The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT)
Ricardo Dominguez, micha cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Elle Mehrmand and Brett Stalbaum (Electronic Disturbance Theatre 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab)
Medium: Coding, Digital Poetry, Mobile Application, and Poetic Programming (2009-2012)
Issues: Border Artivism, Border Justice, Border Violence, Decolonialidad/Decoloniality, and Immigration
Project Links
Description
The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) / La herramienta transfronteriza para inmigrantes by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab is a last mile safety device designed to aid the disoriented of any nationality in a desert environment. The project’s interactive platform was developed and tested in southern California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park from 2009 to 2012. Its code is executable when and if one adds the coordinates of functional water caches to its poetic program. Its poetry, another executable code included here after our project statement “Of Ecopoetics and Dislocative Media,” comprises TBT’s desert survival series. The goal is to guide immigrants toward emergency water deposits and increase their safety while crossing the border. These caches were managed by non-profit groups Water Station Inc. and Border Angels, who shared their locations with the TBT team.
“The performative matrix of TBT allows viral reportage, hate mail, GPS, poetry, the Mexico-US border, and immigrants to encounter one another in a state of frisson that asks: What is sustenance under the sign of globalization-is-borderization, and what are its aesthetics? Before the project was finished, EDT 2.0 and b.a.n.g. labs attracted media attention from both the left and right. Dovetailing with growing debates around illegal immigration to the united states and intensifying xenophobia, three Republican Congressmen called for an investigation of the project by UCSD. The proceedings were well-documented and commented on by Brett Stalbaum on his blog Walking Tools.” (From Net Art Anthology) The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) / La herramienta transfronteriza para inmigrantes is archived here.
Prior Showings
The Transborder Immigrant Tool Videos here presented, Transition, Algorithm, and Precession, were exhibited in ‘Space is the Place’ exhibition at the Gallery of the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, as part of the program of ISEA 2009 which takes place in Belfast and Dublin Ireland this year. The exhibition will run from the 27th August – 1st September 2009.
It has also been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), and more recently, Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) UA (2020), Under a Different Sky, Blideside Gallery, Australia (2021), Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento, LACE, CA (2021), as well as several other national and international venues.
Text of poems: Amy Sara Carroll
Video poems design: Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cárdenas, and Elle Mehrmand
Voices included in the poems: Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Césaire Carroll-Dominguez, Patrick Carroll, and Ricardo Dominguez
Collaborative inspiration: Brett Stalbaum
Bio
Ricardo Dominguez was a founding member of Critical Art Ensemble (http://critical-art.net/) and a cofounder of Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0 (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998 (https://anthology.rhizome.org/floodnet). His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool – https://tbt.tome.press/ – (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the US Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UCSD Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), and more recently, Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) UA (2020), Under a Different Sky, Blideside Gallery, Australia (2021), Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento, LACE, CA (2021), as well as several other national and international venues. The Transborder Immigrant Tool was also under investigation by the US Congress, the FBI, Homeland Security, UCSD and UCOP in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2/Qi, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012). He was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University (2017-18), a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio Center, Italy) during the summer of (2018), and a UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy Fellow (2021). He took part in a video series entitled An Oral History of the Internet, for the NYUAD Art Gallery, (https://www.nyuad-artgallery.org/en_US/resources/watch/an-oral-history-of-the-internet/), (2021). Ricardo is also chair of the Department of the Visual Arts. Many of his articles and essays can be found at: https://ucsd.academia.edu/RicardoDominguez