Video game puts you undercover in America’s Homeland Guantanamos
In solidarity with the detainees currently on hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions at the Los Fresnos immigration jail (Port Isabel, TX), I’m highlighting Homeland Guantanamos. Much more than an educational online game, this project documents actual detainees’ stories and the abuses they endured while in detention. Approximately 300,000 immigrants both legal and illegal are being detained in the U.S., many without conviction of any crime. This non-linear storytelling/investigative project invites players to discover what’s really happening on the inside.
The game’s assignment: go undercover by working as a prison guard and find the truth about what happened to Boubacar Bah, an immigrant from Ghinea who died while in ICE custody May 30, 2007. Free Range Studios built the virtual facility to match the Elizabeth Detention Center (run by the private company Corrections Corporation of America) where Bah was detained and designed the story around the actual events and people involved. While exploring each room, I found clues to help solve the case including embedded video interviews with Bah’s friends and family, his fellow detainees and their families. The video and written evidence reveal human rights abuses that mimic those committed at Guantanamo and other U.S. secret prisons.
Partnering with Free Range Studios, the international human rights organization Breakthrough used this project to launch a national engagement campaign. Included on the site are innumerable ways to take action, a memorial wall for the 87 immigrants who’ve died while in detention and a searchable U.S. map that locates local Gitmos by zip code. The article that triggered this project along with the recently released video What Really Happened to Boubacar Bah can both be found here. Spreading, creating or participating in projects as informative and comprehensive as this encourages the beginning of the end of real homeland Guantanamos.
Visualize Dissent - Turkish Users Protest Censorship Using Google Maps - NYTimes.com
Pirate Bay’s Ipredator VPN Opens To The Public | TorrentFreak
After months of waiting, the Ipredator anonymity service from the founders of The Pirate Bay has finally opened its doors to the public. For 5 euros a month users can now hide all their Internet traffic, including torrent downloads, from third party outfits who might want to spy on their downloading habits.
Broken City Lab: “Talking to Walls”
Stadt, Wand, Fragen: “Broken City Lab did a series of projections with short texts / fill-in-the-blanks that dealt with issues of public and private space, which were generated from the answers to the questionnaires we created, responses on Twitter, and conversations amongst ourselves.” Das Projekt ist Teil der Ausstellung “Public Realms” in Toronto, Kanada (bis 31. Januar).
One of the best environmental films ever made, Dreamland shakes the soul
There is one reason, above all the others, that the Academy Awards are not worth paying any attention to this year: the documentary Dreamland is not up for best picture, best documentary, or best anything.
(...)
Dreamland asks us how much is a mountain worth? Two billion? Twenty billion? Then challenges the capitalism calculi that conjures these figures, re-orienting the audience toward another framework, one of eco-logic, and argues for 89 minutes that the value of the natural world is of course not measured in dollars, or barrels, or extractions. The value of the natural world we inhabit is immeasurable: it is beauty, harmony, health, co-existence and much, much more.
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Curated by Régine Debatty
Régine Debatty writes about the intersection between art, design and technology on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com.
She also contributes to various design and art magazines, curates art shows and lectures internationally.
