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Blog > Tech Tuesday > DLP vs LCD projector tech: pros and cons
DLP vs LCD projector tech: pros and cons
Projectors are awesome. You get an ultra-huge screen for a reasonably low price. But there are two key technologies projectors use to create an image: DLP and LCD.. But what's the best?
First, the abbreviations:
• DLP, or digital light processing, uses tiny mirrors to reflect light towards or away from the screen. And most models use a colour wheel, a spinning wheel with colour filters, to create sequential colour. Some high-end models use three DLP chips; one each for red, green, and blue.
• LCD stands for liquid crystal display, is very similar to the technology found in most TVs. LCD projectors use three liquid crystal panels, each tasked with creating an image using one of the primary colours. All three are projected on the screen at once, so you see a full-colour image.
Each technology has positives and negatives, and there are good and bad projectors that use each technology. But what should you look for when choosing a projector?
Contrast ratio is the most important aspect of picture quality. It is the primary determinant for how realistic an image looks. Contrast ratios of LCDs have come a long way, and some offer excellent picture quality, with DLP technology falling behind.
Most projectors have an auto iris, which closes to dim the image on dark scenes, and remains open to keep bright scenes bright. Though you might sometimes notice the opening and closing, but you can turn the auto iris off if you don't like the effect.
A projector's black level refers to the darkness of the black it can reflect. Not every black is the same. With this in mind, getting better black level performance out of your projector means that you are making it easier to see details in dark areas of projected images. This is especially important when you are projecting video, as opposed to slides, which typically have brighter colours and high levels of contrast.
Light output (brightness)
Light output varies a lot, so to be honest, all projector types are 'adequate' in this regard, it's the brand and model that differs.
Colour accuracy varies a lot. We've used many projectors with accurate colour from all technologies; our advice is to check reviews to see if the model you're considering performs well in this regard.
Motion blur, or the softening of a moving image, is a problem with LCD displays. Some people aren't bothered by it, but others notice it. Side-by-side, a DLP projector will look sharper and more detailed during fast motion than an LCD projector. But, this is not enough to offset the DLPs poor contrast ratio performance.
Have you noticed it before? Bright objects (in particular on a dark background) appear to have trails of multicoloured light. Three-chip projectors, like LCD and high-end DLP models, don't create rainbows. But single-chip DLP projectors, however, create an image using sequential colour, i.e., in any given fraction of a second, there's just one colour on the screen. This is done so fast that your brain combines it into a full-color image (mostly). Some people are susceptible to 'rainbows', and their brains registers the sequential colour especially when you move your eyes rapidly around the screen or bright objects are moving on a dark background.
If rainbows bother you, don't buy a DLP projector. With faster colour wheels, and the shift to LED and laser light sources, rainbows are much less apparent than they used to be, or if the budget allows splash out on a three-chip DLP projectors.
The chips that create an image in a projector are minuscule, and even tiny variations in the position of each chip can be visible on the screen. These can look like coloured edges to white objects or, worst case, softness. Most three-chip projectors come with convergence adjustments, but these can't always eliminate convergence errors. Worse, it's hard to tell from reviews if a projector has good or bad convergence, as it varies on a unit-by-unit level. On the other hand, single-chip DLP projectors, don't have convergence problems because there's nothing to converge.
So that's it. But what is most important, is what is giving whoever is viewing your projected content, the experience. So weigh up the pros and cons and pick the best projector type and make/model for your budget.
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The first impression you get from the Jayco IV 28-5 is that it's a serious motorhome. Its large Luton over the cab, aluminium bull bars, long awning, and high ground clearance suggest it's a workhorse, not a show pony.
Dressed up with striking graphics and gleaming chrome wheel covers, the power of the beast still shines through. The base vehicle, an Iveco Daily, contributes to this impression.
There are seven separate models in the Conquest range, the IV 28-5 being the largest and the only one built on an Iveco. With a three-litre turbo diesel motor driving the rear wheels (duals) through an eight-speed Hi-Matic automatic gearbox, it is a joy to drive.
The smooth and precise gearshifts are barely perceptible. There is no comparison between this gearbox and the AMT transmission in previous models. They are like chalk and cheese.
