Diego Zacks
Political tech art projects from designer originally from Venezuela which both narrate, document and empower the unrest in his home country.
Invisible Protest
This project collects images coming from Venezuela and displays them in real size in a different physical context. These images bridge the geographical gap that separates Venezuela and NYC to pose the question “What if this happened in your country? Would it matter then?”.
SOS.Venezuela
Peaceful student protests in Venezuela are met with violence and abuse by military and police forces. I modified a wireless router to create a small and localized darknet called SOS.Venezuela. This platform served as a portable, self-sustaining network that could help activists communicate during an internet blackout. It is meant for reporting crimes, cases of abuse and to document the events taking place.
I shipped the platform to Venezuela to be deployed at several rallies. Once it was running, the images started pouring in. Within 4 days we had collected over 500 images and identified over 40 crimes.
Murder Machine
In 2012 there were 21,692 violent deaths in Venezuela. In 2013 that number was 24,763, and this year that number is expected to rise beyond 27,000. That is almost 0.1% of the entire population of the country and one murder every 20 minutes.
The Murder Machine is an experimental infographic depicting the frequency of murders in the country. The machine creates a real-time feed of hypothetical murder reports. It combines pieces taken from real Venezuelan news reports, deconstructs and reassembles them to create new headlines every twenty minutes.
More can be found at Diego’s website here