Response 12

A strategy from Ricardo Dominguez’s piece that interested me was overloading websites. In the article, forty five women and children were killed by the Mexican military in an event called the Acteal Massacre. This influenced Dominguez’s decision to take action against the government in some way. After receiving several e-mails, Dominguez decided he and his group can take it to the Mexican government by overloading their website. This was done by refreshing and reloading a government page on multiple browsers for an hour. This ultimately created a disturbance and caused the site to crash. It became impossible for individuals to access the website, Dominguez considered this a victory.

A creative detournement from Raul Alonzo’s article that interested me is that of a mural or “Collective recollection” (Alonzo) depicting the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) victims from Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi. In this event, SCAF, agroup of twenty one unelected military officials, attacked protested who were sitting-in for those that were killed from a recent uprising. Over forty were killed, some were shot, while others coughed up blood and collapsed from the large amount of tear gas that was thrown. SCAF also had sniper units, these units targeted the eyes of unsuspecting protesters with rubber bullets as a means to blind them. One mural in particular conveyed this as several individuals were shown to have their eyes covered with eye patches.

A creative detournement from Raley’s article “Border Hacks” that interested me is Rafael Fajardo game named Crosser. Crosser is one of the many “games with an agenda” (Raley) as it revolved around the U.S Mexico border. It’s game play was inspired by the classic video game Frogger as the goal was to reach the end of the screen. The end of the screen of course, was over the border. Similar to Frogger, the only way to get to the end was to avoid obstacles and cross a river. However instead of just avoiding cars, the player must avoid helicopters, border patrols, and various objects in the river, such as dead bodies. I consider this detournement to be my favorite of the three as I am a fan of video games and I haven’t seen many games that were used to send a message such as this one. It’s message was also very obvious compared to others as anyone would understand it within minutes or even seconds of playing. It’s this reason and it’s addicting game play (since it’s based off Frogger) that I believe it was successful in sending its message.