who we are
Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud
Christoph Wachter lives in Berlin, Germany
Mathias Jud lives in Zurich, Switzerland
Zone*Interdite
Starting with the artistic ambition of gaining our own picture of the world, we discovered certain blackouts - maskings of our perceptions. When observing military restricted areas, our attention got blurred.
“Zone*Interdite” reconstructs the terrain which our reflection has been deprived of.
The Internet project www.zone-interdite.net is a test arrangement that serves as a starting point for individual exploratory tours and as a collection point for ones own findings. In a combination of search engine and atlas, many sources result in a global military overview that overrides nation states and power blocks.
Particular areas are reconstructed as artificial virtual 3D worlds. A PC-version is freely downloadable on www.zone-interdite.net and can be personally explored as a virtual walkthrough on ones own Computer. Presently, Guantanamo Bay with its prison camps, Bagram Airbase with its secret prison as well as an Islamic training camp in Sudan are downloadable.
The power of the project lies in the disarming and lapidary view of a world of military power. Individual imagination and the joy of discovering occurs, i.e. spotting, replacing the patriotic and pacifistic duty of a knee-jerk avowal, and undermining censorship, as well as the restriction of perception.
These virtual tours enable expeditions to take place on a terrain where sovereignty no longer belongs to the national state but to each human being. Therefore, “Dispositif of Power” (power relations) can be detected right to the base of our self-imagination. By experiencing that self-censorship and heteronomy interfere with our own perception, we gain the possibility to realize what freedom and self-determination could be.
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