Dear List,

This month’s discussion *Ground Truth: 'The Migration Machine’* has emerged
as a direct response to the ongoing migration crisis in Europe, and
beyond.

It is hosted by Dani Admiss, AHRC-funded doctoral researcher with CRUMB at
the University of Sunderland and independent curator; and Dr. Cecilia Wee,
independent curator and Tutor in the School of Communication, Royal College
of Art, London.

Since the summer, when our discussions about how to approach this topic
started in earnest, migration has attracted a heightened level of attention
from the world’s media. Whilst they depict an exodus of asylum seekers,
refugees and migrants into Europe, we see migration as part of the complex
flows of power interlinking fields of life like security (powers of the
European border agency Frontex), finance (the unregulated yet burgeoning
migration industry), health (mental health issues and PTSD amongst
refugees), climate (discussions about environmental migration at COP21) and
governance (the nexus of national and supranational bodies) in contemporary
globalisation, producing barriers to all forms of mobility and
equality. Meanwhile,
fierce debate continues about how those involved in Paris, Bamako, Beirut,
Ankara and other shocking events are using the label ‘refugee’ to fly under
the proverbial radar.

We propose that ‘technologies of migration’ instantiate themselves a new
type of border, often geographically displaced and abstracted from our
physical experiences of mobility. These technologies are subjects of social
engineering, residing in websites and interview rooms, as well as the more
immediately perceivable ‘arrival infrastructures’ of e-border and
immigration detention centres. Governments continue to seek ways to measure
the political into policy. Expert devices, such as civic integration
examinations, speech recognition technology, or European databanks of
asylum seekers’ biometric data, map the phenomena of migration and mobility
into knowledge practices, incorporating them into risk profiles and
evidence-based strategies. Grounded by the need to defend the subjective
and narrative-based, we also think of ‘technologies of migration’ in the
broadest sense.

The current migration controversy highlights the fundamentally problematic
challenges to a humanist relationship to data and information. Our
discussion begins with a series of “field reports” from the areas of
cultural activism, academia and ‘extra-disciplinary investigations’. We
have reached out to a network who, in turn, will explain projects in their
archive, share their research, or deliver reports from the ground. We have
asked them to think about how we are locked-in to contemporary conditions
of migration, what are the (social and media) technologies around
migration, their social effects, and what are the limit of these
technologies? We would like respondents to consider effects of
interventionist impulses and tactics, of documentary as a call to action,
the skepticism of rendering things visible as steps towards change, of
identity politics against the probabilities of technicalities, and of
cognitive, crisis and controversy mapping in activist and artistic research
and production.

We are very pleased to introduce a variety of practitioners to our
conversations this month. You are artists, designers, curators, and
researchers. We look forward to learning of your experiences and seeing
where your insight, along with the voices of all of the list participants,
will take these conversations over the course of the month.

We know that many people on this list have a strong commitment to updating
technological and methodological interventions and as such wanted to take
this opportunity not to say what things ought to be, but adopt a ‘slow
media’ approach to ‘discussing it (with others)’.

Invited Respondents:

*Jamie Allen* (Canada) is an artist, researcher and teacher who likes to
make things with his head and hands. He lives in Europe, works in the world
and is Senior Researcher with the Critical Media Lab Basel and the
Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. www.jamieallen.com

*Dawn Bothwell* is curator with CIRCA Projects, Newcastle Upon Tyne + The
Northern Charter, Newcastle. She is a PhD researcher with CRUMB at the
University of Sunderland. http://dawnbothwell.hotglue.me

*Ruth Catlow* is an artist and co-founder/artistic director, with Marc
Garrett, of Furtherfield for arts, technology and social change.
Furtherfield’s public exhibition and lab venues in the heart of Finsbury
Park, London, provide a physical interface for free exhibitions, events and
workshops and an online hub provides a forum for exchange and critical
review. http://www.furtherfield.org

