Since the 1980’s and 1990’s, Ricardo Dominguez and his now-partner Amy Sara Carroll have been redefining the rules of art, activism, and the discourse regarding immigration with a practice they call “artivism,” a combination of the words “art” and “activism.” Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), and Carroll is Assistant Professor of American Culture, Latina/o Studies, and English at the University of Michigan and has authored two poetry collections. Their artivism has primarily taken the form of “electronic civil disobedience,” a term coined by Dominguez in the 1990’s. In an interview, he told me that he calls this term a “burrito term,” meaning that it can be stuffed with “space and time, and filled . . . with contents that do not always match the label.”
Electronic civil disobedience has taken many forms for Dominguez and Carroll, and for their three primary collaborators, Brett Stalbaum, Elle Mehrmand, and Misha Cárdenas. The five of them make up the Electronic Disturbance Theater. The principles that Dominguez works by, in his words, are “experimentation in [art] forms and placement, and questioning what art is . . . one assumes art is a thing, so from that we can create art in unexpected places.” Carroll, also present at the interview, told me that “the same is true with poetry and Javascript.” With the collaborators, she is questioning “what is the code and what is the poetry, and how to switch them.” The project that saw the culmination of these questions was the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
The Transborder Immigrant Tool was an “applet” created for the open-code system of the Motorola i335 phone. The open code allowed the group to program, with the help of various NGOs, the position of numerous water caches in the southern Californian desert area known as the “Devil’s Highway.” The “Devil’s Highway” is a treacherous area used by many migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, and is known for its extreme temperatures. The phones were programmed with the water source locations, and also included 24 poems based on desert survival written by Carroll and recorded in English, Spanish, and other languages spoken in Mexico. The phones, however, could not be distributed, because Dominguez and the rest of the group were put under investigation by UCSD, the FBI, and three Republican senators. The investigations were stemmed from statements that Dominguez gave in a controversial interview with Vice magazine about the project, which was picked up by Congress. The subsequent allegations of cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and misuse of university funds against the group—in addition to commentator Glenn Beck calling them “worse than Iran”—meant that the phones could not be handed out. While Carroll admitted that the project “had not manifested the way [they had] planned,” Dominguez said that “the project became part of the history of the border script of 1994.”
The fact that this particular project was not physically successful has not stopped the group from continuing their work. Carroll said that the goal is to “change the aesthetics of the immigration debate.” She described the current debate as a “hyperpolarization of the ‘evil migrant’ and ‘illegal alien,’” and she wants to “humanize the current debate about the humanitarian crisis.” She points out that borders “have contradictory discourse—goods flow freely across, but human beings are blocked.” In this same illuminating vein, Carroll made it clear that the group “is not writing as a crosser, but as people who have citizenship privilege,” who want to raise awareness on this discourse.
Dominguez elaborated more on borders by pointing out how far “inland” the US-Mexico border has moved, to the point where, in order to access the Anza Borrego State Park of California from within the state, one has to cross through a Border Patrol checkpoint. He also said that “globalization equals borderization . . . soon there will be no nations or state lines, but only borders.”
The Electronic Disturbance Theater is a brave collaborative of artists working to call attention to the discussion around a very real humanitarian crisis with peaceful electronic disobedience, public art installations in unlikely (non-urban) locations, and writing. Dominguez and Carroll are currently working on a series of plays to tell the story of the developmental aspect of the Transborder Immigrant Tool.
Dominguez is a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell, and Carroll is working with him on their current projects as they spend the year here in Ithaca. As a parting note, Dominguez offered some advice to share with all young artists: “Be fearless in working with other artists; find an ‘anarchy 5,’ because five people means you can develop a good dialogue where not everyone agrees, but the presence of the fifth wheel makes the conversation more available to everyone; to think long-term in terms of the arc of your art; and finally, to be slow and be thoughtful.”