Another noticeable difference between this and other motorhomes is the number of external hatches. There are 13 in total—six kerbside and seven driver's side. Three on the kerbside are already spoken for: a drop-down table, a slide out barbecue, and an outdoor TV mount. At the driver's side, four are in use: a twin 9kg LPG bottle locker, a generator fuel tank compartment, a Cummins Onan RVQG3600 generator locker, and a home for the toilet cassette. That leaves six for the owner's toys and equipment.
Getting in, it's a long way up and down, so the electrically operated foldout steps and strategically placed grab handle come in handy.
A separate screen door inside the entry door keeps flies and mosquitos at bay when the main door is left open. Just in case, there is a fire extinguisher beside the entrance.
To the left is the cab and to the right, the kitchen bench with the dinette opposite. The bedroom is between the dinette and bathroom across the rear of the vehicle. The dinette and double bed are part of the slide-out section.
Slide-outs create a lot of extra room; perfect for living aboard for long periods of time. This is certainly the case in the IV 28-5. Two-thirds of the sidewall, the dinette, and the double bed slide out over 600mm, create a 1200mm wide walkway between the dinette and the kitchen bench.
The decor is conservative, with subdued earth tones. All cabinetry surfaces are smooth and easy to clean, with timber grain laminates, except the bench tops and table tops, which have textured surfaces. Designed for Australian conditions, all the windows and the two large roof hatches have insect screens and blinds and there is a ceiling mounted air-conditioning unit as well.
The kitchen fixtures and fittings tend to be on the large size; almost residential you might say. The kitchen bench is a shade over 1800mm long and although it has a 3+1 hob cooktop and a sink with draining tray inset into it, there is still ample space for food preparation. Three large drawers, three narrow cupboards (one a slide-out bottle rack) below the bench, and two large laminate lined cupboards (rather than overhead lockers) above the bench mean all the essentials can be stored close at hand.
There is a separate tap for filtered drinking water. Above the hobs is an extractor fan and above that is a microwave. Both these appliances can be used when off-grid because the Cummins Onan RVQG3600 genset is ready and waiting to supply the necessary 230-volt power.
There are also 230-volt power points above the bench should you want to run the toaster or electric jug.
Dinettes are a pretty standard feature in most Australian RVs. Because the dinette floor is part of the slide-out section, it is higher than the kitchen floor, so the diners are almost at eye level with someone standing at the kitchen bench.
Often dinettes are cramped, upright, and not suited to long-term occupancy. This one has an upholstery-style reminiscent of milk bar alcove seating from days past, with leather panels of taupe and contrasting dark chocolate borders. Long enough for a good leg stretch and wide enough for two each side with room to spare, this dinette is more comfortable than most. Fitted with seat belts, the forward facing seats can also serve as passenger seats.
These are spread out around the interior. The solar regulator, in a cupboard over the hob, and the 230-volt circuit breaker panel, in a cupboard over the sink, are easy to get at. But the Setec electrical management box and the 12-volt fuse panel along with the water heater control panel are more out of the way, in a locker under the fridge.
Those planning to live aboard in their motorhome for extended periods appreciate the need for storage space and the Jayco IV 28-5 has plenty to offer. The dinette has drawers at the end of each seat with more storage available under the seat cushions and in the lockers above the dinette.
In no man's land between the kitchen and bedroom is a hanging locker with two drawers below that could be used by either department.
The bedroom offers more storage options. Opposite the foot of the bed is a sideboard cabinet containing four cupboards with two lockers above. Of course, there's the hanging locker, drawers, and cupboard next to kitchen bench if the cook hasn't already snaffled them.
Over the bedhead are a couple more lockers with a hanging locker and a couple more drawers each side of the bed. Should you need more, the mattress lifts (gas strut-assisted) allowing access to the large space below. Even the bathroom gets in on the act. Towels and bathroom equipment should find a home in the drawers and cupboards in the vanity unit, while the medicine cabinet beside the mirror is large enough to cope quite easily with toiletries and other personal items.
The bed is 1450mm wide and runs across (east–west) the vehicle. A 200mm section of the mattress at the head of the bed (the bolster) can be lifted out and stored under the pillows allowing the head of the bed to be moved closer to the side wall. With the bolster lifted in this way, there is more room around the foot of the bed. Reverse the process at bedtime to recreate the full-length bed—an inner sprung mattress over sprung wooden slats; very comfortable.
