Good evening,

I am very glad that the SCCA people have invited me to lecture in this cycle which has a very significant title, Geopolitics and Art. It seems to me that we live in a time in which such a title carries an important weight and has become very topical, even personal, for all of us. As for myself, I believe that it has always been topical, but never as much as during the past 15 years.

Today I will speak about three projects created over the past four years. One of them I shall touch upon very briefly, because it deserves an entire separate lecture. I am going to talk about the other two in detail The projects I'll talk about are MAKROLAB, the 178 Degrees East - Another Ocean Region project accomplished in 1997 in Australia, and the TRUST-SYSTEM 15 project realised this year at P. S. 1 in New York. The lecture will be continually accompanied by a video recording - so if you're bored you can watch (silent) TV, made above America via the Galaxy satellite communication channel, which the PARAMAX corporation, manufacturer of battleships and battleship electronic equipment, uses for its internal communications. It was their internal video, a report to the employees, which my collaborator Brian Springer had re-directed to his recording devices in 1992 ...

I have also prepared a computer presentation - sorry, this is the first time I am using this programme, well, here's a nice blue arch ...

Now, as I said, I am going to speak about three projects. MAKROLAB (ML) was conceived as a ten-year project because I believed that ten years was a period in which a lot might happen and change, and that the strategy ML used as its basic principle might not be so effective and appropriate at the end of that period. The second is the 178 Degrees East - Another Ocean Region project. The title indicates the position of a satellite from the INMARSAT constellation over the Pacific whose telecommunications traffic served as the basis of that project. The third project, TRUST-SYSTEM 15 (tactical radio unified system transport), was designed in 1995 but has acquired practical relevance only this year, because of the political realities we are living through ...

In 1997 I wrote the lecture Command Communications and Control in Eastern Europe - a view from isolation.

In that text I tried to explain the fundamentals of the strategic action, which I had taken over directly from the US contemporary doctrine of command, control and communications. I have prepared them in an abridged form for you today.

The general idea is ...

...whenever you set about a strategic action - and it makes no difference if it's a social action in art or politics - you must have a clear goal and a purpose; you must lead every operation towards a clearly defined and attainable goal. Already we can see that the first thesis is very problematic in the light of the present NATO operation. There's no clear goal in that operation ...

Offensive and initiative - the initiative must be taken, retained and put to use. The body of concentrated fighting power must be in the key place at the key time. Of course, fighting power can be understood in very different ways, and I think that this month we have the opportunity to see at the cultural/political level in Slovenia how matters stand in a fighting power that is concentrated and understands what "the right moment" means. Another strategic fundamental is economy of force, i.e. efficiency; we must define a minimum fighting power for secondary purposes and concentrate on the principal direction. The important thing is to manoeuvre quickly, to embarrass the enemy by the flexible use of fighting power, to secure what I think is of key importance - the unity of command. For each goal there should be a unified and responsible command; I don't mean one man, but the unified system of decision-making. Of course, it is very important not to let oneself be taken by surprise; your opponent must never be allowed to gain an unexpected advantage, particularly when your opponent is, say, your own state or a system of repression in that state, or, for example, some international system of repression or even the laws ...The opponent should be taken by surprise at a time or point when he is unprepared, or in a manner for which he is unprepared, and there we always have the open question of what exactly is that crucial point, about which the opinions of those who must make decisions usually differ the most.

The last strategic fundamental is of much interest to art, above all ...Somehow, people who read something about me and my work say they haven't understood a thing, and this is what I go by ...The conceptual system and the matrix of thinking which I have set down over the past few years are very hermetic indeed, and I hope that this lecture helps to make simplicity and clarity a constant of that language. The strategic fundamental ...To make operations successful through understanding, we must prepare clear and uncomplicated plans and clear and concise instructions. What I see as the most important point in all of this doctrine is that it is a complete translation of a strategy created somewhere in some rooms and through the history of military operations.

When I discovered how the entire military industry and the development of military means are connected with society, and how a tremendous amount of technology created for military purposes is transferred to civilian use after only a few years, it dawned on me that I had chanced upon one of the key matrices of the development of modern post-industrial society. Truth to tell, this process has lately been going in the opposite direction as well, as large budgetary funds are being channelled these days to civilian industry, which then, indirectly and in inverse proportion to its own development, serves the military-industrial complex. Russia, for example, has great difficulties in this respect, as we were able to see today. (We shall have great problems with Russia in the future) In short, this industry is developing new equipment and the tendency is to have the same products divided into civilian and military programmes. For example, they produce a jet engine for both military and civilian applications; with electronics it is much the same, and examples of this kind are endless.

