Geography Lessons / Video Set #1 / Video Set #2
An on-going archive of videos and still images generated from trespasses in airport security zones.
Increasingly, the spaces we navigate are policed through technologies of visualization and information management. The X-Ray machine, racial profiling practices, surveillance devices, scrutiny of documents, fingerprinting etc are meant to make everything, visible or invisible, available for inspection. Justified through the imperative of security, vast databases track our movements, health records, purchases, reading habits, web navigation and so on.
And much is at stake in representation.
This series of small interventions in highly controlled spaces began shortly after September 11th 2001. Using a video camera as a way of looking back, I shoot images in airport security zones: inside X-Ray machines, at passport check points, immigration control, baggage claim. Geography Lessons (... cont.) is an on-going archive of these video images, a structured and somewhat absurd system of unauthorized counter surveillance, a meditation on the nature and implications of representation. This website contains a small portion of the archive: excerpts of a few videos taken around, and inside of, airport X-Ray machines.
The Naturalization Project
National parks, immigration law, Olympic television, travel guides, night vision, wedding rituals, border crossings.... A collusion of multiple articulations of the national and the natural....
This long-term project explores the problematics of naturalization by considering multiple sites in which this construct is articulated. In each site, the citizen/foreigner dynamic is produced through a series of tropes. The focus is primarily on the production of the Eastern European other via tropes of gymnastics, poverty, nationalism, violence and orphans – as well as the production of the Western citizen subject as a type of viewer (a way of watching). This project consists of a series of multi-channel video installation, 5 short videos, a series of border trespass interventions, interventions within immigration proceedings and wedding rituals.
Composition in Black and White (Danube Bridge, 042099)
Photos shot off the targeting screen of US bomber aircraft during operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. The images are taken a few frames after the moment of explosion, when heat patterns translate on the screen into compositions in black and white. The photos are taken without authorization.
911+1: The Perplexities of Security / Rozalinda Borcila / The Information Technology, War and Peace Project / Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University
