the next part of the phrase was: “Information also wants to be expensive.” That didn't make us more popular, but it helped us think about issues of pricing, value and more importantly ways to continue alive. Unfortunately, we really couldn't go back to work on Delete.TV because an organization asked Bluehost (the server that hosted us) to evict us of their infrastructure, because they didn't want to be hosted next to Borderhack. We were given a whole refund, but what this really showed us was that censorship was turning soft. We couldn't really argue or say we were censored, because we got a full refund including around 6 months for free. Yet it felt like censorship. We would have to rethink our whole existence online, the politics of cyberspace.

FINANCE

Perhaps more than anything, to dabble in equations and algorithms, that make up for the abstractions that allow for contracts, exchanges and operations to organize and regulate human activities, was an eye-opener, a life-changer. What seemed to be a predictable scam, ended up looking as a set of numbers that could be translated to all sorts of human groups engaged in their forms of social production, which could then be valued, exchanged among peers. This could be more easily organized and so we ended up creating Spacebank, a virtual community investment bank that was going to measure the success of the project, and the directions in which it could head, according to the internal responses. This eventually led to the creation of a stock exchange where alternative commodities were traded, and the organization of a big network of collective media projects and collaborations was going to be regulated and funded. After a while it was decided that an own currency should function within the project, and so, the Digital Material Sunflower was born (under a different censorable email).

It was initially backed by one year of collective labor as valued by Google AdSense, I believe it came down to $17.20 or 21 cents. This upset many of the participants of the projects, which were websites of local news, radio-shows, and many other things. They thought this valuation was an offense to their hard work and artistic labor, but it was what Google had paid not to one collaborator, but to a whole ring of websites. The money was divided among the websites and then it was invested in shares of the different websites. Eventually bonds were sold, so that the total value of the complete money supply of the Digital Material Sunflower came to a $100 USD. But soon anomalies started to happen, and the value rose by a few dollars. A nano-macro economy was born and it would develop over the years to be valued somewhere over $300,000 USD, if measured in dollars, but really it should have been valued in headaches and insomnia and smiles and a couple of Facebook likes.

We started to discover that Money didn't exist, yet this money could be converted into other currencies because it was backed by many things including digital labor, metals, alternative commodities and what the Digital Material Central Bank shareholders decided to use at a given time. And so, it was digital, but material. Labor (like a post) could be converted into a share and then currency and then into the kind of thing we call money, to be used to pay fees or other things. It was like magic. And this was not bitcoin, it was our own thing. Although we did cross-over to experiment into such experiments, and traditional finance and we still do. We love the rally and the sound that comes just right after the opening bell.

HUMILITY

This kind of project of course, provides the participants with an intensive program in humility and modesty. One becomes a waiter for real, that smiles and serves coffee and packs bags. So really is like the complete anti-thesis of the ‘waiters wanna-be artists’ that are emblematic of a city like New York. For once you actually have to want to become a waiter for hours and days in a row, in exchange for not even a penny in tips. It is a way of participating in politics without actually speaking or doing anything discursive. We even try not to provide propaganda or posters. Really just the experience of a coffee that is there to support the political activity of like-minded people and others, so they can be connected in material ways to the struggle in Chiapas. The coffee is not sold, it is bartered, exchanged for labor, social currencies, time deposits, or money donations.

KOREATOWN

For a couple of months, the co-op was based here; and during this time, “friends” copied a file of an unpublished book of mine that took me years to finish. I eventually found it 'signed' as original revolutionary research and report sent to Chavez (then president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela). What am I saying, paragraphs? Really the book was edited to around 20-30 pages and presented to him as original research by a supposedly Bolivarian film theorist. The book had tons of full literal paragraphs written by me, but it never mentioned me as the author. This was all wrong, it was the result of an inside job. So called friends who thought the revolution needed such a book and the best way to do it was to deliver it via a cultural agent, when it was still a work in progress. They could have asked me for the text, invited me to deliver a lecture there, anything. When I saw the report not quoting my name ever in the text, it made me question the kind of relations that state politics and revolutionary fervor can do. This was not at all the kind of cultural landscape in which I was interested to work. We've had many such experiences (some even good) with some of the so-called key government left-wing players in the subcontinent known as Latin America, but over time we discovered that this is really a world where many worlds fit. There is space for all of us. Sometimes claustrophobic too, but so far we've survived. Or so we think. Did we? Yes, so far so good. Alive.

