Algorithmic Aesthetics and the Transborder Immigrant Tool
The complexity of algorithmic global finance networks, the epistemological breakdown brought about by the post-truth era and the networked nature of politics necessitate a new complex and abstract form of aesthetics that is able to cope with our new situation. Aesthetics can be used to extend our understanding beyond traditional forms of human cognition in order to accomplish what seems to be the new mission in the arts: “the dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, more real than art”. (Graham, Dan, Ian Alteveer, Günther Vogt, and Sheena Wagstaff. Dan Graham. New York: Metropolitan Museum Of Art, 2014.) The role of the art world economy and Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams do an excellent job of outlining a possible role for art in the 21st century: “An aesthetics of the sublime emerges here, with big data, complexity, and multi-causal relations converging on representations of the economy that are themselves beyond human comprehension… it is in these two mediation points that art can serve a significant political function – by contributing to the cognitive and sensible leverage over economic complexity.” The question then becomes, has art done a sufficient job of addressing this uptick in complexity? No. Scholars like Mohammad Salemy and Suhail Malik point to the formalization of “contemporary art” as a genre as a process that has also removed the ability of art to address contemporary social problems. Put another way, contemporary art has an internal logic that is more beholden to the maintenance of the financial structures that sustain it than to being a generative force capable of aiding the mapping and navigation of 21st century life and politics.
That all brings me to the Transborder Immigrant Tool constructed by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab. It was a locative media and mobile phone based application intended to guide migrants making their way to the United States through the deserts of the U.S./Mexico borderlands to either the Rio Grande or Pacific Ocean. The application delivered helpful information about survival while providing mental and emotional support in the form of poetry and first-person testimonials from people who had already crossed. It was also capable of leading the travelers to food/water caches, providing information on the movements of security and border forces, and leading them to safer routes. It was designed to work on easy-to-hack, low-cost cellphones instead of just the Android and iphone markets.
The project caused a firestorm of backlash where Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Staulbaum, b.a.n.g lab and EDT were investigated by their home university UCSD, the FBI office of cybercrime, Customs and Border Protection, two republican congressmen and a national arts review board. They were ultimately unable to mount any charges against those in question. Where government interventions in art in the 90’s came as a result of creating a cultural context for fringe and non-traditional communities, this project was targeted because it not only used a contested region as the stage but also came into direct conflict with what was at the time a growing tension between those who support migrants and those who use border security as a symbolic issue. As an interesting side note (given my position as a CU student currently involved with organizations fighting student fees), TBT was already under investigation for their sit-ins and protests of the UC system student fees policy (they now have fee waivers) and the attempted dismantling of K-12 public education in the state of California. It’s important to note that the FBI was attempting to frame this as a cybercrime because the University of California Office of the President claimed the performance caused them to lose $5600. A cybercrime must cause over $5000 of “damage” to be investigated.
Now, it’s extremely pertinent to take notice of this fact: the project was never able to be deployed because of these investigations. But how would it have worked and what sort of conceptual framework were they working from? In their own words,
“our connection to critical ecologie(s)/environmentalism(s) are grounded to a geo-projection of these transcendental-isms as an ethico-aesthetic disturbance which marks the Mexican/US border, and all borders perhaps, as what Rob Nixon has termed the “slow violence” of the neo-liberal dismantling of bio-citizenship. This bio-citizenship is one of trans [ ] citizenship that crosses between multiple forms of life: from black bears to plants to water to global labor as borderized-entities that are blocked from geographic movement, which is the blocking of life itself. What is not blocked from movement is multiple types of techno-toxicity (Latin America as dumpster zone of last generation Silicon Valley economies) and free-trade markets from the US, China, EU and others”.
This begins to hint at why I’m making a connection between the idea of algorithmic aesthetics and the Transborder Immigrant Tool, namely, that it acts as an interface between an unknowably complex system (the assemblage of borders, nation states, multinational corporations, economies of scale, grey market movements by narcos and the governments of the US and Mexico) and people. In this way, it acts as a cognitive map in the manner laid out by Fredric Jameson. Notably, it does not attempt any mode of truth construction rooted in a transcendent or universal epistemology. It makes landmarks and cognitive interventions based on a constructed political goal.
This is the kind of work I aspire to make and wish more artists were doing something similar.