Big enough for two people to pass one another without colliding, this bathroom is larger than those usually found in an RV; an important consideration for those living aboard long-term. A Thetford swivel bowl toilet sits below the window, next to the washing machine cabinet. The machine is an optional extra. Opposite is a one-piece moulded 740x640mm shower cubicle that, being one piece, should not leak. Otherwise, it is quite plain with an extractor fan hatch in the ceiling, a soap tray moulded into the cubicle wall, and a clear, side hinged, one-piece door.
Lighting is good with two ceiling lights plus three spotlights over the mirror. Finishing touches include two 230-volt power points, a rail to hang a towel and holders for the toilet roll and a glass tumbler. A solid sliding door provides privacy from the rest of the motorhome.
The Jayco IV 28-5 is spacious, well-appointed, and set up for long-term occupancy. It has lots of storage, inside and out. The large capacity genset makes the Jayco IV 28-5 ideal for life 'off the grid' long-term freedom camping. With its smooth automatic gearbox, it is a joy to drive, especially considering it is a Class 2 large vehicle. Although it is 'truck' size, it is more like a car to drive. If only it had a bigger TV.
For more information, contact South Auckland Caravan on 09 271 3434 or caravancentre@xtra.co.nz.


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Subject: Anthropology, Area Studies, Arts & Humanities, Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Ethics, History, Humanities, Multidisciplinary, International Relations, Law, Literature, Philosophy, Planning & Development, Political Science, Social Sciences, Philosophy & Law, Sociology, Theatre, Urban Studies, Women's Studies
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VOLUME 18 , ISSUE 2 (Apr 2019) > List of articles
Transgressing borders with participatory video technologies: Reflections on creative knowledge production with asylum seekers in Australia
Michele Lobo / Kaya Barry
Keywords : Darwin, knowledge, video, borders, refugees
Citation Information : Borderlands journal. Volume 18, Issue 2, Pages 8-36, DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2019-009
License : (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Published Online: 17-April-2020
EXTRA FILES
In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to disrupt bordering technologies that dehumanise asylum seekers? We focus on videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. As researchers, we use experimental editing techniques to make these transgressions visible in a society with a white majority culture. We argue, however, that these video techniques often work to privilege our creative agency as researchers, even though the aim is to illuminate different temporalities and visualities of the global refugee crisis. This article problematises this agency and attends to ethical dilemmas by revisiting the juxtapositions, montages, fades, distortions and vortexes we use to centre asylum seeker lives. These visual techniques are an attempt to respond to xenophobic nationalism and racially discriminatory immigration policies through forms of digital activism that transgress standard 'borders' of representation and the self/other borders of public debates. In our demand for social and cultural justice, we are inspired by work that uses the affordances of digital technologies to dismantle the rigidity of sovereign borders.
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Media representations of the 'global refugee crisis' often rely on a universalised aesthetic of 'waves', 'flows', 'surges' and dangerous border crossings that focus on the EU and US/Mexico (Bleiker et al 2013; Pallister-Wilkins 2019). Within this 'global' representation, the everyday experiences of those seeking refuge in Australia are rendered invisible by racially discriminatory immigration policies that criminalise those who arrive by boat. These institutional practices dehumanise individuals and censor the public's engagement with asylum seekers, through physical borders at onshore and offshore detention centres. These borders solidify when the media circulates pervasive toxic atmospheres of xenophobic nationalism that fix those seeking asylum as illegals and potential terrorists. Given the emergence of these carceral sites that fuel despair, fear and anxiety, this article highlights the role that city spaces play in dismantling physical and metaphorical borders. We argue that public spaces such as parks, beaches, football ovals, and exchanges that occur across the fences and borders of mandatory detention centres produce sparks of hope that can be creatively captured and used to create new messages of conviviality, care, welcome and responsibility. In this article we develop conceptual and empirical insights on bordering that respond to the call for critical thought and interventions that can expand the realm of the political and undo neat segregations of carceral and non-carceral spaces (Gill et al 2018; Lea 2014; Mountz 2011; Mountz 2017).
