Conceptual trailer of the project.
THE NEW COLOSSUS
*2019 Amendment
2025 AI PROCEDURAL SOFTWAREART
In 2019, Ken Cuccinelli, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), suggested a new addition to the "The New Colossus" sonnet, inscribed in a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. He proposed (in italics):
"Give me your tired, your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge."
For Cuccinelli, the original text referred mostly to European immigrants. The correction represented a symbolic gesture that ultimately announced a severe anti-immigration agenda and the family separation policy that we witnessed from 2019-2021 in the US. As a consequence, detention facilities multiplied. In addition, 91% of detained individuals were assigned to for-profit detention centers controlled by corporations. There are currently 92 detention centers in the US.
As the adoption of AI techniques increases at the government level, it is not hard to imagine the role that machines and algorithms will play during the design and day-to-day administration of such facilities. This is the starting point of "The New Colossus * 2019 Amendment", a generative art project that proposes speculative architectural plans for such facilities, which are usually not publicly available.
After the result of the US 2024 presidential elections and the increasing support of the Latino vote for the conservative party, I decided to add a new layer to the project. A deportation machine simulation generates an infinite amount of immigrant profiles and sets a fixed removal date. While the system is fictional, it has been modeled using real data and population weights to generate a close model of our current reality. Three main immigrant groups are featured on the project: Latino, Asian, and Indian Americans.
The project is currently in the development phase and will premiere in 2025.
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Main project’s interface.
An additional application generates infinite plans of speculative retention facilities. In the images above, various iterations of the architectural plans.
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