Border Haunt ist a project by Ian Alan Paul (Link). He has been working as an artist and a writer in the United States since 2002. His work focuses on the relationships between culture, power, and technology.
On July 15th, 2011 go to www.borderhaunt.com to participate in the action!
more info after the jump
Border Haunt is an attempt to bring two different databases associated with the U.S.-Mexico border into contact with one another for the duration of one day. It is an invitation to join a temporary network of people from across the world and participate in an aesthetic and political experiment, in what I’m calling a border database collision.
The first of the two databases involved in the collision acts as an archive of migrants that have died while attempting undocumented crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border territory. These deaths are caused by the extreme environmental conditions of the desert, the anonymous violence of vigilantes, abusive law enforcement officers, and other causes. There are over 2000 entries in this database.
The second database involved in the collision is used to police the border. Volunteer users of the database watch videos of the border and submit "suspicious activity" reports when they suspect an undocumented crossing is taking place into the U.S. This database was created and is used in hopes of apprehending undocumented border-crossers.
What would it mean for these two databases to come into contact with one another for the duration of one day? By colliding these two sets of data, the data of the dead with the data of the border security structure, the project hopes to coordinate a collective and networked “haunting” of the border. On this day of networked action, participants will purposefully direct the flows of information and collectively migrate the data from the border death database into the border policing database, haunting the servers of the border security structure.
This coordinated haunting is scheduled to take place on July 15th, 2011, in the month where many deaths on the border take place due to the extreme heat. Please come back to www.borderhaunt.com on that day to participate in the action. Also, please be sure to sign up on the mailing list on the right to receive news and reminders. I hope you will be able to take part in this collective border haunting and aesthetic and political experiment.
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