Artist Nathan Witt's Project Critiques Israeli Telecommunications Restrictions in Palestine

Nathan Witt's project, published on ARTMargins Online on February 5, 2017, investigates Israeli-imposed telecommunications limitations on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. It highlights disparities such as illegal Israeli settlers accessing 3/4G networks while Palestinians are restricted to 2G, and constraints on mast locations and heights. These technological barriers facilitate surveillance and arrests, with Palestinians targeted for alleged social media offenses like incitement on Facebook or Twitter. Witt's work, created during a period of forced abstinence from social media due to paranoia while operating between Lebanon and Israel, employs a manual approach using JPEG metadata extracted via a desktop application to create a pin-dropped album alternative. The project resists visual culture, drawing from 1960s conceptual text-based artists, letterism, and Situationists, and aims to present raw data minimally rather than rely on imagery. Witt's experience as a first-time visitor to Palestine underscored the paranoia of monitoring and information control. The article is available through MIT Press under a subscription-only model.