a few days after i posted on the billboard liberation front, regine, of we-make-money-not-art wrote a great piece which discusses blf's history and practices.
i found this bit of advise on billboard improvement worth reposting here (but you really should read the article):
- Minimize property damage and respect the sign men. BLF make modification which are easy to remove and always leave some beer or liquor for the men who have to come and clean their "improvements."
a very cool project, border disturbance is one of the best areas for combining activism and technology (via mobileactive.org)
November 17, 2007 |CorinneRamey
Ricardo Dominguez calls himself an "artivist." Half political activism and half art, Ricardo's projects blur the boundaries between the aesthetic and the political. "We always view our activism within the frame of art and the poetic," said Ricardo. Ricardo was part of a team that was recently awarded the Transnational Communities Award for a Transborder Immigrant Tool that uses GPS-enabled mobile phones to help immigrants crossing the border between Mexico and the United States.
MobileActive recently had a discussion with Ricardo on art, activism, and mobile phones. Ricardo, a researcher in the Calit2 lab at the University of California at San Diego, was given the award along with colleagues Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas and Jason Najarro. The project seeks to create a way for immigrants to orient themselves while crossing the border between the United States and Mexico, which is traversed by thousands of immigrants each year. The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons.
The idea for the project arose from a program called the Virtual Hiker, a project of UCSD visual art professor Brett Stalbaum. "Brett gets lost even going to his house," joked Ricardo, "so he started working on a locative media project called the Virtual Hiker...He developed an algorithm that took into account a certain terrain, and created a virtual trial or hike based on those algorithms." By using GPS, the program created virtual hikes and would orient the user towards certain landmarks. Brett was able access "the kind of utility cloud that GPS offers," said Ricardo.
The Virtual Hiker program led the team to question ways that GPS technology could be used to help immigrants crossing the border. "We asked ourselves, what were the spaces of necessity or danger on the border, and how could we plug in this new element of the GPS structured cell phone?" said Ricardo. The answer to that question was the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
The tool is built on a Motorola i455 phone, which offers several advantages. Not only is the phone cheap -- about $40, according to Ricardo -- but no service is required for GPS functionality. "What we needed was a really inexpensive telephone, one that we could crack the GPS system, and one that would accept new algorithms."
The team took language into account when designing the application. "We needed to design the interface in a way that would be somewhat universal in terms of the community that would be crossing the border," he said. Many of the migrants are from indiginous communities, and wouldn't necessarily speak Spanish. The end result was a navigation system that looks like a compass. The phone also vibrates in response to certain landmarks, like water or a highway. The vibrations allow the user to concentrate on the surrounding environment instead of constantly looking at the screen of the phone.
Ricardo sees even the interface of the phone as having artistic value. "We were trying to think of many layers of communication -- iconic, sound, vibratory," he said. Additionally, the program helps the user not only avoid getting lost, but helps him or her find a more aesthetic route. "The algorithm would look at it not just in terms of a map or a politics but by suggesting the most aesthetic crossing," he said. Eventually, the people using the tool to cross the border would form an imaginary "mass desert painting" or "walking art," Ricardo said. "All the immigrants that would participate would in a sense participate in a large landscape of aesthetic vision."
The project is still in its preliminary stages, but by the end of next year the team hopes that it will be a working and usable tool. "In the next stage, the research team will go to both ends of the border and work with the tools directly in terms of triangulating the info to the satellites," said Ricardo. The final step of the project will include workshops and trainings with groups that work with immigrants who are getting ready to cross the border. Possible partners include Casa Imigrante and the Centro de Informacion para Trabajadoras y Trabajadores (CITTAC). "We hope to get them to communities that interface with people getting ready to cross," said Ricardo.
Ricardo says that the team currently has enough funding to pay for 500 phones, and hopes to purchase more in the future. He also mentioned the possibility of adding about $50 of phone time to each tool, although, he said, that team recommended only using the tools as phones in emergencies for security reasons. The team is also working with a group of teachers to design a simple pamphlet with instructions on how to use and upgrade the tool. He hopes the instructions will be similar to the safety cards available on airplanes -- they'll rely more on pictures and icons than language.
Ricardo sees the Transborder Immigrant Tool as part of a larger trend of border disturbance art. "There's a long history of artists at the border creating gestures that question the very nature of the border," said Ricardo. Because disturbance art is framed as art, and not as solely political activism, the "artivists" are given more leeway politically. "The reason they can't stop us is that we always frame all these gestures within the poetic frame." By framing politics as art, and art as inextricably linked to politics, projects like the Transborder Immigrant Tool are able to survive as both a life-saving device and an "artivist" concept.
Photo courtesy of Ricardo Dominguez.
On Monday the 12/3/07 I attended a wonderful lecture given by Kristin Lucas on her own work for the Arts, Technology, and Culture Colloquium at UC Berkeley (all lectures free and open to the public). As the flier accompanying the lecture states "Kristin Lucas is an artist working in the realms of digital art, video, performance, intervention, sculpture and installation." She lives in Oakland and currently holds a position at California College of the Arts.
Lucas describes herself as working with the feeling of time, space and digital media and I found particularly enlightening her feeling of inbetweeness that these elements cause in contemporary life. With the constant accumulation of digital and physical material she feels lost in the everyday space of her life. This is at once a boon because when one is lost one doesn't know what one is looking for and open to new discoveries, but also a demobilizing clutter. In regards to the accumulation of technology she is not critical of the technology itself but the systems deploying it. Here, she feels demobilized between the magic of technology and its massive, yet some times invisible, force it plays on her life. She sites the toxic Superfund sites of Silicon Valley to exemplify the negative forces technology creates in her life.
To navigate, or perhaps deal, with the life's overwhelming accumulation, Lucas uses her art to become a hunter-gather of physical, cyber and or imaginary spaces all of which she considers as equally real. This can be seen in the gathering of a self portrait photo, digital game like images, and make-up derived imaginary illnesses as seen in her 2007 digital print on a light box, Break Out, or with her residency with the John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA), a brief case sized museum that she traveled around Wiemar, Germany with in order to enlist a search party to find the "outside." She talked a wide variety of people on where to find the outside but unfortunately has not yet enlisted a single person to search with her.
In one stroke of genius, Lucas adopted a digital method into her physical life in order to give herself a clean break in a world of accumulation and being lost. That is, in her project Refresh, she legally changed her name from Kristen Sue Lucas to Kristen Sue Lucas thus giving herself a restart in her legal and mental world. This required to appearances before a judge and a month long notice in the newspaper. She had audience members reenact her courtroom appearance at the lecture. Which was great because we felt closer to this kind of art as intervention into legal space.
Lucas's is work is an incredible reflection on our lives in the contemporary age. In her lecture she warned that cyberspace is becoming control space in both our physical and virtual lives. And so with her work she brings together the physical, digital and the hard to commoditize imaginary, in order to explore and delineate their borders and, in my view, prepare for a more open future.
Ms. Lucas does some great work and seems to be a wonderful person. You should really check out her homepage.
Be sure to look for one great example of the power of gathering as a sense making tool: Her Decryption Poem Series where she takes corporate annual reports and turns them into poetry!
Also, soon you will be able to listen to lecture through the Berkeley Art Museum.
