Freephone
from the press release
WHAT: Freephone Art Project Provides Deported People with a Phone Call
WHO: Chris Head, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuñiga and Camilo Ontiveros
WHERE: Lui Velazquez Gallery, Calle José Maria Larroque #273, 2do Piso, Int. 6, Colonia Federal, Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, C.P. 22 300
WHEN: Saturday May 30th, 2009, 1-6pm
CONTACT: Micha Cárdenas - mcardenas@ucsd.edu
The Freephone is an art project that aims to provide people just deported from the US with a free phone call. To achieve this, a group of UCSD Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students and graduates are coming together to present the phone at the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, just a few feet from the turnstiles where people who are deported are dropped off by the border patrol. The project is by the artists Chris Head, Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuñiga and Camilo Ontiveros.
The Freephone is an effort to use new media performance art or performance with technology to make the experience that people who are deported from the US a little bit less difficult. To make the phone, the artists bought a non working payphone casing from Ebay.com, wired it to a new $10 phone from a store and hooked that up to an adapter which would allow the phone to make calls over the internet. Then, the phone was installed outside of the Lui Velazquez gallery. On May 29th, the artists will do a public performance including posting signs, talking to people coming through of the turnstiles into Tijuana and sign spinning to direct people who may have just been dropped off by the border patrol towards the free phone.
"Every day at this gallery we see people being deported by the Border Patrol. We wanted to engage the public space outside of the gallery as well as inside," said Katherine Sweetman, director of Lui Velazquez.
"Art has the power to concretely improve people's lives. Artists can go beyond just representing or commenting on political issues and actually engage in political action as art," said Micha Cárdenas, recent graduate from UCSD's MFA program. "The Freephone is part of the tradition of Border Disturbance Art along with projects such as the Transborder Immigrant Tool from the Electronic Disturbance Theater", said Cárdenas.
The Freephone will be shown on Saturday, May 30th as part of the Satellite Ensemble II, a show by UCSD MFA students aimed at taking UCSD's artistic impact beyond the boundaries of the campus. The show will begin at Agitprop gallery in North Park and will take place along the path from that gallery to Lui Velazuez in Tijuana via public transit. In addition to the Freephone, the show will include work by artists including Crystal Campbell, Zac Monday, Clare Zitzow, Priscilla Lazaro, David White, and Anna Chiaretta Lavatellii.
"We want to not just make art with technology, but also show people how it was made, how they can use it and how they can make their own open source art projects," said Chris Head, about the Freephone. To accomplish this, the Freephone will be included in the ALTBIT open source art show later this year at Lui Velazquez. ALTBIT is a project to combine a number of open source and open hardware art projects together in one repository and present them in workshops in various locations in the US and Mexico.
Initiated as part of the Society of Molecules, the Freephone performance will be part of a distributed aesthetico-political event coordinated by the Sense Lab at Concordia University in Montreal including artist groups from around the world including Madrid, Naples, Boston, New York, Montreal and other cities.
For more information on the Freephone, contact Micha Cárdenas - mcardenas@ucsd.edu.
Images here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lotu5/tags/freephone/
http://luivelazquez.com
http://alt-bit.org
http://visarts.ucsd.edu
http://ucsdse2.blogspot.com/
http://senselab.ca