Trent Gillaspie
Judgmental maps – Your city. Judged.
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Maps of cities according to popular thinking, stereotypes and judgements on its different neighbourhoods

#NotABugSplat
Not a bug splat
Installation
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A giant art installation targets predator drone operators. The project is a collaboration of artists who made use of the French artist JR’s ‘Inside Out’ movement.

In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.

Ronald Rael & Virginia San Fratello
Recuerdos : Snow Globes
Snow globes, 2000 –
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California artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello have created a series of snow globes that reimagine the fence between Mexico and the United States.

Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello created these recuerdos, or souvenirs, to document their travels along the border. They show both the dark and whimsical sides of life en la frontera, or the border.

Kari Mulholland
DNA Portrait
Documentary
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DNA Portrait is a lovely short documentary shot by TED’s own Kari Mulholland. It features the work of the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who spent time collecting hairs shed in public spaces… and then sequencing the DNA therein to print 3D sculptures of what those hairs’ owners might look like.

Eleanor Trevisanutto
Animals
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These aluminium CCTV camera cases by Italian designer Eleanor Trevisanutto transform security equipment into animal characters.

Eleanor Trevisanutto created the Animals series for Italian company Parson to make electronic surveillance seem less intimidating.

Virgilijus Trakimavicius
Dreams of Prague
Cutted paper, 2013

Virgilijus Trakimavicius’ artwork involves maps as inspirations. This art book was made out of the map of Prague. It was made for exhibition of Author’s Book In search of a lost place in Prague, 2013.

Nathalie Loubeyre
A contre-courant
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Since the mid-1990s, more than 20,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean in their attempt to reach Europe. In July 2012, a Euro-African activist coalition called Boats 4 People charters a boat for a solidarity action in order to monitor the border and denounce those responsible for this situation.

When preparing this project, the need to film this action was evident for all members of Boats 4 People. The coalition contacted Nathalie Loubeyre, director, and Joel Labat, cameraman, who participated in all stages of the Mediterranean crossing. This videographic media is of particular importance for Boats 4 People Besides the desire to share an extraordinary action taken by activists from Africa and Europe, the film aims to raise awareness, mobilize public opinion and continue the struggle for the rights of boat-people.

Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev
Newstweek
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Newstweek is a device for manipulating news read by other people on wireless hotspots. Built into a small and innocuous wall plug, the Newstweek device appears part of the local infrastructure, allowing writers to remotely edit news read on wireless devices without the awareness of their users.

A new network art project by Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev at the boundaries between surveillance and data flows.

Hélène Crouzillat et Laetitia Tura
Les messagers
Documentairy
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Migrants die every day, in various places, without the possibility of keeping tracks of it. They disappear in the border. Where are the bodys ?

Les Messagers (The Messengers) are these firsts witnesses, they name the death, they get organised to find a name, a body or build a grave. Holders of the disapeared persons’ remembrance, they fight against the disparition of the human being.

a documentary produced by Marie-Odile Gazin/The Kingdom, in association with Périphérie.

Clémence Lehec et Laurent Davin
Street Art on the Separation Wall
2014
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Take a walk along the separation wall from Aïda Camp to the Chekpoint 300 in Bethlehem.

Aïda camp area – Bethlehem, Palestine
Length 1525 m
919 pics

Magali Daniaux & Cédric Pigot
Cyclone Kingkrab & Piper Sigma
Live stream + Micro fictions

We were looking for places where global warming is considered as an opportunity of development when we were struck by an article in Le Figaro describing Kirkenes in the future as the new Singapore !

We decided to go to Kirkenes, north of Norway, at the Russian border along the Barents Sea. This region is a hot spot: with the melt of ice cap there is a new shipping passage to Asia. Kirkenes with a deep see harbor will became a geostrategic point as Singapore. But the difference is that Kirkenes is also full of resources (oil, gas, fish, ore, wood). It’s Also a geopolitical point, the border to Russia is also the border of the Shenghen Space.

