Toward a Geopoetical Rhetoric: The Transborder Immigrant Tool and Material Tactics

Abstract

This chapter examines the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a tactical media art project designed to provide safe travel through the desert around the US–Mexico border, which is at once explicitly rhetorical, in that it aims to do public political work, and explicitly aesthetic, in that its makers are invested in the practice of art-making as means of invention. The chapter builds on contemporary material theories of rhetoric by analyzing how the Tool intensifies, reassembles, and redistributes the border and thereby extends the notions of rhetorical “ecology” and rhetorical “ambience,” sharpening the utility of these concepts for explicitly political rhetorical invention. The chapter ends by returning to the zone of interference between art and rhetoric in which the Transborder Tool operates, via the concept of geopoetics.