The Internet seems to be an open, limitless space for communication beyond all borders (further substantiated by participation platforms like Wikipedia or YouTube), however these seemingly free spaces are heavily controlled by censorship and exclusion. The artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud use the possibilities of the utopian, accessible, open net to make visible those mechanisms of control and exclusion. Their open-source projects uncover forms of censorship of the Internet, undermine the concentration of political power, and even resolve dependency on infrastructure.
The project Zone*Interdite (French for: ‘restricted military zone’) emerged from a paradox: It is forbidden to depict or enter military areas, yet these pictures appear in the mass media. The work focuses on these images, reconstructing restricted terrain through virtual walkthroughs, composed of crowdsourced information and insight (including prisoner testimony) and freely available data (i.e. Googlemaps etc). Visitors are even invited to improve and complete the project with their own Internet searches.
Zone*Interdite is not primarily concerned with world politics or military strategy, but with something that affects us all personally: the power of our own imagination and the ability to perceive independently, free of myth or propaganda.
