The funding for and development team for the Transborder Immigrant Tool is under attack!

In the past few weeks, a number of developments have happened in relation
to the art/research practices of the bang.lab and Electronic Disturbance
Theater (EDT) which we wish to share with the public in accordance with
our long history of radical transparency.

- Since the November of 2009 the Transborder Immigrant Tool has become a media event with many groups and individuals, such as Congressman Duncan Hunter in his Op-ed in the San Diego Union Tribune, calling for the defunding of the Transborder
Immigrant Tool, the University of California system began a financial
audit of the project on January 11, 2010, in which they requested that
every member involved be interviewed by Audit & Management Advisory
Services (UCSD). The exact investigations (they claim that they are
multiple) under way have yet to be clarified by UCOP or other UC entities,
but in the interviews thus far, TBT members have been questioned about the
usage of the funds and the originality of the project. The investigation
has ‘arrested’ TBT’s developmental process and core research matrix.

- Indeed, due to widespread media coverage of the Transborder Immigrant
Tool members of bang.lab and EDT also have been receiving copious hateful
email and paper letters, some including threats of physical violence and
murder. Beyond the racist, xenophobic, classist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic “excitable speech” of the threats, the gendered nature of these hyperbolic
responses has been as clear as the correspondence received in recent weeks
by national representatives who voted for health care legislation or
federal justices charged with representing those accused of terrorist
acts.

- On March 2nd, http://Markyudof.com publicly declared the resignation of
UCOP Mark Yudof in a gesture of minor simulation to encourage the
imagining of other possible futures. On March 21st, bang.lab received
notice that a faculty member at UC Riverside was being investigated in
relation to this action.

- On March 4th, http://bang.calit2.net hosted a virtual sit-in against the
UCOP website, providing a space for many people concerned with public
education to embody their dissent online. As a result, UCSD IT Security
shut down our server's access to the Internet for eight days. After that,
we were informed that an investigation by the Senior Vice Chancellor (SVC)
was begun by the UCOP of Ricardo Dominguez seeking criminal charges for
the virtual sit-in, despite the legal precedent that a virtual sit-in is
political speech, not a DDOS attack. This investigation has been framed by
SVC as potential reason to end Professor Dominguez's tenure.

We feel that these events indicate a number of troubling trends within the
current transnational struggle for education (and more equal distribution
of resources, more generally speaking!):

- A complete disregard for our academic freedom as researchers engaging in
trajectories of art, literature and technology research that the Visuals
Arts Department and CALIT2 consider to be extremely valuable, and for
which Professor Dominguez earned tenure for.

-The use of bureaucracy as a weapon, to prevent our research from
continuing by bogging us down in endless meetings with accountants and
investigations.

- The criminalization of dissent: across the UC system and the world on
March 4th people engaged in actions, including civil disobedience, to try
to restore public education, stop the budget cuts and work towards a
better future for education. We are among hundreds of people facing
charges for engaging in dissent from the very institutions that claim to
foster independent thinking.

While we feel that poetry, walking art and queer technology cannot be
quantified, “spread-sheet Excel-ed,” we in the bang lab harbor our own
concerns for the lack of accountability that enables the UC system to
continue transforming a public university for the state of California into
a private corporation, accessible to a select few. That same selective
lack of accountability fails to count the number of deaths tragically
occurring because of international borders. To perform our own due
diligence in the spirit of accounting for the here and now, we seek to
“queer the census”: if you feel that you are a part of the bang.lab or
have participated in any of our activities in mind, body, spirit (in real
or virtual timespace), get up, stand up, sign your name in a comment at:

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