How Do You See the Disappeared? is an ongoing collaborative project by Mariam Ghani & Chitra Ganesh whose goal is to is to create alternative systems for collecting stories from the immigrants whose lives as individuals are lost in the abstractions of legalities and headlines, and to develop from those stories new terms and languages through which the issues of the immigration debate can be framed. A Warm Database is the web-based phase of this project, and serves three purposes: as an annotated guide for the uninitiated to and through the mountains of documents that surround detention, deportation and immigrants' rights; as a resource for and call to action; and as the starting point of a data collection project designed to span multiple communities and languages. The Warm Database that is presented in this first version of the project is an interface for the further visualization and presentation of the data that we will collect and translate after the project's launch, as we've done in the examples of the small set of responses collected already.
How Do You See the Disappeared? A Warm Database was conceived and designed by Mariam Ghani, produced in collaboration with Rob Durbin, Ed Potter and Chitra Ganesh, and is a 2004 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Work on the project was also supported by residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Eyebeam Atelier, and the MFA Computer Arts Department of the School of Visual Arts.
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