Tijuana Calling*

An Online Curatorial Project for inSite_05

Tijuana Calling is an online exhibition of five commissioned projects that make use of the Internet to explore various features of the Tijuana/San Diego border region, including cultural tourism, border density, transborder narco-tunnels, vigilante surveillance drones, and the journalistic hype surrounding border crime. Like the inSite_05 Interventions, these projects grew out of a lengthy process of research and investigation. Although all five projects exist online, they adopt a wide range of artistic strategies, from gameplay to tactical literature. As part the inSite_05 web site, Tijuana Calling describes and links to these projects, but the projects themselves exist elsewhere on the Internet.

Artists began experimenting with the Internet in the mid-1990s, when the first Web browsers became available to the public. Net artists, as they called themselves, saw the Web not as a way to publish their portfolios online but as a space for art making. Net art was fueled by a critical engagement with the market forces that drove the rapid transformation of the web from an arcane computer network into a popular medium for communication and commerce. Net art tended to be both dynamic and process-oriented, more like a happening or a performance than a painting or a sculpture.

Although Net art may be over as an art movement, artists continue to work online in ever greater numbers. For these artists, the Internet is both a medium and a platform, a set of tools, and a distribution channel through which they can gain direct access a global art audience, without the assistance of art world institutions. Equally important, it can enable artists to reach audiences that rarely set foot in galleries, museums or performance spaces.

One of my main goals in organizing Tijuana Calling is to support projects that have the potential to reach beyond the art world and into an online equivalent of what has been called the public sphere. If the public sphere is a place where politics happens, then I am looking for projects that transform this sphere, if only temporarily, into a place where art happens.

* The title of this curatorial project is taken from the lyrics of Tijuana for Dummies, a track by Hiperboreal on Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1 by the Nortec Collective.

—Mark Tribe

Individuals
Carol Hobson, Sheldon Brown, Ivan Orkeny, Miklos Szurdy, Ruben Ortiz Torres, Dr. Ramón Felix Landeros, Dr. Orlando Acosta, Dra. Cinthia Romo, Dr. Leon Dychter, Demetrio Cárdenas García, Jesús Vázquez, Dr. Carlos Peralta, Dr. Ubaldo Eliaz Paez, Dr. Felipe Álvarez Olloqui, Márgara de León, Esmeralda Ceballos, Joseph Arnone, Josep Arnonoe, Kurt Olmstead, Kurt Olmstead, Brooke Singer, Alex Dragulescu, Christine Foerster.

Organizations
Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, University of California, San Diego
Draganfly Innovations

Sponsors
Instituto de Cultura de Baja California
TELNOR
Prodigy Infinitum
Cerveza Tijuana
Department for Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego.

Venue
The Internet