The Transborder Immigrant Project
O Projeto The Transborder Immigrant Project (via MobileActive.org), de Ricardo Dominguz, mistura arte e ativismo. Usando celulares equipados com GPS o projeto visa ajudar imigrantes que tentam cruzar a fronteira entre o México e os EUA a se orientarem para evitar as constantes e inúmeras mortes. O projeto ganhou o Transnational Communities Award.
Vejam um trechos da descrição abaixo:
“Ricardo, a researcher in the Calit2 lab at the University of California at San Diego, was given the award along with colleagues Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas y Jason Najarro. The project seeks to create a way for immigrants to orient themselves while crossing the border between the United States and Mexico, which is traversed by thousands of immigrants each year. The device seeks to reduce the number of deaths along the border by helping immigrants locate resources such as water caches and safety beacons.
The idea for the project arose from a program called the Virtual Hiker, a project of UCSD visual art professor Brett Stalbaum. “Brett gets lost even going to his house,” joked Ricardo, “so he started working on a locative media project called the Virtual Hiker…He developed an algorithm that took into account a certain terrain, and created a virtual trial or hike based on those algorithms.” By using GPS, the program created virtual hikes and would orient the user towards certain landmarks. Brett was able access “the kind of utility cloud that GPS offers,” said Ricardo.(…)”