This article focuses on creative collaborations with people of asylum seeker and refugee background in Darwin, northern Australia, who used videos and photographs to express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. We argue that the experimental and collaborative process of editing these videos of public spaces taken by racialised, vulnerable bodies, presents ethical challenges even though our aim is to adopt a visual and aesthetic gaze that opens up different perspectives, temporalities and visualities of bordering. These challenges relate to the framing of creative knowledge produced, and our artistic licence that regulates decisions about what footage should be included, and what should be edited out. In attending to minor, mundane, and perhaps unappealing shots of everyday actions that do not fit with the overall visual aesthetic that the final film or video artwork was working towards, we consider whether we unintentionally also transformed the narrative being told by putting up new barriers and borders.
These challenges that highlight ethical considerations when conducting participatory creative research are just emerging in scholarship within geography, mobilities, and migration studies (Barry 2019; Barry & Keane 2019; Basnet et al 2018; Boyd & Edwardes 2019; Castro et al 2016; Lobo forthcoming 2020; Lobo 2019; Longhurst et al 2008; Myers 2011; Rose & Bingley 2017; Tolia-Kelly 2008). Feminist and cultural geographers, in particular, continue to draw attention to the potentialities as well as the risks of collaborative knowledge scholarship with marginalised, vulnerable and racialised communities (Askins & Blazek 2017; Askins & Pain 2011; Basnet et al 2018; Darling 2011; Fincher et al 2019). The ethical dilemmas are addressed, to some extent, through academic reflexivity in the research process. Askins and Blazek (2017), however, argue that such reflexivity is often a practice of individual introspection and is less attentive to emotion, affect and embodied experiences. Their research calls for 'caring with' projects in the neoliberal academy through a political stance that is 'embodied, emotional and thoughtful' (Askins & Blazek, p. 1086, p. 1103). This approach resonates with the broader feminist literature on carceral spaces that centres the politics of the body (Mountz 2017). In this article, we build on this research by presenting collaborative creative interventions with asylum seekers as performances of 'caring-with' that transgress imbricated global and local bordering technologies.
We are inspired by the creative work of artists who use the material things of migration or digital/photographic media of risky journeys to embody the 'cry' for empathy and cultural justice. While there are numerous examples of participatory research with refugee and asylum seeker communities that embrace storytelling and more traditional forms of creativity in writing, music, and fine arts, our exploration in this article is to show the complications and ethical dilemmas when using experimental forms of creative practice. Specifically, our exploration focuses on a series of experimental video artworks that embrace creative techniques to follow the sensory attunements and push beyond representational forms. The polyvocal, multi-sensory and more-than-representational aspects of the creative work is powerful and enable us to think anew about how our digital practices might create new knowledge that momentarily dissolves brutal hierarchies in 'fortress' nations with white majority cultures such as Australia—self/other, white/non-white, citizen/stranger, life/non-life, human/nonhuman, material/symbolic, as well as land/sea. We follow Mignolo and Walsh (2018, p. 109) in using the '/' to refer to a complex concept that is both divided (a dyad) as well as united or connected.
The article unfolds in three sections. First, we survey literature and recent innovations in participatory and creative modes of engaging with people of migrant, refugee and asylum seeker background to highlight the issues and ethical dilemmas of academic collaborations. Second, we give context to the experimental project that enabled us to engage with these new settlers in Darwin, a small tropical city in northern Australia. We explore the process of collaborative editing that we (Michele and Kaya) engaged in as a mature-aged female migrant Australian of Indian heritage and an Australian-born white female. We engage in this learning process to shift rigid self/other, disciplinary and methodological borders that fix ways of seeing asylum seekers. Fincher et al (2019, p. 12) remind us that such learning is often a process of 'lengthy negotiations' across differences that calls for trust, flexibility and openness. In this collaborative learning process, we learn from asylum seekers as well as each other. As the discussion of our artistic editing style unfolds, we conclude with a discussion of the swirling vortex, a concept from the natural sciences that pushes us beyond ocular sensibilities and attempts to translate affective registers of turbulence that are central to asylum seeker lives.