We displayed a permanent video station pointing the city and and the harbor. During our stay we wrote a series of 11 texts inspired by the economic and geostrategic issues of the Barents Region copied on the pattern of Facebook event. At the same time Deep Water Horizon was dumping tons of crude in the Pacific ocean. At the end texts became 11 audio stories talking about money, oil and global warming.

“Series of audio tales whose tragic beauty with science fiction scenarios trickles away like a string of Facebook events in a sonic composition against a backdrop of an abyssal groundwater, enigmatic culminations of jingles and samples where the engine of an icebreaker collide with the hysterical laughter of gulls, a few seconds of a radiophonic hit single, the sonar of a whale, sounds of helicopters, the synthetic Victoria… And the beautiful stoic voice of Motto, unravelling the absurd.” Orevo

Since they met, ten years ago, Magali and Cedric’s joint work bears the dual hallmark of experimentation and performance. Their pieces bring together various media and associate elements from opposite ranges, with a taste for connections between Sci-Fi and documentary forms, high-tech engineering and fantasy tales, heavyweight materials and fleeting sensations. Starting with installations and plastic objects, their work soon included experimental actions and more immaterial artistic gestures. Videos, sound art, music, olfactive research, virtual works bordering the digital arts, have formed, this past 3 years, a cycle of works dealing with climate change, economic, politic and geo-strategic issues, urban development and food management.

Streaming : mms://88.84.190.77/cam11

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Magali Daniaux & Cédric Pigot
Arctic Tactic
Radio documentairy : 46 min

Kirkenes, North Norway, Russian border, Festival Barents Spektakel, February 2011, -25°.

The Queen, ministers, ambassadors, politicians, a diplomat, architects, artists, journalists and researchers were present and gave us the map… A sonic immersion into political, economic, geostrategic and urban issues of the contemporary Arctic.

Since they met, ten years ago, Magali and Cedric’s joint work bears the dual hallmark of experimentation and performance. Their pieces bring together various media and associate elements from opposite ranges, with a taste for connections between Sci-Fi and documentary forms, high-tech engineering and fantasy tales, heavyweight materials and fleeting sensations. Starting with installations and plastic objects, their work soon included experimental actions and more immaterial artistic gestures. Videos, sound art, music, olfactive research, virtual works bordering the digital arts, have formed, this past 3 years, a cycle of works dealing with climate change, economic, politic and geo-strategic issues, urban development and food management.

Atelier de Création Radiophonique, France Culture Radio.

Chroniques des mondes possibles, Festival Seconde Nature, Aix en Provence 2013

Ken Rinaldo
Drone Eat Drone: American Scream
Installation

This piece consists of two reaper drones crashing into each other, riding around on a hacked and reprogrammed, Roomba vacuum cleaner. On the robot base is a bucolic country house, with mini humans and cows and speaks to the issues of the coming of the drones, being used as autonomous military robots expand into domestic markets worldwide.

As many who study technology and the issues of borders know, drones in particular have become the weapon of choice, for crossing borders and carrying out undeclared war. These drones and the technology they employ, are playing an increasing role in world politics and in particular the military industrial complexes in the United States and increasingly worldwide.

As lobbyist work to fund more military robots and we are on the cusp of autonomous drones, which can algorithmically come to decide if a person is an “enemy combatant” of not, this work critiques the businesses such as IRobot (producer of military robots and the domestic Roomba vacuum cleaners) with the drone manufacturers General Atomics. The work questions and challenges the act of continuous war and the affect on populations especially in regions targeted such as Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen where the Bureau of Investigative Journalism out of the United Kingdom, that over a nine year period, out of 372 flights 400 civilians were confirmed dead, 94 of them children.

This work questions the notion of borders, where you can have a few countries or businesses lobbying governments to purchase and use new technologies, that also fundamentally challenge the notion of national autonomy and borders. The work is itself an autonomous robot, as it uses the intelligence programmed by the artist, who has highjacked thee digital programming and logic of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, which shares many algorithmic similarities to military robots. It conflates the land of other countries with the terrain of your living room (home) and seeks to join and help others understand the relationships between domestic consumer goods and the military industrial complexes, which increasingly manipulate, control and create foreign policy, through military robotics and autonomous killing machines.

