Dorkbot SoCal: Immigration Technology

Speakers:

Micha Cárdenas - Lecturer, Visual Arts Department, UCSD - Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab

Chris Head - MFA Candidate UCSD - Artist/Researcher, Experimental Game Lab and b.a.n.g. lab

Elle Mehrmand - MFA Candidate UCSD - Artist/Researcher, b.a.n.g. lab

From Machine Project: "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 MFA students and graduates came 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 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 and the artists invited people coming through the turnstiles at the border to make a free phone call."

FREE

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This image was taken by flickr user `David. It was used under the Creative Commons License.