| You Are Not Here |
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A Dislocative Tourism Agency
You Are Not Here (.org) is a platform for urban tourism mash-ups.
It invites participants to become meta-tourists on simultaneous excursions through multiple cities. Passers-by stumble across the curious You Are Not Here signs in the street. The YANH street-signs provide the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, a portal for audio-guided tours of one place on the streets of another. Through investigation of these points and with or without the aid of a downloadable map, local pedestrians are transformed into tourists of foreign places. Current walking tours include Baghdad through the streets of New York City and Gaza City through the streets of Tel-Aviv.
Welcome to Gaza Become a meta-tourist on an excursion through the city of Gaza while walking through the streets of Tel Aviv. The double-sided map serves as your tour guide. You Are Not Here tries to expose the contrasts and the similarities between two cities. Though geographically close, Gaza City and Tel Aviv are both emotionally and politically detached from one another. This is something we want to address through YANH, and offer, perhaps, an interwoven urban experience. Placing the two maps one on top of the other echoes the Situationist act of wandering, undermining the foundations of both cities and the repressed connections between them. Streets and regions in the city are charged with unknown meanings, and are revealed to the walkers through the map of the corresponding city, by means of cellular communication and resignification of the monument. While strolling along the Dizengoff-Kaplan thoroughfare, for example, you may visit the Palestinian Parliament or the monument to the Unknown Soldier; the Ramat Israel neighborhood in eastern Tel Aviv is revealed to visitors through the Great Mosque and marketplaces of Gaza. It was important for us to provide a personal voice that would make a sincere use of this stage and introduce the everyday life of Gaza inside the streets of Tel Aviv. We turned to Laila El Haddad after reading her touching blog ‘Raising Yousuf, Unplugged: diary of a Palestinian Mother.’ Happily, Laila loved the idea and through her we all get to experience this exceptional visit to Gaza.
What you get should look something like this:
By holding the double-sided map up to the light, you can find your way through Gaza in Tel-Aviv by locating the You Are Not Here signs in the street, walls or other corresponding locations in Tel Aviv. These signs indicate that you have arrived at an important tourist destination in Gaza City. The YANH street-signs provide the telephone number for The Tourist Hotline: 03-915-0880. Enter the site-specific access code following the general Tourist Hotline for a guided audio tour of that destination by Gaza resident and blogger, Laila El-Haddad. 1. Hold the map towards the sun to find your desired destination. Arts & Crafts Village Call the Gaza Tourist Hotline: 03-915-0880
-Thomas Duc, Lalia El-Haddad, Kati London, Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv* *Project in collaboration with Block Magazine
Explore Baghdad through the streets of New York! Site-specific access codes can be found throughout the city allowing you, the Meta Tourist, to experience the Great City by the Tigris. Upon finding an access code, call the Tourist Hotline (646-862-7769) for free audio guides to all the must-see locations.
1. Download side 1 (8.0 MB PDF)
1. Hold the map towards the sun to find your next desired destination Visit the following attractions: Call the Tourist Hotline: 646-862-7769 NOTE: The tours were available from April 2006 – May 2007, they are temporarily suspended.
People Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, an educator and a media activist from Tel-Aviv, based in NY. His work explores media in public space and the public space in media. In his creative research he focuses on the perception of territory and borders and the way they are shaped through politics, culture, networks and the World Wide Web. He is the co-founder of ShiftSpace.org – an open source layer above any website; Shual.com – a foxy design studio; YouAreNotHere.org – a dislocative tourism agency; Kriegspiel – a computer game based on Guy Debord’s Game of War; and the Tel Aviv node of the Upgrade international network. Mushon is an honorary resident at Eyebeam – an art and technology center in New York. He teaches new media research at NYU and open source design at Parsons the New School of Design. Dan Phiffer is a new media hacker from California, interested in exploring cultural dimensions of inexpensive communications networks such as voice telephony and the Internet. Drawing on his computer science background, Dan’s software projects seek to provide meaningful creative opportunities through intuitive user interfaces. Dan now lives in Brooklyn, New York and just completed a Masters from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Kati London designs, develops and builds opportunities for interacting with others—whether that be for people and plants, residents of Baghdad and New York City or an international conference of mobile game developers. Her varied interests have led her to curate cultural programs at one of New York City’s botanical gardens as well as produce the first online art auctions for artnet.com. Her collaborative projects have been featured in the Come Out & Play Festival, New York; and Conflux: Festival of Psychogeography. Her project Urban Sonar has been featured in Wired; andBotanicalls: the plants have your number, has been featured on the BBC, and will be included in an upcoming documentary for German and French public television. She currently works as a producer and game designer for the big game design company, area/code. She recently finished her Masters atNYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program She loves dogs and plants. \n”,0] ); D([”ce”]); //–>. She has exhibited her art works and installations in New York, Los Angeles, Germany, Italy and Providence, Rhode Island. Laila El-Haddad is a freelance Palestinian journalist and writer based between the United States and the Gaza Strip. She spent the past three years in Gaza reporting for the Aljazeera Satellite Channel’s English language website (now known as Aljazeera International) and Pacifica Radio’s Free Speech Radio news. Her work is also frequently found in the Guardian Unlimited, the BBC World Service, the Electronic Intifada, Le Monde Diplomatique, and the New Statesman. Laila received her B.A. from Duke University in Political and Comparative Area Studies in May 2000. Her thesis was on “NGOs and the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip: Between Integration and Conflict.” More recently, in June 2002, Laila earned a Master’s in Public Policy, with a concentration in International Security from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government. Laila has received a number of awards and scholarship for her leadership, public service, intellectual abilities and dedication to her work. Laila is also the author of the blog Raising Yousuf, named after her two-year-old son (www.gazamom.com), where she writes about the trials and tribulations of motherhood under occupation. Thomas Duc is an artist living in New York. His work focuses on current media and their poetics. He has exhibited in the United States, Brazil and France. Looking for the political in the technical, the global in the political, he fosters meaningful spaces of play in reality. Seeing no border between engineering and art, he worked for atualidade (a brazilian newspaper) both as caricaturist and information architect until 2003, for the French national center of Research (CNRS,brain development department) until 2005, for a circus as a performer, and is nowadays part of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Charles Pratt
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