Skip to main content

Search

Archiving for everybody?

ATroitzsch

For me it seems like the Internet Archive gives the possibility to participate to everybody - so if you think this webpage should be archived, you can just do it by yourself, everybody who has a free account on the internet archive, can add something to the archive - but besides this, they are having a lot of partnerships with libraries and other institutions to be always behind important web pages that should be archived.  

Frozing time

ATroitzsch

The most interesting part of this archive (which helped me to find information about the chemical accident that happened 1993 in Höchst AG) was the wayback machine: The “internet archived” saves a very huge amount of webpages (475 billion web pages) in different moments in time, so that even if information are not available on websites anymore or the websites/ companies do not exist anymore, in the archive they can still be found. Extending the idea of “archiving the internet itself” from 1996, the “internet archive” also started to build up a library, where books, audios and videos which are running on free licenses can be found.

Archiving digital text-data

ATroitzsch

It is not designed to remember data related to a certain topic, but more generally an archive where especially websites of different institutions, NGOs, companies etc. are saved (“Wayback Machine”). It is strongly related to a question of archiving digital text-data, for example websites.

Oysterfarms

ATroitzsch
Annotation of

One ecosystem mentioned in the film was the one of oysters  -which actually is also man-made, as it is an oyster-farm - but I think it becomes very clear in the film that it became more difficult to the oyster-farmers to cultivate the oysters through the 6th Naphtha petrochemical complex. The farmers talk about  mud and other new circumstances that kill the larvae of the oysters. In this context, this is also affecting the socio-sphere, and the impact on the eco-sphere is not so much highlighted in the film, but I think it would be interesting to look further in this point.

Our body is more sensitive

ATroitzsch
Annotation of

The technical infrastructure that is supposed to monitor fixed pollution sources by law is not working properly in the case of the 6th Naphtha (- or it is made to work not properly). There should be CEMS “Continuous Emission Monitoring System” installed directly at some of the chimneys, and there was data produced by the systems, showing a lot of cases of excessive emission - but data was described to be invalid due to maintenance of the apparatus. The activists describe this as a loophole. It is interesting here, how standards and monitoring is not only a question of what is asked by law or regulated by law, but also what happens to avoid these regulations. So what civic data is needed here? It would be the measurements of the CEMS  or from other monitoring systems not only at the plant, but for example nearby the school. As one activist stresses in the documentary, there were for example infrared thermometers at one school, that recorded the heat of the accident mentioned in the film. This is an example for civic data.  It was also interesting here, how a person in the film said, that their own bodies monitor the pollution (“Our body is more sensitive”): they feel in their bodies, what the monitoring devices supposedly do not notice. 

Subjectivities of 6th Naphtha

ATroitzsch
Annotation of

One could say that there are several subjectivities produced in the context of the 6th Naphtha petrochemical complex: being someone who suffers from a disease or the smell, the risk to get health issues due to the exposure to the polluted air; being an activist who fights against formosa company, being a oyster farmer who has become politicised by the environmental pollution. In this context, for me it is the point of being at risk is very interesting, as it seems to lead people to different kinds of action: to produce knowledge about these risks, to relocate children from one school to another etc.