A Crossing Industry is a videogame on the informal border economy that has emerged over the last 20 years between the West Bank and Israel. This informal economy has developped in reaction to the tightening of Israeli mechanisms of control. While providing ways to circumvent movement restrictions, it has also set up a parallel system of movement regulation. Smugglers and facilitators have become informal regulating authorities aside of the State of Israel. Drawing from the data collected during ethnographic fielwork investigations (2000-2010), the game simulates this complex borderscape. It is produced by an anthropologist, Cedric Parizot, a digital artist, Douglas Edric Stanley, and students from the Higher School of Art of Aix en Provence. At the cross road between research and art, it explores how simulators, such as video games, can disseminate research analysis in ways the linear narratives produced by books and articles cannot.

Authors: Cédric Parizot – anthropologist, researcher at the CNRS, Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (AMU, Aix en Provence) and Douglas Edric Stanley – digital artist and lecturer (Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence)

Students at Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence: Tristan Fraipont, Emilie Gervais, Matthieu Gonella, Martin Greffe, Bastien Hude

Iconography: Matthieu Gonella