Hush! Caution! Echoland in 2021!

Along the LODE Zone Line and, as usual, fully immersed in the electric information environment . . .

. . . the Re:LODE Radio project in 2021 continues under the new banner:

Hush! Caution! Echoland!

And "echoland" is where we find ourselves, an information environment so dense in its content, so mesmerising in its entertainment value, so driven by distraction from distraction by distraction, we have no time, and space, to reflect, and to juggle both the images and the consequence of the images, into;

patterns of perception!

But, that is the purpose of the Re:LODE Radio project, to create this time and this space for this juggling, this juxtaposition, of the both the facts, and the "alternative facts", the gossip and the "pavement radio", and to begin to see beyond the ideology and the spectacle. To see and understand what's happening across our planet.

The stories circulating among the inhabitants of this planet are so numerous that the methods and purposes of LODE, Re:LODE and Re:LODE Radio includes this "way" of making connections along a line, that is more than a line, because "it girds the planet", it is a circle!. 

It has no beginning! It has no end! Instead the LODE Zone Line offers an infinite middle, in media res!

'Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?' Hmm . .'

'What do you think, Harry?' said Luna, looking thoughtful.'

'What? Isn’t there just a password?'

'Oh no, you’ve got to answer a question,' said Luna. 

'What if you get it wrong?' 

'Well, you have to wait for somebody who gets it right,' said Luna. 'That way you learn, you see?' 

'Yeah . . . Trouble is, we can’t really afford to wait for anyone else, Luna.' 'No, I see what you mean,' said Luna seriously.' 

'Well then, I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning.' 

'Well reasoned,' said the voice, and the door swung open.' 

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The LODE Zone Line works because it is a circle and therefore has no beginning.

So, LODE always opens into the middle of things, as it were, and so any place on the LODE Zone Line is a place in equal relation to all other places along the line, and any moment of  making a connection to a place along the LODE Zone Line is equal to all other moments that have occurred in that place.

What is happening at any given location along the LODE Zone Line is happening, or has happened, in relation to all the other things happening or have happened along the the LODE Zone Line, so there is no need to impose a strict sequence to ordering these moments. It is the spatial relationships and the patterns that seem to come through the mosaic of moments of time associated with locations that form the psycho-geographic matrix of the LODE cargo.

It seems a non linear structure works in revealing complex connections in a way that a linear structure cannot, hence the concept of the 'field' when considering how knowledge about things happening is mostly about realising that: 

what we know now will not be the same as when we know more!

Presenting knowledge of the world may be ordered, but sometimes, as Jean-Luc Godard once said: 

"I agree that a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order"!

So, when coming to a place on the LODE Zone Line, the original thinking in the proposal was to make a simple magnetic compass from materials sourced close to a particular location on the LODE Zone Line, that would form the cargo, along with other compasses assembled along the LODE Zone Line and that would eventually be unloaded and unpacked as the focus for the performance and installation work. The date and time of the "assembling" did not require "placing" in a particular sequence in time, as in a narrative, as it is the value of location in terms of the spatial relations that the project explores. 

It is the relational matrix that matters! 

So here we go!

New line of defense: The photo shows a health worker receiving a COVID-19 vaccine at Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital in Central Jakarta on Thursday, a day after Indonesia began its mass vaccination program, with health workers given top priority. 

Dian Septiari reporting for The Jakarta Post, from Jakarta (Mon, February 1 2021) writes under the headline: 

Indonesia against 'Vaccine nationalism' 

Indonesia has urged the world to not resort to "vaccine nationalism", which it says could limit the global availability of COVID-19 vaccines, after a recent procurement row broke out in Europe. 

Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said during an online panel organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Friday that equitable and fair access to vaccines was important not just for developing and least developed countries, but also for developed countries. She said the world would not truly recover from COVID-19 unless all countries recovered. 

“So please stop the politicization of vaccines; please stop vaccine nationalism. And we must remind ourselves that vaccines are a humanitarian issue; vaccines are not a political issue,” Retno said.

Indonesia has promoted multilateralism in the search for solutions to the global health crisis as a means to keep nationalism and protectionism at bay. 

Retno herself is one of three cochairs of the GAVI COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC), a multilateral COVID-19 vaccine initiative she cited as the type of effort “we need to continuously strengthen" to ensure both rich and poor countries received vaccines simultaneously. The AMC is part of an international collaborative effort called the COVAX Facility, which is seeking to pool and distribute some 2 billion vaccine doses throughout world. Through the program, Indonesia could receive 13 million to 23 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. 

Read also: Jokowi calls for equal vaccine access in UNGA address 

On Saturday, Retno spoke with Seth Berkley of the GAVI vaccine alliance, one of founders of the COVAX Facility, about the rise of vaccine nationalism and its potential to inhibit multilateral vaccine cooperation. 

Last week, the European Union announced it would tighten rules on the export of COVID-19 vaccines produced in the region as “an insurance policy” for the vaccines it had bought in advance, Reuters reported. The plan came after the EU publicly criticized AstraZeneca for failing to deliver vaccine shots as promised. The EU plan has alarmed the United Kingdom in particular. 

Read also: EU could ban vaccine exports under new checks

Vaccine supplies under the COVAX Facility and other multilateral efforts are exempt from the planned scheme, as are exports to certain countries. But some developed countries that have made advance purchases have voiced their concerns, including Japan and South Korea, whose officials raised the issue at the WEF panel on Friday evening. 

“I'm concerned that the EU has announced that the EU may block the export of vaccines produced in Europe until sufficient amounts are provided to European people before they allow any export to the third countries,” said Japan’s Taro Kono, who is in charge of delivering vaccines to the country’s more than 120 million people. 

Even though it was “understandable” for a country to put its own citizens first, he said, the move could disrupt the global supply chain and trigger “some kind of retaliation”. 

Outgoing South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha asked why some governments were collecting vaccines “in volumes that were many times more than their population sizes [required]”, which she feared would exacerbate the uncertainty for the rest of the world. 

With a population of only about 450 million, the EU has reserved almost 2.3 billion doses from six vaccine makers. But EU Ambassador to ASEAN Igor Driesmans defended the approach earlier this week, saying the advance purchases were to ensure that the EU had enough for its people. 

"What we see for the time being in Europe is that there's very much a scarcity of vaccines," he said during a virtual press briefing on Thursday, adding that once the EU’s population was vaccinated, the surplus would be shared with other countries. 

Read also: Data problems cast shadow over Indonesia's ambitious vaccine drive

Despite having been developed by various producers at an unprecedented speed, COVID-19 vaccines are scarce throughout the world, and only a few dozen countries have begun mass vaccination programs. 

By Jan. 29, more than 91.22 million vaccine doses had been administered worldwide, with the United States leading the tally with 27.88 million doses, followed by China with 22.77 million doses, according to the Our World in Data project by the University of Oxford. The worldwide tally is equal to 1.2 doses for every 100 people. 

As of Jan. 30, 482,145 first doses and 20,810 second doses of CoronaVac had been administered in Indonesia, according to the Health Ministry, about three weeks after the nation began its vaccination program. The figures represent a fraction of the country’s 260 million people. 

Driesmans said he hoped all countries would “up their game and be more ambitious” in their funding for the COVAX Facility. He said about 50 percent of the program had been financed by the EU – a greater share than any other contributor, including China, the US, Japan and South Korea. 

So here's the thing . . .

. . . the information, and the way in which this information is processed and presented has different qualities from places along the LODE Zone Line, but the forces at work, the issues that are raised, and the politics of representation have one thing in common, they are planetary in scale!