Walkthrough Gitmo: the de-restricted fortress
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These are images from a project which seeks to map the world's secret military landscapes. Zone Interdite is a collaboration between Matthias Jud and Christoph Wachter, who have gathered tons of maps, photographs, and other documentation over the course of years, to piece together a an interactive cartography of roughly 1,200 global restricted areas. The site features a searchable database that cross-indexes these spaces according to country and the type of armed forces which occupy them.
These particular images are of a virtual walkthrough of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba.
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What's even more compelling, though, is that the site encourages users to add their own "restricted areas" to the map, inviting a democratic orgy of cryptogeographers, researchers, and model-makers to help build a complete networked walkthrough of all the actual spaces we -- as citizens of the world -- cannot go. I love the idea of revealing these off-limit places this way, in a sense, de-restricting them in the process of remaking them. Altogether, rendering a de-restricted global fortress.
What starts off as a few models of detention centers and prison camps could eventually turn into a full on game-world atlas of forbidden cities; a Borgesian labyrinth of illegal walkthroughs and blatantly trespassed border-zones, subverted checkpoints, oblique tunnel architecture, web tourists lost in the intersecting planes of bunker complexity and secret baseworld archipelago urbanism. It becomes a backlash taxonomy of exposed military installations. A virtual military-industrial-complex: "clandestinatopia." Border fences and security walls give way now to a deterritorialized map of exploratory landscapes, overrun by mad gamers and tribes of sim-squatters preserving the world's most closed and hidden places as endlessly wandering open space. Like a Subtopian involuntary park online, or a virtual spelunker's paradise.
So, yeah, I hope to see you there.
(via)
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