During the eighties, vast amounts of money were invested in the military-industrial complex in both the West and East. In the nineties, the situation has changed. Nominally, there is less money and the corporations are uniting and becoming ever stronger and more influential. But this is not the subject of this lecture, but only the background of the entire complex of problems bearing upon my projects in the field of art and technology and their junction with science.

Briefly, ML was first presented within an art exhibition Documenta X at Kassel. It was conceived as an integral project. As a matter of fact, ML was first an open-air performance which later, through the functions it was to perform, grew into the kind of entity it is now. This year we have been working on a new phase of the project, with a new team; the object will change, becoming more efficient and agreeable for a long stay and exertion in it. ML has three basic structural dimensions - analytical, process-oriented and performative.

Out of ML, i.e. the material accumulated on it, there developed a cycle of Wardenclyffe performances and the larger-scale happening SOLAR ...of which there is no time to speak today.

ML is interested in three basic global areas of research. These are telecommunications systems, weather systems and migrations as a phenomenon - migrations of people, capital, goods, fauna, flora. In short, we are interested in everything ...I once said that ML was the big eye and ear of the world, and now I might say that it is also a big processor. The fact is that not even today, a year and a half since the end of the first phase in Kassel, has all of the material accumulated during those three months been processed. This is due to human limitations, the tremendous amount of information and data accumulated, and because the Atol Project has no analytical service to process it all. This partially explains why only a tiny part of it has actually come to public view or appeared in the Wardenclyffe cycle projects and in the SOLAR performance. At the research level, the first phase of ML focused on telecommunications systems. ML operates completely autonomously, on a solar drive. You simply put it in the sun and it works; it doesn't need any infrastructure except itself. On Lutterberg it lasted from 12 June to 17 September 1997, including all the phases from construction onwards.

The second phase of ML will focus on migrations, which have become very interesting these days. We shall concentrate on migrations in the Balkan Peninsula, mainly the migrations of people. We shall place it on a tiny island, Campalto ...which throughout history has served as a small fortress in the Venetian lagoon, as a defence line for Venice ...It will start operating on 15 September and will remain there until 15 October 1999. But we shall be there much earlier, the bureaucracy in Italy is so complicated ...(because of a shortage of funds on the Italian side the project was discontinued in September 1999 and will be realised in the year 2000).

The third phase will take place in western Australia, from 5 February until 25 April 2000. It will focus on weather systems, telecommunications systems, migrations and the continuation of the 178 Degrees East - Another Ocean Region project. We shall also study the local ownership and territory problems. In Australia the problem of who owns which piece of land is an important issue - I assume you all know the story about Australia as a penal colony - for before the entire continent was occupied by the Europeans there had been some other people there, and certain ownership problems have arisen in that connection and ML is very much interested in such problems ...

The next project I am going to speak about also took place in Australia. It is the 178 Degrees East - Another Ocean Region project. The project was set in the Performance Space gallery in Sydney, in November and December 1997, and was concerned with the Australian telecommunications legislation which, because of the UKUSA Pact amongst other things, pays much attention to the possibility of interception of telecommunications. UKUSA is an intelligence co-operation pact signed by the English-speaking countries after World War II ...It was first signed by the USA and UK, then by Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It enables a very broad exchange of information and intelligence data, analyses and personnel. The result is that in these countries and their allies, comprehensive systems of secret listening devices have been installed and united into a system called Echelon. Very little is known about the system, although it has recently become a popular topic of all conspiracy theories. However, thanks to some New Zealander it is now known how the system is supposed to operate. Its stations, installed all over the world (the closest to us is at Bad Aibling, in Bavaria), have antennae directed towards the civilian telecommunications satellites - well, to military satellites too, but there are very few of those, mainly American and some Russian, British and French, which are all there are in the military telecommunications area. All other traffic goes via civilian satellites, and the Echelon system listens to them and records ...

