"Here and There" by Gregg Bordowitz Networks of trade, of wealth, of information are inter-connected all over the globe. Who is connected and how? In what direction do goods, services, information and profits flow? These are the important political questions of our day. There has been a major shift away from flows of power to the power of flows. Networks are the forms of social organization currently governing our lives. So says Manuel Castells, author of "The Information Age." My mind repeatedly returned to the notion of networks as I attended the Thirteenth International Conference on HIV/AIDS, last July, in Durban, South Africa. The networks governing the production and distribution of lifesaving drugs exclude the majority of the world's people with AIDS. AIDS activists in resource poor countries are building alternative networks to deliver medicines, care and information to the people hardest hit by the global epidemic. This year's conference focused attention on the catastrophic number of HIV/AIDS infections in Africa. It is estimated by UNAIDS that there are 24.5 million people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and over 4 million people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. South Africa has the fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemic in the world. As the conference served to focus the world's attention on Africa's AIDS problem, it also created an opportunity for African AIDS activists to address the world. The most important story to come out of the conference this year was the issue of access to treatments and medical care. Anti-viral drugs and treatments for opportunistic infections that make people with AIDS sick, drugs that are relatively available in the U.S. and Europe remain unaffordable and inaccessible to people with HIV/AIDS in Africa and resource-poor countries. Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the leading AIDS activist organization in South Africa, staged a demonstration and Global March for Access to HIV/AIDS Treatment to coincide with the opening of the conference. The demonstration was a boisterous gathering of more than five thousand demonstrators with a very strong showing by members of trade unions. Almost all the protestors wore t-shirts with the words HIV POSITIVE printed on the front. There was much chanting and singing by the crowd and many fiery speeches given. [See Carole Leach-Lemens's "Report From Durban"] Every speaker asserted that a diagnosis with AIDS is not a death sentence and that every person with AIDS has the right to fundamental care and available treatments. In response to such pressure leading up to the conference, a group of five major pharmaceutical companies offered to cut drug prices by 85 percent, but the Nobel-Prize-winning group Médécins sans Frontiérs (Doctors Without Borders) likened the gesture to "an elephant giving birth to a mouse." The offer to cut prices still does not put the drugs into the hands of those who cannot afford them. Médécins sans Frontiérs believes that the answer to equitable drug distribution does not lie with donations or price cuts from drug companies but rather with the Brazilian approach of mass-producing quality generics. AIDS drugs are not prohibitively expensive to produce. Recent experience in India, Thailand and Brazil, has shown that most of the critically needed drugs can be produced at a cost that puts them realistically within reach of the resource-poor world. There are two primary reason why the drugs are inaccessible to the developing world: First, drug-pricing structures imposed by the manufacturers make the drugs unaffordably expensive. Second, the international patent and trade regime prevents any large-scale attempt to produce and market the drugs at affordable levels. Toward the end of the Durban conference, Treatment Action Campaign held a press conference to announce the beginning of a plan to attack both these problems: A defiance campaign to obtain Fluconazole (a treatment for cryptococcal meningitis and candida) at the cheapest price in the international market and to distribute the drug in South Africa through a number of doctors and nurses who have agreed to support the campaign. TAC also announced that it is taking legal action against the drug company Pfizer, which makes Fluconazole, to seek a compulsory license allowing South African companies to produce cheaper versions of the drug. The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Intellectual Property Rights (known as TRIPS) allows for compulsory liscencing--the production of generic versions of patented drugs by countries facing national health emergencies. Drug companies can still make it difficult for poor nations to produce quality generics. They can file law suits against companies producing generics. Governments of poor countries fear these law suits, as wells as trade restrictions that can be imposed by powerful countries, like the United States, to protect the interests of pharmaceutical companies. Even though the TRIPS agreement allows for emergency generic drug production, it is now being contested because it potentially reduces indigenous communities' control over their own genetic and natural resources and cultural values; and it could restrict access to technology and patented pharmaceuticals, thus interfering with peoples' right to health. TRIPS protects corporations in countries which have the economic and military might to enforce patents. On August 17, 2000, an important United Nations human rights body, the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, unanimously adopted a resolution calling into question the impact of TRIPS on the human rights of peoples and communities, including farmers and indigenous peoples worldwide. How will artmaking be changed by the ongoing debates about intellectual property rights? The question of access to drug formulas can be extended to many forms of cultural production in general, like software, movies and images. While the latter may not engender matters of life and death, all forms of cultural production within the current global order may have to adapt to new rules of production and distribution. Works of art circulate within a larger economy and within different economies of scale. Issues of authorship will have to be rethought in view of unprecedented numbers of audience members, and, more importantly, unprecedented numbers of artists. Can the international art world driven by profits for corporate sponsors and wealthy patrons continue to traffic in the myths of authorial genius and originality that guarantee current market values? Can the international art world with its well established networks alter its circuits to foster the production and distribution of art not legitimated by the capital investments of the underlying dominant funding structure? From the abstract to the concrete, my mind ponders these general questions and then quickly moves to the specifics of my own practice. How can I, as a relatively privileged person with AIDS--my life is sustained by the drugs that the South African activists are fighting courageously to obtain--articulate a position of subjectivity that shares a common sense of purpose and destiny with people with AIDS in the resource poor world? How can one do something "here" that will bring about change "there"? "Here" and "there" are terms that have been profoundly altered in two ways. First, distances have been bridged and collapsed through new communications technologies. (I receive news about South African AIDS politics daily via email.) Second, modes of production have become increasingly decentered as the controlling concerns of production have become more consolidated; the effects of power are more diffuse, while those who have power are more remote. In July, in South Africa, I attended a dinner party at the house of Zackie Achmat, the chairperson of the Treatment Action Campaign. At this dinner, a group of PWAs from the U.S. had the opportunity to sit down with African PWAs and activists. At a moment when the conversation became quiet, Zackie asked us, the Americans, to show the assembled guests our AIDS medications. Stunned, I, and a few others around the table, reached into our pockets, took out our pills and laid them on the table. Each of us then talked about the medications we are currently on, their benefits and side-effects. Zackie's request was a very elegant way of demonstrating to all attending that there was a gross inequity among the PWA's at the table. The South African's were not angry with us. They didn't want our pills. They want medications for themselves. As an artist I am interested in continuing the efforts of the modernist avant-garde: To erase the boundaries between art and life. I believe that art has the potential to save lives. Currently, I am wrestling with the problems of making a useful and relevant video documentary work on the subject of global access drugs, specifically about TAC's efforts in South Africa. I want to make the work for a North American audience because we have an important role to play. People in the United States concerned about the AIDS crisis in Africa can pressure U.S. based pharmaceutical manufacturers to make AIDS drugs available. We can pressure our government to ease trade restrictions that prevent the distribution of drugs to poor countries. Lastly, we can send much needed donations to organizations like Treatment Action Campaign. For more information about TAC visit www.tac.org.za Gregg Bordowitz is a person with AIDS, a writer and a filmmaker. He is a member of the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Also read Artery's 1999 interview with Gregg Bordowitz The symposium "panelists'" - Richard Elovich, Gregg Bordowitz and Sarah Schulman.