Artist Response No 8

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon: The BoarderXing (2002)

Since the internet became available to the world's public, it has been used for all different kinds of purposes. But nowadays, the internet rather represents a worldwide community connected across geographic distances by an electronic network.
However, as it is explained in the excerpt (https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/MarkTribe/Heath+Bunting+and+Kayle+Brandon),technology and mobility is limited to the privileged and the ramifications of the globalizational reality have excluded, for political, economic, or social reasons, many others from networks of communication and transportation.

Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon have created an online basis that addresses these issues. It is called BorderXing.This is an online guide to crossing European borders secretly. The site is said to be primarily addressed to activists, asylum seekers, and others who lack the requisite government documents to pass legally from one nation to the next. The guide is built around a database-driven Web site that contains information about routes between various pairs of countries in Europe. Furthermore it contains documentations of the artists' attempted crossings. Besides that, even instructions on how to cross specific borders undetected and without a passport are accompanied by hiking maps and lists of necessary tools. In interesting question would be where Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon did get these information from and how they have managed not to get caught by officials.

As it is stated in the excerpt (see link), the artists patrolled the boundaries of the BorderXing project by limiting access to some of the Web site's texts to authorized users. One critical thought about the project is the overthrow of the integrity of national European borders.

Despite the fact whether one might consider Heath Bunting's and Kayle Brandon's work art or an illegal course of action, I truly admire the political engaged nature of their work. I really wonder what the authorities think about that. However, according to them, their work is not about decoration or visual pleasure; it is about the beauty showing in BorderXing in the form of photographs taken by the artists as they travel illicitly between countries. These often-stunning images, traces of the artists' experiments in illegal migration, reveal liminal landscapes of surprising beauty.

In my opinion, this again is a perfect example for the endless boundaries of the possibilities of the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, I would be truly interested myself in these secret routes and photographs. The fact that it is illegal probably makes it so fascinating as art. Especially the pictures might cause a notable attraction and appeal because they truly correspond to reality.