Dolores from 10 to 22 hrs, 2001, a net performance by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez [Enlarge in New Window]

Ricardo Dominguez: Anchors for Witnessing: Post Media for Off-Grid Communities

Chiapas, a mountainous province on the southern tail of Mexico bordering the Pacific Ocean and Guatamala, is home to four million people and the setting of a brutal ongoing conflict between the government and rebel groups. The best known of these is the Zapatistas, who have been fighting for indigenous land rights and against human rights abuses since a 1994 uprising. Outside the few major cities, the Chiapas communities don't have regular electricity, phone service, or Internet connections. So when something happens -- like the 1997 massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indians -- it's hard for those suffering to get the news out and rally the international community to their aid.

Richard Dominguez, a founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, has set up a video project in an effort to help the people in Chiapas and other low-tech areas get their stories out. Titled Anchors for Witnessing: Post-media for Off-Grid Communities, this project gets cameras into areas where they are needed: the Zapatista territories in Chaipas; the Woomera in Australia, site of an indigenous struggle against uranium mining and illegal toxic dumping; and the western island of Vieques in Puerto Rico, which has been subjected to test bombing by the U.S. Army for the past 50 years.

Dominguez intends to work with the communities to determine where best to fix the cameras to monitor the situation and how to adapt them to the terrain. Getting the cameras connected to a wireless streaming network, so that others can see the images collected, is the most complicated part of the process. Dominguez needs not only to find stable power sources, but will also have to get access to satellite bandwidth to upload the footage and get it on the Internet.

Rather than using Anchors as an exercise in gathering and distributing edited news segments, Dominguez sees the entire scenario in the tradition of agit-prop and activist theater. What unfolds before the cameras will be drama, the real-life drama of people living in such fear that they need oversight of their daily lives to be safe.

"Basically, it's little sisters who watch big brother," says Dominguez, 43, who was an actor in classical theater before he became involved in activist work in the mid-'80s. He moved to New York in the early '90s and began working on electronic forms of theater, including the Blast, Thething.net, and his own Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Dominguez's idea of working with images from communities like Chiapas emerged from these early ventures. Anchors grew directly out of a 1998 virtual sit-in of the Mexican government's website; EDT set up a system for thousands of people to flood the site with hits and force it to shut down. Major news outlets covered that protest, and Time magazine referred to the EDT as a "novel weapon" in the new digital activism frontier.

Other models have come into play since then, particularly the more journalistic Indymedia movement, but Dominguez continues to be interested in the dramatic nature of activist projects. "All of this online activism is about telling a story. It's a very old model," he says. "The idea is to question to what degree the audience can empathize and participate. That's what agit-prop theater has always focused on. It's been very important in developing the original idea to make this as theatrical as possible."

He adds, "We're not trying to do journalism. Agit-prop is really about gesture. It's specific and can be read by many involved. The primary gesture is just setting up the idea. What comes out of the response to that gesture is another level of theater. We try to create a sociological drama that allows many communities to participate in a dialogue."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Digital Arts / New Media | Labor | Politics | New York | 2001