Guantanamo Bay

I never cease to be amazed by what the Internet has to offer. The last incredible site I've visited is Zone Interdite, that gives information including location and details about all the Restricted Areas in the world, mainly military facilities. The most media friendly of them all is of course Guantanamo Bay. This prison camp has been causing uproar in the international community, let's say the US doesn´t have a great record as far as human rights are concerned. At Zone Interdite, we can visit the Naval Base of Guantanamo in a painfully realistic way. The 3D maps are amazing and will make you think what right a country has of maintaining such facilities around the world. Will the US be willing to be considered a rogue nation, an outlaw of international conventions? Zone Interdite, what a great site!

Here's what they have to say for themselves:

About Zone*Interdite
cw, 31 Dec 2005

Starting with the artistic ambition of gaining our own picture of the world, we discovered certain blackouts - maskings of our perceptions. When observing military restricted areas, our attention got blurred.

Currently, the public’s interest is focused on new weapons and successful military conquests, Abu Ghraib and the present CIA-scandal. But criticism always becomes a negative catchphrase. The military world is hidden from civil society by fences and prohibitive signs; their real existence is a taboo. Nevertheless, we are still able to discover remarkable things in our immediate vicinity, such as CIA airplanes on the airfield in Zurich-Kloten or atomic warheads directly behind Kaiserslautern in Rhineland-Palatinate. This may seem paranoid, but “paranoid” is exactly the term that describes such blackouts. Why shouldn’t we continously think about what is happening in front of our very eyes?

In precepts, patriotism, civic duty, security and threat scenarios, national tradition etc. “Governmentality” takes place. This again leads us to the art project: “Governmentality” acts directly on our perception. That’s why it is essential to recapture the military world, in order that ones own experience, individual consideration and reflection becomes possible. Instead of subordinating to a ‘higher power’, we could explore individually the limitations of our personal world and the margins of our concept of reality leading to our very own horizon of imagination. Restricted areas equal those “Zone de Non-Penser” with which we could sharpen our perception — not only to experience the world more consistently but also ourselves.

“Zone*Interdite” reconstructs the terrain which our reflection has been deprived of on two different “LEVELs”:

LEVEL_01 shows the Internet project www.zone-interdite.net
The test arrangement serves as a starting point for individual exploratory tours and as a collection point for ones own findings. In a combination of search engine and atlas, many sources result in a global military overview that overrides nation states and power blocks.

LEVEL_02 reconstructs particular areas as artificial virtual 3D worlds. A PC-version is freely downloadable on www.zone-interdite.net/level_02/ and can be personally explored as a virtual walkthrough on ones own Computer. Presently, Guantanamo Bay with its prison camps as well as an Islamic training camp in Sudan are downloadable.

The power of the project lies in the disarming and lapidary view of a world of military power. Individual imagination and the joy of discovering occurs, i.e. spotting, replacing the patriotic and pacifistic duty of a knee-jerk avowal, and undermining censorship, as well as the restriction of perception.

These virtual tours enable expeditions to take place on a terrain where sovereignty no longer belongs to the national state but to each human being. Therefore, “Dispositif of Power” (power relations) can be detected right to the base of our self-imagination. By experiencing that self-censorship and heteronomy interfere with our own perception, we gain the possibility to realize what freedom and self-determination could be.