Transgressing borders using creative participatory methods
Creative methods, such as participatory photography and video provide the opportunity for urban citizens of migrant, refugee and asylum seeker background to frame and position their own narratives and perspectives of everyday life in the city. These perspectives are necessary in the Australian context given a universalised aesthetic framed by media coverage and reporting on the European migration crisis in 2015-2016 that racialises and dehumanises asylum seeker bodies, but has cumulated into a global leitmotif of the refugee experience (Bleiker et al 2013; Burrell & Hörschelmann 2018; Pallister-Wilkins 2019). By positioning newcomers to Australia as urban citizens we intervene in these debates that focus on refugees and asylum seekers as people with no rights to dignity in a new country. More specifically, we are interested in how participatory methods seek to challenge dominant stereotypes and aesthetics of migration. These types of visuals and aesthetics, we argue, have facilitated the metaphorical borders in public debates, which in turn reinforce the very real physical borders of Australia's hard-line and inhumane detention processes.
Using methods that move beyond textual description, as Caroline Scarles describes, can allow a 'bridge that connects researcher's and respondent's experiences' (2010, p. 912) in unexpected ways. These creative modes of engaging, cut through language barriers to open perspectives and platforms that activate ways of seeing the city that highlight the lives of asylum seekers. There has been a plethora of innovative and powerful studies in the past few years that have mixed modes of participation through visual, multi-sensory, embodied, performative, and affective reflections on migration experiences (Basnet et al 2018; Frazier 2019; Lenette 2019; O'Neill 2018; Ní Laoire 2016). Basnet et al (2018, p. 12) argue that these experimental approaches that incorporate the unplanned and unexpected in the research process provide fresh insights into collaborative research with vulnerable participants; the risk, however, is the temptation to '"tidy up" the messiness of our own, and our participants', lived experiences'.
The messiness of participatory methods fits within a long history of visual and non-textual methods used in geographical and social science research. The recent growth in research that has employed and facilitated participatory and video-based methods (for example, Frazier 2019; Lenette 2019; Ní Laoire 2016) is evidence of the ability for researchers to move beyond purely textual accounts and instead offer genuine modes of engagement and collaboration with participants. However, the use of participatory approaches that blur the lines between documentation (as ethnographic traditions) and the more creative and experimental practices (artworks or allowing participants more agency in the creation process) raises several ethical questions. This type of research necessitates further scrutiny of the agency of the researchers, the contributions of participants, and the representational and aesthetic decisions that are made when presenting or disseminating the outputs.
Insights from the creative arts are crucial in illuminating everyday struggles and the transgression of borders in ways that can seed critical thought and political action (Gomez-Barris 2017; 2018; Paparstergiadis & Trimboli 2019). Looking at examples from contemporary creative work, however, sheds further light on the types of aesthetic and ethical considerations that visual methods, in particular using video, may raise when engaging with, or reporting on, refugee and migrant experiences. Prominent artists and activists draw our attention to the ways that visual and video documentation traverse the role of artists (or researchers) as reporter and documenter of current situations, and the problems with agency and aesthetics used in re-presenting such material. For instance, the prominent artist Ai Weiwei's recent critically acclaimed art film, Human Flow (2018), is positioned, rather uneasily, as a merger between an artistic portrayal of refugee journeys and a documentary film. The film relies on a certain aesthetic built through 'prominent visual motifs that saturate the screen with colour' (Barry 2019, p. 211). The aesthetics that Ai Weiwei's art film and his body of work around the European refugee 'crisis' facilitate are stylistic devices—colours, textures, materials—that operate within an established aesthetic realm of creative practice and representation (Barry 2019; Tzanelli 2017). But it is this dual role of the artist that Ai Weiwei's film, and his larger body of works on the global refugee crisis, bring into question, raising issues about the agency of the artist as author, and the liberties and barriers that fall under what could be termed 'artistic license'. Reflecting on this, Ai Weiwei has said: 'I don't care what people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice' (2018, p. 88). At the same time, he advocates that: 'It is the duty of an artist to connect himself or herself to social change, to bear responsibility, to be part of the change' (Weiwei 2018, p. 89).
