During the 2019 NMC Symposium BORDER CONTROL at the University of Michigan (September 19-22, 2019) WOKE New Media – Borders and Bodies: New Media Caucus (NMC) Diversity Panel is Sponsored by the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative and Co-sponsored by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). It is being held on Saturday, September 21, 2019 (3:00-6:15 PM) at the Art & Architecture Building, University of Michigan.

 

Chair/Moderator: Mina Cheon 

Artists/Panelists:
Part I – Mina Cheon (Introduction), Christopher Kojzar, Victor F M Torres, Allana Clarke 

Part 2 – Antonio McAfee, Kei Ito & Andrew Paul Keiper, Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead (Conclusion)

 

Today, we are facing micro and macro aggressions of threats of “The Wall” at global and local scales, affecting all human bodies. We drown in the media war on Trump’s victory wall between the Mexican and US border; the post-internet wireless world turns out to be less than borderless as exemplified with China’s Great Firewall as an erected government surveillance; cold war tensions continue regardless of the collapse of the Berlin Wall; and nobody really cares about North Korea as long as the DMZ reinforces the splitting world power-relations. Moreover, Brexit is about leaving the European Union to deface the monetary burden of the Syrian refugee crisis, while more border-patrolled walls keep millions of Middle Eastern and African refugees from entering Europe. Every nation-state borderline contours a separation to prop up naturalized citizens, whereas undocumented bodies are systematically left in the gutter. Walls and borders displace bodies, and every neighborhood, block, or fence strategically borders off the “others.” The New Media Caucus (NMC) Diversity Panel, comprised of artists who use new media in their work, demonstrate artistic responses for countering scattered hegemonies, walls, borders in our world of increasing cultural, ideological, political, economic divisions. This is what diversity looks like in WOKE New Media.