Interestingly, one of the CRAY super-computers is said to have been developed precisely for use in that system, in which it is necessary to process an enormous amount of data in the shortest possible time. Echelon uses some "dictionaries" with entries which at a particular moment are of interest to system operators, and special search programmes then search those entries in the faxes, telexes, e-mail messages and voice communications which the system has stored. The system is said to have two stations in Australia, reportedly at the Pine Gap base and at Woomeri. From the standpoint of international law Echelon is illegal, of course, as is the entire system judging by the majority of national legislations except the Australian ...This was the subject of the project for which I had made a comparative study of telecommunications laws in all the UKUSA signatories and found out that with the exception of Australia, no legislation allows anybody, be it a private person or the state, to listen surreptitiously to private conversations without court authorisation. But, of course, where the so-called "national interest" is concerned the states disregard this although it is written in their laws and constitutions, for they have different channels through which they can even do it legally. We found out that one of such legalised channels in the Australian legislation enables civilians to do the same...There is a small detail, of course, that you must not record or disclose what you've heard, and what you are listening to must not be transmitted from Australia or intended for Australia. But the legal possibility to do it exists, so I decided to demonstrate, not to use, that possibility and to warn of it. This is how the project which turned its antenna towards the Inmarsat satellite over the Pacific came to be.

We prepared the reception system and every visitor to the gallery signed the Confidentiality and Non Disclosure Agreement form made in accordance with Australian legislation through the intermediary of a large firm which had confirmed our interpretation. We drew up the form together, and all visitors who wanted to use earphones and the reception system to listen to that satellite communication - mainly telephone conversations - had to sign it. If anyone is interested in the details I can explain them after the lecture. In my opinion the Australian law is how it is in order to enable the two Echelon stations operating in Australia to be legal in a very broad sense. The Australian continent is big, and when you're there the laws are also something very open and abstract. When you have in front of you an open space with 600 km between two towns anything can happen without anyone seeing and knowing it, and precisely because of this Australia is a paradigmatic territory for realising such a legal idea. The installation of the satellite reception system itself was very simple and both the laws, which I named "the attackers", i.e. the Telecommunications Interception Act and the Australian Security Intelligence Act, were available. These are the two books that made the project possible. Above them is the map of the Inmarsat constellation, which I named "the attacked", and on the walls were materials about Echelon and UKUSA and the protection of privacy - in short, the entire context. If I were to describe the project in a single sentence I would say that the essential thing about it is the demonstration of the possibility of the legal use of means for research on the telecommunications spectrum. Telecommunications are the most regulated part of legislation in all the countries of the world, and are crucial to projects which act to open and not close the problems.

The next project is TRUST-SYSTEM 15.

The beginnings of this project date back to 1995; its aim was communication with the military-industrial complex and the collecting of documents connected with it. In 1995 I started to write letters to such corporations, very polite letters of the type "Marko Peljhan, Project Atol, Pact Systems Ljubljana, we are interested in what you are producing and selling, please send us information about it ..."

To my great surprise mail started showering in, rather in waves, as my address began to circulate ...In 1995 Slovenia was a hot territory, the embargo was being lifted and they were probably saying "well, well, here are our first buyers, we shall send them our offer." I collected a fat folder of such documents, many of them having a personal ring: "Dear Marko ..." etc., obviously meant to create an impression of trust, and since I am quite engaged in technology the result was that I changed my strategy of creation. At that time I wrote the text The Art of Intelligence on the Art of War Making, which became the basis of my work...

In that text I explained the principle of conversion, or how something made exclusively for military purposes can be used for civilian purposes. Within the Urbanaria project, if you remember it, we then developed the UCOG-144 project together with Borja Jelič and Luka Frelih as the programmers; Frelih was the first to use the GPS military satellite navigation system in the civilian sector in Slovenia. Over the past two years the use of the system spread so much that it became absurd to build it at home, as we had been doing, when it was available in shops for 300 US dollars ...

TRUST-SYSTEM 15 is a work from the Resolution series in which I explore the tactical contents in a modern society using the system of art, and of representation which attaches to art as the realm of presentation and promotion of ideas, concepts and specific solutions. In 1996 I used a larger team to stage a performance at Cankarjev dom. The visual image of that performance was composed of fragments of prospectuses and materials; this documentation ...that you see now are fragments from that collection ... , my favourite is "performance is the best strategy" which, believe it or not, is an advertisement for the LORAL firm's rocket system ...In a word, all the works in the Resolution series use methods and materials that are in direct interaction with social and capital systems. Communication with those systems, the use of those systems, co-operation and confrontation with them ...TRUST-SYSTEM 15 is designed as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), an unmanned flying object. Such objects are now being used in our near vicinity, and this is really a very interesting moment in time; one could call it the "electromagnetic" moment because all those mechanisms are receiving and transmitting signals, and if you have the right equipment and antennae you'll find that there are quite a lot of such things in the air today. We should probably devote more time to it now in Project Atol, but unfortunately time and capacities are in short supply. The project is about the developing of the UAV for civilian-tactical purposes, and I will now explain what these purposes are ...

