Exploring Borders: Experimental Media Workshops in Tijuana

• In Event: Communication Research in the U.S./Mexican Border Region

Abstract

T(e)M was an experimental media workshop at the Humanities Faculty in UABC Tijuana that, through a transdisciplinary and cross-training student group, produces projects exploring the nature of frontiers and the possibilities they afford.
T(e)M has produced four main projects during its year of existence: two seasons of “minibúks”, a graphic “Philosophical Dictionary of Tijuana”, and a series of science fiction-based interventions on the border crossing at San Ysidro.
“Minibúks” are small booklets (distributed freely on the university and the city. They are meant to be traded as collectibles. “Minibúks” are produced in thematic seasons and they are designed to provoke a public discussion of certain issues concerning borders.
Our first season was devoted to “Science fiction made in Mexico”. This allowed us to study the future as a frontier with a third world perspective focusing on the use and effects of technology.
The second season was international in approach, and concentrated on “Counter-versions”. We chose essays by authors who remain marginal to academic institutions or who take a controversial standpoint within the academy and try to propose alternatives in the way we view our lives and the world.
Our third project, the “Philosophical Dictionary of Tijuana” is a collection of posters using documentary photographs of Tijuana and quotes by philosophers. The result is a collective discussion on the nature of border life and the way thinking, and philosophy, can have a creative relation to the way we perceive the real world.
Our final project was called “You can see the future from here”, a series of science fiction-based interventions made during a two month period on the San Ysidro border crossing. Two hundred artists, mostly students, collaborated with images, artwork, dance, theatre and conceptual performances, installations, short stories, and readings in a collective imagination exercise of the near future. We even had a short wave radio station for the cars waiting to cross the border.
The free and public nature of the projects has been a cornerstone of T(e)M’s approach as an experiment on the borders between university and society.

Author

• Juan Jose Rojo, BINACOM - Binational Assoc. of Schls of Comm of the Californias