Ai Weiwei is an exiled person himself, but his prominent and profitable international arts career and personality means that any dialogue or creative process he contributes to the public arena quickly becomes subsumed into, and arguably emblematic of, the 'global' representations of migration. However, a recent exhibition Ai Weiwei had in Sydney, opened fierce public debate on the representations of refugee and asylum seekers here in Australia, and the national politics of 'offshoring' persons arriving via boats (see Albert 2018; Barry 2019; Davidson 2018). To this end, the merger of artistic, commentator, and political activist roles that Ai Weiwei's artworks bring to the surface, are potent explorations on how representation is still a critical and challenging issue on both local, national, and global terms.
There is a plethora of prominent work that traverses this uneasy line between artist, documenter, researcher and participant in Australia that seeds our critical thought and reflection on collaborations with asylum seekers. For example, the indigenous Australian artist Vernon Ah Kee's recent work The Island (2018), a three-channel video installation narrates the lived experiences of two refugees who struggle with incarceration in Australia's asylum seeker offshore detention centres. Ah Kee's 2010 video work, Tall Man, which brings together news footage, mobile phone video shot by community members, and video extracts from police officer's body cameras, depicts the story of the infamous Palm Island riots in Australia, in which a police station was set alight in response to a death in custody of a young indigenous person. Ah Kee's skilful crafting and editing of the footage collates and combines the various forms of recordings into a new narrative of the situation, in which the different viewpoints (of community members, the police officers involved, and the Australian media), are brought together to re-tell the story. 'The footage is raw, out-of-focus and jerky, signalling the chaotic confusion and profound urgency of the event' (McDowell 2018). Split across four large projections, the Tall Man artwork moves between chaotic, shaky video that is difficult to discern what is occurring, to moments of clarity in which community members give public talks and calls to action.
Unlike Ai Weiwei's smooth camera footage, long aerial shots, and slow pans of the landscape, Ah Kee's Tall Man and The Island bring together narratives of individuals through more experimental, confronting editing decisions in their depiction of events. While these two examples of artistic use of video, by Ai Weiwei and Vernon Ah Kee, both narrate specific instances of migration, what is of interest, in our study, is how they theoretically utilise video editing as a powerful representational tool to re-tell stories of refugee and migrant experiences. Through the merging of artistic agency, mixture of video materials and sources, and the choice of display and dissemination (for instance, as a documentary 'film' screened in cinemas, or a video artwork on display in a public gallery), the ethical decisions about what to include, which perspective to take, and how to, as a creative process re-tell and represent such instances, become the questions at hand.
What is missing, however, in these artworks is the capacity of exiled bodies of asylum seekers to lead and shape the process of video storytelling and performance. In Darwin, Michele had the opportunity to see an exhibition of these artworks at the 'Rights on Show', the annual Human Rights Art Award and Exhibition that includes entries from asylum seeker detainees who are unnamed. More recently, Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian incarcerated in Manus Island under Australia's offshore detention policy collaborated with Arash Kamali Sarvestani to produce a documentary film titled Chauka, please tell us the time (2017). The film clandestinely produced through videos taken by a mobile phone and shared by Whatsapp focus on dehumanisation and brutality symbolised by high security fences, but also the hope for freedom expressed through shots of beaches, birds and butterflies (Doherty, 2017). In 2018, Boochani collaborated with artist Hoda Afshar to create the video artwork Remain, which is a stylised performance recorded on the shores of Manus. The video merges narratives, song, and performance as Boochani and fellow asylum seekers depict their sensory experiences of waiting on the island, as they are seen moving through the dense vegetation and across the sandy beachfronts. Similar to Chauka, Remain merges self-directed video documentation, performance, and narratives into a creative depiction of their experiences.
At the Technologies of Bordering Conference in Melbourne, July 2019, we had the opportunity to see and listen to the creative writer and film-maker Behrouz Boochani (2018), following the publication of his award-winning autobiography No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison translated by Omid Tofiaghan. Another recent example is the exhibition at Counihan Gallery, Melbourne, titled Video Echoes: Waves from the Eastern Mediterranean curated by Victor Griss, where contemporary video artists from the region emphasised the 'political nature of images' (2019, p. 1) that travel, connect and transform us so that borders can be erased, played with and mocked for their absurdity. Such collaborative work inspires us when we revisit the videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who live in community detention on bridging visas. These visas were held by asylum seekers who had arrived by boat before 19 July 2013 and once lived in the carceral spaces of mandatory detention centres at Christmas Island, Airport Lodge and NIDC, Darwin. Community detention did not provide lawful status or the right to work but enabled them to reside in Australia temporarily while their claims for refugee status were processed (Parliament of Australia 2012).