The project was first presented as an exhibition of electronic components built into such mechanisms in April 1999 within the exhibition GENERATION Z at P.S. 1 in New York. The project has two objectives - tactical broadcasting of a radio programme over territory where broadcasting by the usual means is impossible because of military actions and civil repression, and collecting of intelligence for civilian purposes. The second objective is of course in collision with all the legislations in the world, but I and an entire culture are certainly interested in how to maintain a degree of civilian control over very aggressive and self-reproducing systems of social repression which use these same methods to keep us under their thumb. You can see in the picture the installation of the project in New York. It was the first direct result of communication with the military-industrial complex; namely, the industry sent Project Atol its samples ...various materials started arriving at a specific address in New York, from UAV engines to electronics, jammers, telemetry and navigation systems.

The platform we intend to make will have satellite and inertial controls and navigation. We plan to make two versions for two kinds of applications - a swift one with a turbojet engine, and a slow one with a four-stroke aircraft engine. The components will include an FM transmitting and receiving system with memory for up to six hours of programming, and a jamming module with anti-electronic action feature - one was exhibited in New York and is manufactured by NOISECOMM Inc. which was very kind to us in this communication ...the same module is built into the EA6-B PROWLER aircraft ...these are the individual elements, if anyone is interested I can explain the technical details later. Our flying object must not be too dangerous to the people down on earth; it must continuously report its position, what it is doing and what is happening to it, and we must have the possibility of telling it where to go ...The object must be able to identify the position of other aircraft in its vicinity to avoid crashing into passenger planes, etc. ...We don't want any such thing to happen, for once you are in the air conditions change and you are confronted with a very complex system that operates at a high speed, in real time, in four dimensions. I have prepared for the project a series of manuals in different fields, and these will be issued as a book, as a manual to be supplemented with new information as the project develops. At the same time it is a technological work, one which must meander through different legislations, and a work which must convince those unconvinced in the military industry that our objective is not to make a surprise nuclear bomb and send it in an unidentified direction.

In short, we are confronted with very complicated issues. The UAV will be designed for use in dangerous areas and for civilian tactical purposes ...What I mean is that, for example, you might incorporate "Radio Študent" in the platform and let it descend, say, on Serbia so that people can listen to the radio, until someone downs it, of course. The system was to be used first above Kosovo and Serbia - it appears sensible because of the circumstances there and the proximity. Apart from this, there is also in preparation a system of mobile tactical solar-energy-driven ground transmitters. My plan is by the end of next month to move three such transmitters to refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania ...

One of the firms with which I communicated and which seemed willing to place at the disposal of the project three micro gyroscopes of its own making is Fibersense Technology Inc. Over the past three months the firm attracted much attention as China had illegally got hold of the same gyroscopes, which are very accurate and are used for navigation with inertial navigation systems and are under very strict control of the State Department. Someone tried to buy them, and since then Fibersense has been very cautious and wary of my letters. They promised to send the samples to New York but the samples did not reach there, and there was only a letter saying that they unfortunately could not participate in the project for political reasons.

This is a very interesting piece of equipment, the navigation receiver which combines the Russian and American systems of satellite navigation, GPS and GLONASS. Such systems are very few and this one uses both Russian and US satellites. A very interesting piece of technology from the conceptual-spiritual standpoint as well...because it unites and uses two Cold War products. This is an engine made by HEBRANDSON ENGINES of California. It was tested in Israel and was used. Reportedly, a high-speed version of TRUST-SYSTEM 15 was made on the basis of conversion of the system in the picture (BOEING SLAM ER). I've passed over these topics very quickly and I know I haven't told you everything, so please ask me now if you have any questions or need clarifications, explanations and details about them.

Question: You are referring to minimum strategies of resistance, but ML or TRUST-SYSTEM 15, for example, do not seem to me to be minimal projects ...

Answer: I am speaking about the minimum because the projects grow out of the context of an artistic activity, and are really minimal in comparison with the systems with which they are in collision and with which they communicate. An effort by a few people is not tantamount to a very organised system that would stand behind the development of these projects with human and capital resources. The money invested in all these projects combined does not exceed 180,000 DEM, which is the price of a slightly above-average deluxe car today. It is an entirely different kind of activity which started four years ago, so it is still a small-scale activity. ML is indeed a big project and was the largest object on Documenta , but it was installed 25 km off Kassel and not many people saw it ...which again makes it minimal ...

