Fascinating project from MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media: Between the Bars, a “blogging system that makes it easy to blog on paper, using standard postal mail. It consists of software tools to make it easy to upload PDF scans of letters, crowd-sourced transcriptions of the scanned images, and the usual full-featured blogging tools including comments, tagging, RSS feeds, and notifications for friends and family when new posts are available… We are designing this system for prisoners in the US, a growing population that is routinely denied access to broadcast media. We hope that prisoners will be able to use this platform to tell their stories, to maintain social connections to the outside world, and to retain a sense of identity and humanity through the process of their incarceration.” (via.)
The Moment takes a look at DC’s Prison Art Gallery. Proceeds benefit victim support groups, justice advocacy and sometimes the prison and/or prisoner, “There is, predictably, a preponderance of oversexualized female figures (read: mudflap babe caricatures), outlaw heroes (Tupac and Willie Nelson, anyone?) and religious icons (Mary and her offspring in every racial flavor), but there are also gems to be found.” Sometimes paintings are made without proper art supplies. Dennis Sabin, who runs the gallery, says, “They’ll use dental floss, M&M’s, spinach, coffee grounds.”
Subtopia enthusiastically writes about Amnesty International’s Counter Terrorism With Justice campaign — a scaled replica of a Guantanamo Bay maximum security isolation cell traveling the country. Visitors are encouraged to experience isolation and share their thoughts in video (Flickr set.) Great post on the “symbolic implication of the replica cell itself, as if it were a mobile unit of detention being put on real display at a trade show or something, selling its exportability, strapped down on the back of some shipping vehicle as simply as any old box of trade goods, or a prefab architecture kit.” Amnesty has done such a great job using public space to deliver their message. This follows their famous (and best campaign) using transparent billboards as an example of to effectively get the message out to a mass audience.
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