Territory of the Imagination

We spent October of 2015 in El Paso, Texas, preparing for the exhibition Territory of the Imagination: At the Border of Art and Space, organized by Kerry Doyle at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. Territory of the Imagination took place around the US-Mexico border region in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico. Through a series of exhibitions, workshops and public events, featuring works that:

"engage in disruptive, alternative, and collective interactions with space and space technology. It reflects a growing interest by artists to understand how space exploration has entered the social imaginary, and provide alternatives to traditional state-based and emerging commercial narratives. Through both artistic and participatory practices, these artists are generating new possibilities for how we relate to the skies and to each other."

During our month in El Paso we investigated the possibility of creating a network of transborder laser modems. This network would be raised on both sides of the border and use our laser modems to share documents and create a communication channel across the border and across other large distances.

This proved to be harder than we thought. Besides the expected technical and judicial challenges, we also faced difficulty in finding people or groups that were insterested in building, maintaining or using this network with us. During a series of workshops on both sides of the border, we noticed that people were more worried about communicating with the future, than with the other side of the border. Nonetheless, we set up a small laser network between two points within the Rubin Center and a nearby cave.