Autonomía

Knowledge never comes alone

07
This work tries to delve into the production of hybrid objects and knowledge, by means of an extensive field work with the collaboration of experts in many different areas whose research methods include the use of concepts such as the invisibility or the difficulty of the parameters that characterize their search, as well as the negotiations with the territory, taking the dark matter as a metaphor and thread of this story.
Let’s just say that the aim is to make up a story or scientific historiography which, in some of its particularities, transforms into more general stories based in the specific characteristics of a physical and political territory that becomes an exceptional parameter for the study of specific problems.
The supposed neutrality of geographical knowledges has at best proven to be a beguiling fiction and at worst a downright fraud. Geographical knowledges have always internalized strong ideological content. In its scientific (predominantly positivist) forms, natural and social phenomena are represented objectively as things, subject to manipulation, management and exploitation by dominant forces of capital and the state. 
Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, David Harvey.
In this scientific forms, eventuality considered as a possibility or risk of change, fact or unexpected problems is presented as a fundamental concept at facing the reading and rewriting of facts before a “mathematization” of the Universe.
Eigenlicht o el conocimiento nunca viene solo (Eigentlich or Knowledge Never Comes Alone) is made up of three works: one documentary, four diaporamas and one sound mechanism.
The documentary filmed in Chile, in the Atacama desert, the most arid in the World, shows how this landscape and the extreme life conditions in it substantially affect the work carried out there by some scientists.
Both recent and past history of this territory are present in the activities and reports elaborated by the scientists, making up a unique paradigm to investigate and rethink the relationship between policies, contexts and knowledge produced within them.
This choral story includes people (archaeologist, anthropologists, natives, engineers, astrophysicists, cosmologists, etc) as well as landscapes in which their activities are carried out (an archaeological museum in Arica, in the Peru-Bolivia border, an experimental station in a territory recently revealed to science -Alto Patache-, the Chuquicamata copper mine, the Paranal astronomic observatory (ESO), … and archaeological ruins arisen from industrial development: old mining cities abandoned in the desert, cemeteries of ancient dwellers of those settlements, etc.
The change in the cosmologic model emerged from the studies of dark matter and energy plays the role of an allegory and a mental image of the need of change in the archetype used when dealing with the production of knowledge, orders and paradigms, all of which are apparently intact.
The diaporama is made up of four projectors programmed with Arduino, bearing each carriage an unequal number of images. Each one of them projects an assortment of images found in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek corresponding to four discourses or scientific specialization lines: Archaeology, Astronomy, History of Communication (cybernetics, radio, etc…) and Extrasensory Communication (mesmerism, hypnosis, etc…).
Apparently, the discourses seem to display an independent narrative in which there seems to be no synchronies or contact points. The projectors make up a visual and audible score apparently disorganized and responding to independent and internal discourses only.
However, the projections of all four projectors unexpectedly synchronize to produce an image or text.