GPS as Border Disturbance.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a work-in-progress by the U.S.-based collective b.a.n.g lab, an art/ research group housed at Calit2, The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California, San Diego.

The project revolves around a GPS-enabled cell phone containing a program that detects resources that are valuable to those trekking through the extreme geographical conditions of deserts and other locations. Partly intended as a safety device that helps border crossers locate water and safety beacons when they are facing dehydration, the Transborder Immigrant Tool is both a material and symbolic intervention in the border as a zone of ideological confrontation.

Different perspectives on this application of mobile technology to border politics evidence the usual "Us vs. Them" ideology at play in relation to militarized border zones. Taken literally, as a functional device, the tool triggers heated discussions about illegality, propriety, and ethics: for those enraged by the prospect of giving border crossers access to a piece of technology that will help them arrive safely to "the other side," the tool is too efficient; for those scandalized by the assumption that a cell phone could tame the hardships of the desert and prevent deaths, the tool is too naïve of an aide.

I read the tool as participating in the kind of politics that the Zapatistas defined as "the politics of the question": a politics that interrogates the very basis on which a system rests rather than offering a quick solution that leaves the system unquestioned. While the Transborder tool is supposedly offered as a resource to help border crossers maneuver in the desert and arrive safely to their desired destination, b.a.n.g lab's cell phone is not posited as a solution to the issue of border crossing but it opens questions about the many systems at play — material and ideological — informing border politics and ethics.

Linking practical issues with humanitarian questions, b.a.n.g lab's project is an artistic production that embraces material and symbolic notions of spatial production to open discussions about the politics of movement in a globalized world. The cell phone that has been reprogrammed by b.a.n.g lab as a Transborder Tool involves applying research on locative media to the U.S.-Mexico border zone.

The term "locative media" refers to user-oriented mapping technologies such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS), and its particular use by artists has generated the emergent field of locative media arts, in which users interface with "real," mainly urban, landscapes through handheld devices [1].  In locative media art pieces the emphasis is not so much on location, as the name "locative" might suggest, but on mobility and its documentation. These pieces are generally predicated on a subject's ability to move freely.

In contrast, b.a.n.g lab's Transborder Tool critically engages the field of locative media arts by addressing a different kind of subject, an "illegal" immigrant whose movement is confined, whose body is prohibited from moving beyond specific boundaries. Instead of celebrating movement uncritically, the Transborder Tool takes into consideration the differential politics of mobility that affect subjects along lines of ethnicity and citizenship. In this sense, with the Transborder Tool b.a.n.g lab adds a new layer to the locative media arts commons, one that utilizes tactical media practice and mobile technologies to raise questions about the interdiction to movement through the very networks that exalt (or proclaim) connectivity and access.

By changing the parameters of the field of play from the city — as it is the case in locative media arts — to an inhospitable landscape and politics, b.a.n.g lab prompts us to think about how the seemingly out of place (a GPS for border crossers!) points in the direction of other technologies at play in the border, such as the fence, surveillance systems, drones, and the like, which, rather than deter border crossers, create a zone of humanitarian crisis.

[1] The term was coined in 2002 by Karlis Kaninis, Technical and Creative Director of Locative Media Lab.

Comment on this page