Central Monitor · Central Node was a software, an interface, and a platform to visualize and navigate through what I then called techno-political imaginaries (2011). It allowed to read thousands of the so-called cables leaked by WikiLeaks in late 2010 — originally they would have been actual cables, sent using telex technology — in what was called the Cable-Gate case: a vast collection of secret or confidential documents that, for decades, US-diplomats sent to their Department of State — the equivalent in the US to a Ministry of Exterior — to inform about, and somehow redrawing, the political scenarios and the networks of power within almost every country in the planet.
WikiLeaks technological platform, and the actual public leak of this archive of political intelligence — in the strategic and military sense of the term — showed at least two aspects that this project aimed to explore: first, the massiveness and scope of the networks of power/knowledge that during the 20th century were built, almost exclusively, through telecommunications and information technologies; and second, the role that technologies of writing, encoding, and archiving have had in the configuration of political territorialities, and thus of psychic territorialities — in other words, of techno-political imaginaries.
Thus, by being an interface and a platform of observation, the project sought to invite visitors to witness, to monitor, if not to explore, the not-so-apparent configuration of these territorialities and these imaginaries.
Resembling an expert-economic-system, the project’s visual interface offers a series of world-map configurations which are based on the amount of references to a certain geographical region in the archive/collection of cables — in the case of Wikileaks, in yellow — or well, on the amount of articles published by the newspapers that partnered with Wikileaks to release these documents — the other colors and tabs in the visual interface. Hence, visitors inevitably witnessed (see videos below) that through this techno-symbolic machinery some territories exist more than others.
Central Monitor · Central Node was installed and presented for two weeks in the New Wight Gallery at UCLA’s Broad Art Center in May 2011, as part of the MFA in Design Media Arts thesis show.
The software was developed with Processing.