Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper explores the interplay between aesthetics and ethics by analyzing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s large-scale interactive installation, Border Tuner (2019). The work invites the public to communicate with each other at six stations along the US-Mexico border, creating “bridges of voice and light” across the border wall. The dialogues among the participants enable new connections between the two cities, El Paso, Texas, U.S., and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Additionally, they highlight the pre-existing, complex relationships of the border residents that challenge the misleading rhetoric surrounding the border that has been perpetuated by the Trump administration and the mainstream media. In this context, the article focuses on the participants’ collective voice and characterizes their experience as “becoming a people yet to come.” The experience can be understood as the emergence of a new mode of collective subjectivity exercised through each participant’s power to act. In producing this creative and processual subjectivity, the different domains of aesthetics and ethics are interwoven through the participants’ choice of a new mode of existence and their performative expression concerning social and political issues. Furthermore, this article investigates time as the condition for ontological change and becoming, functioning as a theoretical foundation for the aesthetic experience of “becoming a people to come” through the production of subjectivity.