➢ CONTEXT:
• The article describes TBT connection unexpectedly to borders, nature, and global positioning via geo-poetic disturbance in critical ecologies. This group of artists was actively engaging in the theory and practice of electronic civil disobedience.
• It’s a geopolitical context addressing the fact of lives needlessly lost in the desert performed as art.
• The project raises the question about sustenance and it’s true definition.
• Technical process: TBT (Transborder Immigrant Tool), a code switch device repurposing inexpensive, discarded mobile phones that have GPS antennas to navigate people safely in the Mexican-US borderlands.
(From Wiki) Electronic civil disobedience (also known as ECD, cyber civil disobedience or cyber disobedience), can refer to any type of civil disobedience in which the participants use information technology to carry out their actions. Electronic civil disobedience often involves computers and the Internet and may also be known as hacktivism. The term "electronic civil disobedience" was coined in the critical writings of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a collective of tactical media artists and practitioners, in their seminal 1996 text Electronic Civil Disobedience: And Other Unpopular Ideas] Electronic civil disobedience seeks to continue the practices of non violent, yet disruptive protest originally pioneered by Henry David Thoreau who in 1848 published "Civil Disobedience."
➢ CONTENT: What was the issue, need, idea or opportunity addressed by this project?
• To guide the tired and weary needing water to safety as they journeyed along the Southern California Desert. TBT is artistically challenging needlessly deaths surrounding border crossing politically.
➢ FORM:
• The group used technology, electronic, code switch devices, Internet, and cyberspace.
➢ STAKEHOLDERS: Which are the groups or individuals that were invested in the project?
• CALIT2 at UC San Diego
• The b.a.n.g lab artist
• Professor Ricardo Dominguez
• Water Station Inc. and Border Angels
• Latin America Communities
• A social force field for TBT has been the curators, critics, scholars and artists/activists who have chosen to speak out about the project and to exhibit TBT.
➢ AUDIENCE:
• Those in need of assistance as they navigate the Southern California Desert crossing the border.
• To contribute to the political conversation around the topic of boarding crossing and immigration.
• Themselves to push the art and political boundaries.
➢ ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES:
• The border organization groups help with the coordination points for the water locations in the desert as part of its safety tool component and support. Funding from the University. Also, artists working together creating the work measuring the responses and outcome from the TBT interaction with people.
• Getting the work out: curators, critics, scholars and artists/activists who have chosen to speak out about the project.
➢ GOAL: What are this project's objectives?
• Ecological artwork, a trail-hiking tool to replete with spatial and geographical terms e.g. borders, nature, desert, and global positioning.
As mentioned in the article: the TBT project calls into question the northern cone’s imaginary about who has priority and control of who can become a cyborg or “trans” human. Immigrants are always presented as less than human (bare life) and certainly not as part of a community which is establishing and inventing new forms of life, when in fact those flowing in between immigrant communities are a deep part of the current condition that Haraway’s research has been pointing towards as the core of the cyborg-condition.
• Questioning borderss and movement through them using art.
➢ VALUES:
• *** This text is from the b.a.n.g. lab project page. I found the following statement about the value and context of the project.
TBT thus seeks to have both genuine use value in a geopolitical context where thousands of lives have been needlessly lost, as well as conceptual and poetic value inasmuch as it performativity raises the question: “What constitutes sustenance?” Or suggests that “in the desert, we are all illegal aliens.” But above all, the device – like the disturbance-art project of which it is part and parcel – directly raises the question of the politics of art today.
What exactly is to be gained by understanding such devices and such projects to be art and not the mere real thing? By disturbing the porous borders between art worlds and life worlds, considering civil disobedience decidedly within the purview of artistic practice, the group clearly wants to give art political teeth; but how does art, in turn, add its own specific value to the device’s user ship? And what kind of art world would make that possible?
➢ RESOURCES:
• Recycled phones, funding for the project, artists producing content. Organizations assisting with coordination points to place water caches in the desert.
• US San Diego and others
• Social media, curators, Latin Community and more.
➢ 10: OUTCOMES: highlights from the article:
• People’s lives being saved as they journeyed through the desert experiencing TBT assistance.
• *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), this award was funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico – U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico)
• Also funded by CALIT2 and two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities.
• *Transborder Immigrant Tool* was exhibited at 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), as well as a number of other venues, the project was also under investigation by the U.S. Congress in 2009/10
• Was also reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry.
• A huge investigation by three Republican Congressmen, the FBI Office of Cybercrimes and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Professor Ricardo Dominguez was in jeopardy of being de-tenured, and not being able to produce any other activism work.
More outcomes from the article are below:
TBT was targeted by right-wing media, specifically Fox News, and that caused an increased level of extremely violent emails toward the members of EDT/b.a.n.g. lab. We could tell whenever a story about TBT appeared on Fox News because of the number of emails that occurred right afterward. We even had to have meetings with the Department of Justice to help us alert the very police and FBI who were investigating us about the level of aggressive harassment we were under and having them offer protection to some degree.
TBT is a small gesture that echoes back, at least for us, some of these occluded conditions, and marks them via the gesture as aesthetically visible.
Comments
Post a Comment