Takahiro Noguchi, Tamarind Rossetti, Spencer Stair

“A child's imagination and a border remixed.”

Currently our project consists of two microwatt-radio transmitters of equal power, placed equidistantly, one on each side of the U.S./Mexico border, broadcasting at a single frequency. To develop our program, we will collaborate with children contacted through community centers in both San Ysidro and Tijuana. These simultaneous broadcasts will be filtered, so while they are meaningless individually, when the broadcast signals interfere/intermingle at la Frontera, the physical boundary where the two states meet, their meaning is revealed.

In dialogue with the children of the borderlands, we wish to educate and to also be educated in turn, in order to re-imagine the border beyond paternal notions of divides (digital, North/South) and unmoving political and cultural states. Those who choose to remain frozen within these territories will hear only a partial, disjointed message. Yet those who live in the unbound la Frontera will recognize the stories of their children.

Biography

Collaborators Takahiro Noguchi, Tamarind Rossetti, Spencer Stair began an open-ended set of collaborations in the summer of 2002 in Montreal, Canada. Each permutation contains a diverse set of accomplices and tactics. Our previous projects include large-scale projects connecting Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Richmond, Virginia using bicycles and contraptions of our own invention. Our publications have toured the U.S. and Canada with the Montreal/ Philadelphia based Projét Movilivre/Bookmobile Project. Often our work is encountered like an ambush in the night, a surprise met in the streets and on the sly. In our goal to make what is in-existent real our desire is infinite.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.