Joana Moll
AZ: move and get shot
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AZ: move and get shot by Joana Moll is a net based piece which shows the natural, animal and human flows in the landscape of the U.S. / Mexico border in the state of Arizona, through the eyes of six surveillance cameras.

These cameras are part of an online platform created by a group of landowners with properties in the U.S. border. The platform shows the images of six surveillance cameras located in the border territory. The main purpose of this community is to provide the public with raw images of immigrants crossing the border illegally through their fields. Each camera incorporates a motion sensor which triggers the capturing of images when detecting the slightest vibration of the landscape. Then, these pictures are sent to a server and displayed directly on the web page.

While the main goal of the landowners is to capture and disseminate photographs of immigrants entering the United States illegally, the camera is programmed to detect and record any kind of movement. By delegating the surveillance to a machine, the original human intention is lost, and the original purpose takes shape as a collection of images that reveal not only immigrants but all kinds of human, animal and natural activity. Therefore, the monitoring action becomes something uncontrollable and potentially meaningless.

The piece is composed of six independent films automatically made from the images captured by each camera. Every 24 hours, a Bot detects whether there are new pictures. These new images are saved to a local server and added algorithmically right after the last frame of the corresponding video. Thus, the films expand and reveal, day by day, the pace and the nature of the movement of the Arizona borderland.

Joana Moll. Barcelona, 1982. Holds a Master’s degree in Digital Arts from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a BA in Visual Arts from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Arts Santa Monica and The Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the Oi Futuro Institute in Rio de Janeiro, the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, the Lancaster University in UK and the Ithaca College in New York, from where she received an award for “The Texas Border”. She took part in FILE 2011 held in Sao Paulo, FILE 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, ISEA 2012 edition and Festival Internacional de la Imagen 2013 in Manizales. She also contributed to the development of interactive projects for the Science Museum of Granada, the Institute of Palaeontology of Sabadell and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is actively collaborating with Sauti ya wakulima project and with the trandisciplinary research project Antiatlas of Borders at IMéRA, Marseille (France).

Joana Moll & Héliodoro Santos Sanchez
The Texas Border
Audiovisual online installation

“The Texas border ” is an audiovisual online installation showing the live broadcasts of surveillance cameras placed by BlueServo along the U.S. Mexico border in Texas. BlueServo is an internet platform managed by the Texas Border Sheriff ‘s Coalition, which makes several border surveillance cameras available to anyone who wants to monitor those attempting to enter the United States illegally and report these actions by means of a website. The piece consists of 64 videos, some of BlueServo archives, showing attempts to enter US territories which failed as a direct result of the reports submitted by anonymous users to BlueServo. The act of observation which aims to “protect” the country has become a very symbolic monitoring performance carried out by U.S. citizens, in which the images that appear on the screen does not even need to be real.

Joana Moll. Barcelona, 1982. Holds a Master’s degree in Digital Arts from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a BA in Visual Arts from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Arts Santa Monica and The Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the Oi Futuro Institute in Rio de Janeiro, the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, the Lancaster University in UK and the Ithaca College in New York, from where she received an award for “The Texas Border”. She took part in FILE 2011 held in Sao Paulo, FILE 2012 in Rio de Janeiro, ISEA 2012 edition and Festival Internacional de la Imagen 2013 in Manizales. She also contributed to the development of interactive projects for the Science Museum of Granada, the Institute of Palaeontology of Sabadell and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She is actively collaborating with Sauti ya wakulima project and with the trandisciplinary research project Antiatlas of Borders at IMéRA, Marseille (France).

http://www.janavirgin.com/

Héliodoro Santos Sanchez (Colima, au Mexique, 1984) studied the MA in Digital Arts at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain (2009-2010), a degree in Visual Arts from the University of Guadalajara (2002-2006), plus have completed Basic Painting Workshop in IUBA Colima University (1998-2000) and the Diploma in art, Media and Technology (digital art) at the Centre de Cultura Casa Lamm, Mexico, DF (2007-2008). It also has several parallel studies and courses in sound art, graphics and contemporary art with teachers: Manuel Rocha Iturbide, Ivan Abreu, Betsabeé Romero, Santiago Ortiz, the group Graffiti Research Lab, among others

Patrick Lichty
The Private Life of a Drone
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The Private Life of a Drone by Patrick Lichty is a video travelogue recorded by flying video drones, exploring the area surrounding the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia (US).