MARIÁ LILIA (MAMÁ) 

The third member of the Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op and really the key to the project. She is based in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, where she manages and receives the shipments of Zapatista coffee, that before being sent to NYC are stored in a small room in her garage. That room used to be the Tijuana Media Lab. And it’s a tiny room full of dust, books and things, that once someone broke into as a form of warning. For a while this room was the stage of many things for a small crowd. I will try to number one or two later on. But at least 4 of the persons that used to orbit around died in the Summer we started. Maybe it doesn't sound like much in these days of Covid-19, but when you have a small room and a small crowd, this could make up as much as a double-digit percentage sample.

NEW YORK CITY

It's the place we call home. But it wasn't always as easy to call it like that, even as far as year five. At the beginning we had a fellowship and space at Eyebeam art and technology center, where we managed to put into motion the Digital Material Sunflower currency which created a very big and functional Diego de la Vega Cooperative Media Conglomerate, that even had a small press, an online radio with collectives from Mexico to Argentina, Turkey, the USA and Colombia, and beyond creating weekly shows. And eventually the focus of the co-op became Zapatista Coffee, in part thanks to a fellowship from a Blade of Grass. And so, the Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op was born. Here is a video before we managed to move into our co-operative apartment: https://vimeo.com/144518926 . It took us 10 years of saving every cent that ever got into the project and re-investing it over and over, to be able to move into our apartment, in order to be somewhat protected from the realities of market capitalism in a city like this, in order to be able to afford to continue working this project, expand it, contract it. The vision and the dream are still in progress, we have managed to have a few temporary coffee-shops like in Jamaica, Queens within an exhibition Jameco Exchange that lasted a couple of months. But rent is so expensive that it’s impossible to make it permanent. Also, we turned the housing cooperative Museo de los Sures in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) into a coffee-shop fueled by a patolli-run economy. But overall we do catering in events like the NYC Anarchist Book Fair, the Left Forum, May Day Holiday Market and Forward Union Fair.

OCCUPY WALL STREET

We sometimes would set up a small installation of Spacebank, whose motto was “don't hate the banks, become the banks', but the organization would look at us with suspicion. Their enemies were banks and at times it seemed what the struggle wanted was a bigger share of the colonial loot, instead of new forms of relations in Planet Earth. We thought, well, differently. But overall there was no interest. They wanted the money of the banks, and they wanted it now. For us it’s all about the long term, the five-year plan, the Second 500 years of what some call 'war', but we call 'life'.

ZAPATISTAS

They have been our inspiration since January 1st, 1994. To say role models would be a bit too much. But they gave us something to believe in, to keep on going to the days of crisis and neoliberalism in the 1990s, and to try to organize against the dystopias of government and surveillance in the 2000s, and the whole conceptual reconfiguration of many fields over the 2010s. It feels like all of a sudden, many things changed, and we are still here serving coffee, trying to make a geographical drawing by connecting people and movements in New York City and Chiapas via a cup of coffee. There is so much to do, still. We started to work with popcorn too, to try and finance anticolonial films by selling indigenous popcorn with alternative currencies. That is, trying to bring promiscuity to fields and disciplines that could benefit a bit by becoming entangled. Maybe it’s not the best economic theory or practice, but it’s the one that art allows you to experiment with. I am sure things will pop up from it.

To be continued... and modified periodically over time. This is version one.

Bronx, NY. September 14th, 2020.
First year of the global pandemic.

Fran Ilich is a media artist, essayist, novelist, and activist. His work focuses on the theory and practice of narrative media, experimental economies and finance, hacktivism, and social organizations. He is the author of novels Circa 94 (2010); Tekno Guerilla (2008); and Metro-Pop (1997), and created works of narrative media that range from interactive web telenovelas to experimental theater, alternate reality, and utopian experiments in social organization. Ilich continuously works on different projects, like the Diego de la Vega Coffee Co-op (where indigenous Zapatista coffee is served and exchanged for time, objets, alternative currencies at social art and social movement events).

In Aridoamérica Winter Plan, he turned a storefront space in Williamsburg into a neighborhood coffee co-op with its own micro-economy, for a solo exhibition funded by ISCP at El Museo de Los Sures. He was a fellow at Eyebeam and A Blade of Grass. He has produced work for exhibitions and projects of the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, No Longer Empty and others. He was Visiting Lecturer at the Literature Department of the University of California San Diego and director of the Literature Department at Centro Cultural Tijuana. He participated in Berlinale Talent Campus, Transmediale, ARCO, Documenta, EZLN’s Festival Mundial de la Digna Rabia, Other Futures (Amsterdam), Antidoto (São Paulo), The Economist Summit Mexico. His work has been featured at Walker Art Center, Creative Time’s ‘Living as Form’, IAGO (Oaxaca), and others.