*Ricardo Dominguez* is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater
(EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with
the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. The Electronic
Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab created the Transborder Immigrant Tool
in 2007, a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/US
border. The project was under investigation by the US Congress in 2009-2010
and was reviewed by Glenn Beck (2010) as a gesture that potentially
“dissolved” the U.S. border with its poetry. Dominguez is associate
professor at the University of California San Diego in the Visual Arts
Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at
CALIT2 and the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD. He also is
co-founder of art collective the *particle group*.
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/particle-group-intro
http://bang.transreal.org/

*Heidrun Friese* is professor of intercultural communication, faculty of
philosophy, chemnitz University of Technology. Her research interests
include social and cultural theory, social anthropology, postcolonial
perspectives, (cultural) identities, friendship, hospitality,
(undocumented) mobility, transnational practices. Recent publications
include Grenzen der Gasfreundschaft. Die Bootsflüchtlinge von
Lampedusa und die europäische Frage, Bielefeld 2014.
http://www.hfriese.de/welcome.html

*Marc Garrett* is co-director/co-founder with artist Ruth Catlow for
Furtherfield, an artist led online network, gallery and commons in Finsbury
Park, London. In final stages of an Art history PhD at University of
London, Birkbeck College. http://www.furtherfield.org

*Marialaura Ghidini* is a contemporary art curator and writer with
international experience in producing projects reflecting on the
intersection between the arts and technology. She was founder director of
the web-based curatorial platform or-bits.com (2009-2015), and currently
she is faculty at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology and
program director at T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects in Bangalore (India).
<http://marialaura-ghidini.hotglue.me/>http://marialaura-ghidini.hotglue.me/

*Thomas Kilpper* is a German installation artist, draftsman and engraver
and since 2014 teaches at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway.
He is known for his critical, social and political interventions and for
his use of architectural scale woodcut methods to transform historical
buildings and spaces. In 2000, he created The Ring, a monumental woodcut
and installation at Orbut House in London. In 2008/2009 he exhibited “A
Lighthouse for Lampedusa!” at a number of locations in Italy.
http://www.kilpper-projects.de/blog/

*Armin Medosch*, PhD, is Professor of Theory and History of Art and Media
at the Faculty of Media and Communications at Singidunum University,
Belgrade. He is an artist, curator and author working in art and media art
theory and network culture. His work as curator includes exhibitions such
as Waves (Riga, 2006; Dortmund, 2008); and Fields (Riga Culture Capital,
2014). His book “New Tendencies – Art at the Threshold of the Information
Revolution” will be published by MIT Press, May 2016. He is initiator of
the Technopolitics working group in Vienna and initiator and maintainer of
the cooperative web-space http://www.thenextlayer.org/

*Copa & Sordes* (Birgit Krueger and Eric Schmutz) have been an artistic
cooperation since 1995 exploring the intersections of everyday culture and
art. http://www.xcult.org/copaetsordes

*Florian Schneider* is a filmmaker, writer, and curator. His work
investigates border crossings between mainstream and independent media, art
theory and open source technology, documentary practices and rather
estranged forms of curating. He is an initiator of the KEIN MENSCH IST
ILLEGAL campaign at documentaX. He founded, designed and supported
online-projects, such as the European internet platform D-A-S-H and KEIN.ORG.
He has directed and co-organised new media festivals including MAKEWORLD
(2001), NEURO (2004) and the FADAIAT2 event in Tarifa/Tangiers (2005).
http://fls.kein.org/

*Brett Staulbaum* is an artist and C5 research theorist specializing in
information theory, database, and software development. A serial
collaborator, he was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in
1998, for which he co-developed software called FloodNet
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html, which has been used on behalf of
the Zapatista movement against the websites of the Presidents of Mexico and
the United States, as well as the Pentagon. Stalbaum has published widely
on digital art, its context and aesthetics, and location-aware media.
http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/brett-stalbaum

-- 
Dani Admiss

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