Transborder Immigration Project

This information comes from the justseeds.org blog. justseeds is a community of artists who have banded together to both sell their work online in a central location and to collaborate with and support each other and social movements.

One of the highlights of this year’s Allied Media Conference in Detroit was learning about the Transborder Immigration Project by Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas and Jason Najarro.

In the true spirit of hactivist art and civil disobedience, this team of San Diego-based artists and scientists has ingeniously reconfigured a Motorola i455 phone into a lifesaving device for immigrants crossing the border between Mexico and US. In their own words, “The goal of the project is to help reduce the number of deaths along the border by developing a common cell phone device into a navigation tool that will help migrants locate life saving resources in the desert such as water catches and safety beacons.”

The device, which is built upon the back of a basic $40 Motorola i455 phone, has a built-in compass, vibrates near water sources, and is gps enabled.

Learn more here.

And here