Patrick Lichty is a technologically-based conceptual artist, writer, independent curator, animator for the activist group, The Yes Men, and Executive Editor of Intelligent Agent Magazine. He began showing technological media art in 1989, and deals with works and writing that explore the social relations between us and media. He also works extensively with virtual worlds, including Second Life, and his work, both solo and with his performance art group, Second Front, has been featured in Flash Art, Eikon Milan, and ArtNews. He is also an Assistant Professor of Interactive Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago.

Alban Biaussat
The Green(er) Side of the Line
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Alban Biaussat presents his photographic project, political and aesthetic, “The Green(er) Side of the Line”. It refers to the line dating back to the 1949 armistice between Israel and some of the neighboring Arab countries (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt). During the negotiations, a green ink was used to draw the line on the map. It is controversial, challenged by those who would redefine the boundaries by separating populations and cultures according to their geographical presence rather than the existing legal frameworks.

Born in Paris, France, in 1970 Alban Biaussat moved professionally into photography after years working for international organisations in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Alban Biaussat is interested in exploring creative documentary photography to address complex socio-political issues and their perception. Member of Picturetank, a Paris-based cooperative photo agency, since 2008, he is also co-founder & Director of Collateral Creations, an innovative audio-visual production platform based in Paris, working in partnership with research institutes, policy analysts, international organisations, and corporate clients for communication and advocacy purpose.

Romain de l’Ecotais
Au pied du mur
Documentary
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Since 2007, huge metal pillars planted in the desert, on more than one third of the 3600 km border between the United States and Mexico, are the new barrier which already has made more victims than the Berlin Wall. In this territory, the broken families is increasing. The access to the American Dream is a project increasingly perilous, and hopes of migrants are often proportional to the energy and resources deployed to destroy their attempts. In these times of crisis, Mexicans and Americans also mobilize for migrants to defend their rights and to make people aware of their living conditions. For Mexican youth, the United States appear from year to year more inaccessible, but not out of reach, as long as it still a dream.

Romain de l’Ecotais is a director of 29 years, based in Marseille. In 2005, after the university ended with a Masters in International Economics and a Masters Documentary Film and Social Sciences, Romain de l’Ecotais began to work on the theme of exile and labor. It carries out projects of all kinds, from business film to documentary , also the directing audiovisual workshops with young people from Aubervilliers. Achievements made in the Music Conservatory of Marseille, or in a social cafe in Belleville, to meet the molecular kitchen Thierry Marx, and the discovery of the environmental initiatives in Japan, or in the daily Senegalese wrestlers in Pikine, Senegal.

Ben Fundis, Clara Long, John Drew
Border Stories
Documentary
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Border Stories is re-imagining the documentary, one with no beginning, middle, or end. Its only linear aspect is the border itself. Our crew travels the length of the U.S.–Mexico border, from Brownsville, Texas to Tijuana, Mexico in search of stories that portray the human face of this politically and emotionally-charged region.

Ben Fundis is graduated from Bard College with a degree in film studies. He is the editor and director of “Que Mira?” a documentary about a refuge for former street children in the cloud forests of Nicaragua.

Clara Long has an academic background in development studies and human rights and holds a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University. She’s worked and studied in Brazil and Venezuela. As a journalist, her work has appeared on National Public Radio, in the Times of London, the Associated Press.

John Drew is the co-founder and former associate editor of “The Citizen,” a hyper-local magazine based in New York’s Hudson Valley. He grew up in Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela and graduated from Duke University with a degree in economics.