Dissing Information
The following is a short essay I wrote for the 10th issue of Shoppinghour Magazine (UK) titled Feast on Listen. It involves what I refer to as an Audio-Spatial experience and is mainly inspired by my experience with the You Are Not Here project. For the past few decades digital storytelling have been delivered mainly … Continue reading Audio-Spatial Storytelling
On Friday March 12th 2010 I will be participating at NYU’s Media Culture & Communications’ Radars & Fences III: Borders, Affect, Space (please RSVP and come). My friend Laila El-Haddad and I will present You Are Not Here – A Tour of Gaza Through the Streets of Tel Aviv, and we’ll discuss the way geography and the concept of the border is shaping the mediated experience of the conflict. We will also discuss some of our recent initiatives to disrupt the theater of conflict resolution.
I am posting an essay Laila and I wrote for the catalog of the Unrecorded exhibition in Istanbul, March 2008, curated by Basak Senova. At the end of the essay I embedded the videos of Laila & Saeed’s Al Jazeera documentary Tunnel Trade that have inspired this text.
When Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, the city of Rafah was suddenly split between Egypt and Gaza by an Israeli wall. Families found themselves divided by a high-security international border, though their houses often lay less than 100m apart. Before long, influential families who once controlled trade through Rafah moved their business underground through dozens of secret tunnels burrowed below the border, connecting family houses on either side.
With Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the number of tunnels mushroomed. The Israeli military used the tunnels as a pretext for stepping up demolitions of houses to make way for a buffer zone along the border. Israel’s main concern is the smuggling of weapons to armed Palestinian groups. But for the smugglers themselves there is far more to the tunnel trade than politics and arms smuggling. Everything moves through Rafah’s tunnels: from cigarettes and drugs to cash and people. It is a vast enterprise, and pays five times an average annual Gaza salary in one month. It is a family business, passed on from father to son and always – for reasons of security as well as economics – kept in the family. Continue reading “Radars & Fences / You Are Not Here / The Gaza Tunnel Trade”
The new You Are Not Here is going to be fascinating! We are collaborating with Block Magazine to bring Gaza to Tel-Aviv. This time the project will be a bit different than the first iteration of it (New York/Baghdad) since we are going to try to work with people from Gaza in the first place … Continue reading Working on: You Are Not Here – A tour of Gaza through the Streets of Tel-Aviv
This weekend together with my collaborators, I will be presenting You Are Not Here and ShiftSpace at the Conflux – contemporary psychogeography festival. On Thursday Sep. 14th bet. 5:00 pm–7:00 pm we will give a presentation for You Are Not Here: A Tour of Baghdad through the streets of New York. A day after – … Continue reading YANH & ShiftSpace at Conflux festival
A presentation of works from the past year as a Part of the Upgrade Tel-Aviv. Here’s a link to the presentation file Saturday, 20.5.06, 19:00 Squat Ben Atar, Ben Atar 2, Florentin, Tel Aviv Free Entrance Mushon Zer Aviv Borders Conflict Next Upgrade evening will deal with concepts of geographical and cultural borders … Continue reading Border Conflict presentation TLV 2006
I was attacked by 3 men, really!, originally uploaded by mushon. last night when I was getting off the bus, returning from our traditional Friday movie night at Ned’s in Williamsburg, I was attacked on the street. As I was walking the very short walk from the bus station to the entrance of my home, … Continue reading A violent night in Harlem
The following is an essay dealing with public space and public art in physical space and online. It can also serve as a cultural background to the ShiftSpace project I’m working on with Dan Phiffer.
About two months ago, Galia and I were walking down 116th Street in Harlem. Being terribly late for our meeting with Dan and Ellie, we tried to walk as fast as we could. As we were walking by a little neighborhood Basketball court, something there made us stop. In the middle of the court the Basketball hoop was lying, it’s base torn off and it’s board flat facing the ground. Something about this image was so disturbing for us that we couldn’t just walk by and ignore it.
Continue reading “An Emergent Public Artwork in 116th Street”
For my Show & Tell spot at the Theoretical aspects of interactivity class, I would discuss some of the ideas brought up in Norbert Weiner’s ‘Cybernetics in history’ essay, concerning my thoughts about contemporary cartography and community GIS.
Here are some ideas I would like to go over in class: Continue reading “Show & Tell: Contemporary Cartography vs. Cybernetics in History”
The following is a draft for a course Dan and I might give in Eyebeam: Where It’s @ mapping and location awareness Mapping is first and foremost an attempt of contextualizing one’s surrounding environment. More than just asking “Where am I?” we believe the cartographer is also concerned with the question “Where am I not?” … Continue reading Where It’s @