BIASMAP is a crowd-sourced experiment that locates perceptions of bias and prejudice in time and space. Like the cholera maps of John Snow, BIASMAP visualizes expressions of prejudice in an attempt to draw out the spurious relationships and often hidden mechanisms of how irrational prejudice against the Other is transmitted, validated and institutionalized. By crowdsourcing perceptions, BIASMAP creates an atlas of qualitative data on the subject of prejudice, which can serve as a point of departure and inspiration for creative interventions and questions we may never have known to ask. Snow’s cholera maps did not just locate the origin of disease in a well, but the question which led to the discovery of microbes. The maps revealed something invisible to the naked eye. BIASMAP is a question, an open investigation into finding the spurious and invisible ways in which bias and prejudice spread.

Pitting culture and cultivation against civilization and its privatization of the commons, the Guerrilla Grafters graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees on city streets. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. A web application helps grafters to find graftable trees, track how grafts are doing, and help facilitate the gleaning of fruit. The project proves that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up and aims to turn city streets into food forests. Neighbors take other trees as stewards and inscribe (gr. Graphos) the city with fruit-bearing graffiti.

A refugee camp is visible from behind the fence, but not accessible from the street; the entry is barred. Similar to a display in an anthropological exhibit, a map was mounted on the two fences separating the lot from the street access. Text on the map communicated the perceptions of the Bosnian war and general (military) philosophy. The participant was led from the physical representation of a refugee camp, its function as a temporary shelter and settlement, to the camp as a plan for the war itself. The text cites the number of refugees worldwide to date, as well as the number specifically displaced in Bosnia. Other texts comment on ethnic propaganda, UNPROF, humanitarian aid, cultural survival and other issues about the war.

With recent legislation such as Proposition 187, immigrants, refugees and illegal aliens were certainly impacting the city’s political and economic landscape. We wished to draw attention to the fact that most people find themselves in these various categories due to forces beyond their control. They deserve respect, understanding and legal protection. A voicemail system accompanied the exhibit and featured personal interviews with refugees from Bosnia in the United States. This aimed to connect the abstract concepts of the map with individual identities on the phone. In addition to the interviews, the voice mail system listed resources for direct aid for those displaced by the war.

Mounted on a red wall are photos of “lead flowers.” The number of homicides reported in the city (of the exhibition) determined the number of photographs on the wall. Accompanying literature informed the viewer that the lead flowers in the photographs are of enlarged Starfire hollow-point bullets. Fired through gelatin, to simulate penetration of the human body, the bullets had bloomed into lead flowers. Each flower photograph represented one of the many casualties this year. Flattened, expanded and recontextualized as traditional flower photography, the Starfire hollow-point bullets became a symbol of both moratorium and horror. A plaque on the wall reads “To date there have been ___ homicides in this city.” The number in the blank changed throughout the duration of the exhibition. Bouquet was a memorial to the unknown dead of our streets.

Your Value or You Are Value is a financial-based reflection of the visitor’s life choices. Inspired by the insurance industry’s valuation of human life by calculating the projected economic loss to the families of the World Trade Center tragedy in 2001, urvalue examines how we see ourselves and others in terms of economic value rather than humanity. The site allows visitors to assess their own value using insurance company valuation tables and asks visitors to assess their daily activities in terms of financial costs and benefits and return on investment.