Question: I'd like to know if people were allowed to get inside ML, into the object itself ...

Answer: Not in principle, but we had various situations ...there were quite a lot of people coming from Ljubljana, as well as from Kassel, and some wanted to get in and tour ML after talking with us from the console ...of course we didn't forbid them ...but we didn't let everybody in, and not the local villagers either, who during the first three weeks were coming every day after work, around 6 o'clock, in threes and fours and looked at it, walked around it, sometimes knocked at the door ...We told them it was a visiting weather station ...we didn't explain much, because we never knew who we were talking to. We only were in Germany and it was very interesting to observe what was going on. A few days before the end of the project, on the eve of the first Wardenclyffe situation on ML, three cross-country vehicles were driving at high speed on the fields around us the whole afternoon. They all had Wiesbaden licence plates and the majority of German police automobiles are registered in Wiesbaden ...But we had a licence for use of telecommunications equipment and the whole operation was officially and at least partly legally regulated. Still, I didn't feel completely at ease that day and didn't know what would happen the next day...

Question: Why is ML interested in migrations, and why should it be installed on the islet in the Venetian lagoon?

Answer: I am trying to act in those contexts in which the principle of freedom is very broadly understood, and art provides a framework in which we can do many things that would be impossible to do in some other social framework. If the project was presented as some other kind of activity, the first questions would probably be:" Who are you doing it for, who is paying you, why are you collecting these data?" But in art it is different, and indeed no one stands behind it and all this work is just a civilian initiative trying to change our angle of observation of systems of control and their operation. The project will be installed in Venice because that's where the Biennale is ...We had to find the appropriate location and there is no other reason to put it there except that the place is very interesting from the aspect of migration, primarily ornithological migration. Before the war in Kosovo the concept of the project revolved generally around developments connected to Kosovo, but things have changed now. Data will be collected in various ways, mainly through the mapping of telecommunications, which is the simplest method to use and something we can do relatively well as long as that remains possible, because the satellite telephony systems now in use are highly secured against such activities, which is OK. The point which we strongly emphasised in Kassel and made clear in the project in Australia is that we are not interested in eavesdropping on the private telephone conversations of civilians but in demonstrating that such an activity is possible. In this way we raise the question of why those systems are so open and why they are not better encoded today, when technology enables everybody to have complete security against even systems such as Echelon. With the GSM telephony systems it is much the same, do not think that they cannot be tapped with the right equipment ...for example, the one manufactured by the well-established Munich firm Rhode & Schwarz ...Such equipment was in the Slovenian intelligence service van seized by Croatia ...

These communication systems are vulnerable and ought to be protected if we want the right to privacy protected. The NMT system is also completely open and any amateur radio operator with an ordinary station can listen to and even join in the conversation. Mobitel keeps silent about it, but those interested are certainly eavesdropping ...

Question: How would you comment on the news that some months ago a group of hackers re-directed a British military satellite ...

Answer: I know about the information; it was released by Reuters and very soon disappeared from all agencies' news and has never been confirmed. In my opinion private persons are not capable of doing this, and if it did happen it must have been done by another country and not by a group of hackers. The communications and telemetry of those satellites are protected by cryptographic protection and such protection cannot in principle be broken. I think the news was false, since it was published only by Reuters, the English have denied it and nothing out of the ordinary has happened ...The news also appeared on the Internet where such information tends to spread quickly, especially among hackers, but there has been no confirmation. I think that in terms of technology it is a very complicated enterprise that could be carried out by someone who knows the software and the protocols of communication with that satellite, which reduces the circle of potential users ...With such satellites secret listening is rendered completely impossible by means of crypto protection, although the UHF channels on the FLTSATCOM systems were reported to have been unprotected during the busy traffic that we have now. As for communications from Aviano, for example, almost nothing can now be heard on the airband since the frequency hopping and spread spectrum technologies have very much advanced and surface-to-aircraft communications are appropriately protected. The situation was different as recently as during the military operations over Bosnia, when here and there something could be caught, but now we can only listen to silence that is not silence, of course ...

Well, if there are no more questions I would like to thank you for coming to this lecture. If there are any new developments about ML you shall certainly be informed through the media. Thank you, and goodbye.

The text is published in its integral version, without being edited.