Trabalhos / Artworks

You Are Not Here

2007
by Mushon Zer-Aviv and Laila El-Haddad

You Are Not Here (.org) is a platform for urban tourism mash-ups. It invites participants to become meta-tourists on simultaneous excursions through multiple cities. 
By holding a two-sided map to the light, meta-tourists can find their way through Gaza walking the streets of Tel-Aviv. They locate the You Are Not Here signs in the street indicating they have arrived at an important tourist destination in Gaza City and providing the telephone number for The Tourist Hotline. Calling the number and entering the site-specific access code provides the meta-tourists with a guided audio tour of that destination by Gaza resident and blogger, Laila El-Haddad.
Laila will show you around her city and uncover the mysteries of the ancient baths, Souk al-Zawya and The Great Omari Mosque. Walk through the Park of the Unknown Soldier, visit the PLO Flag Shop, the Saraya Prison and Kathem’s ice cream parlor.
You Are Not Here attempts to expose the contrasts and similarities between two cities. Gaza City and Tel Aviv are politically involved while emotionally and socially detached from one another. The cultural tendencies within Israel have resulted in the public denying their roles as the occupiers and a disengagement from responsibility to the occupied. You Are Not Here hopes to challenge this detachment and re-engage individuals by providing a mediated, one-to-one, human-scale experience.

Bio:
Laila El-Haddad is a Palestinian freelance journalist, writer, blogger, and media activist based between Gaza and the United States. El-Haddad is the author of the upcoming book Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between (Just World Publishing) and co-author of The Gaza Kitchen. She writes principally for the al-Jazeera English website and the Guardian Unlimited.

She blogs at gazamom.com

Mushon Zer-Aviv is a designer, an educator and a media activist from Tel-Aviv, based in NY. In his creative research he focuses on the perception of territory and borders and the way they are shaped through politics, culture, networks and the World Wide Web. He is the co-founder of Shual.com – a foxy design studio; ShiftSpace.org – an open source layer above any website; YouAreNotHere.org – a tour of Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv; Kriegspiel – a computer game version of the Situationist Game of War; the Collaborative-Futures.org collaboratively authored book; and the Tel Aviv node of the Upgrade international network. Mushon is an honorary resident at Eyebeam. He teaches new media research and design at NYU and at Parsons.

He blogs at Mushon.com