[spectre] PRESS RELEASE: Freephone Art Project Provides Deported People with a Phone Call

[dj lotu5]

FOR IMMEDIATE 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 A+ ucsd d()t 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 at 
mcardenas A+ ucsd D[]t 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

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