Using digital technologies in Darwin
In this section we situate the city of Darwin and describe how we negotiated participation by asylum seekers who were living in community detention. This discussion is informed by the larger research project that focused on multi-sensory experiences of belonging and engaged approximately 200 participants who were Indigenous or of ethnic-minority background. We discuss the collaborative learning process of editing participant-led videos as a 'caring with' project that aimed to centre the lives of asylum seekers but raised ethical challenges. As an early career researcher and geographer, Michele engaged in a research project that focused on belonging in Darwin that aimed to highlight the experiences of racialised bodies of colour (including Indigenous peoples, ethnic-minority migrants, refugees and asylum seekers). She asked participants (including asylum seekers who are the focus of this article) to use a video camera in public spaces such as beaches, parks, bus stations, shopping centres, community centres as well as streets and express how they felt. Kaya assisted with creatively editing the footage that opened up questions about the ethics of representation. The insights and reflections from our collaborative work raise questions about representation, agency, and the creative process of using participatory video as researchers.
Darwin, a tropical city in northern Australia is a place that is 'home' to asylum seekers from war-torn countries such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. After long overland journeys, risky voyages across the Indian Ocean and months as well as years of trauma in high security onshore or offshore detention centres, young men in particular, continue to be labelled 'illegals', 'queue jumpers', 'financial burdens' and 'potential terrorists' within public discourse. Michele had the opportunity to visit families, young men and single women who lived in detention centres at Airport Lodge, Northern Immigration Detention Centre, Blaydin Point and Wickham Point in Greater Darwin. She shared public space with them when they visited community centres, arts spaces and places of worship. Since they arrived before Australia's offshore detention policy was introduced in 2013, they escaped the dehumanisation of incarceration that continues on islands such as Nauru as well as Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Michele also had the opportunity to visit asylum seekers living in community detention in lodges, apartments and suburban units. Living on bridging visas, their days were filled with anxious waiting—they often described themselves as 'hostages' held by the Australian nation-state.
With the support of asylum seeker advocacy networks and faith-affiliated social welfare organisations, Michele listened to stories and shared meals with asylum seekers who lived in community detention. It was in public spaces such as beaches/beach reserves where men took daily walks, streets (outside detention centres) where they kept vigil, football ovals where they played sport and community centres where women cooked or sewed, that Michele asked them to use a video camera and talk about their life in a new country. As they walked along the beach, chatted with Michele after a game of football, cooked familiar dishes that reminded them of home and learnt how to sew clothes for themselves or their children, they used a small video camera to express how they felt. It involved preliminary explanations on how to hold and position a simple video camera which had a side screen rather than the more convenient flip screen that enables the participant to view the framed images. While originally not having cameras with an easy to see viewfinder seemed inconvenient, in practice this was an advantage in exploring textures of public space and complexities of belonging. The camera focused less on what the eye could see and the footage emerged as an expression of embodied experiences of hope in city spaces.
Michele reflected on participation by people of asylum seeker background who were racialised and so vulnerable, but yet invisible within the frame of the image. Could the collection and editing of their video footage of Darwin be justified in the aims of the research project that sought to question discriminatory bordering practices? How might the use of the participant's videos be a vehicle for communicating back to the public, these communities, or individuals themselves, in order to attempt to quell vitriolic debates on national identity and contribute to socio-spatial justice? These questions, and many more, are not uncommon for researchers, who need to rationalise and justify the benefits and impact of the research. While white gatekeepers in Darwin made Michele aware of the dangers of appropriating and extracting knowledge from Indigenous communities who participated in the project, encounters with asylum seekers were facilitated through asylum seeker advocacy networks, government organisations, NGOs, faith institutions, arts as well as social welfare organisations with whom Michele had developed relations of trust over 3 years.
Witnessing as well as participating in weekly events of cooking, sewing, art, football matches and vigils for those in detention or who had passed away, Michele, was the privileged researcher but made herself vulnerable by sharing emotional stories as a racialised first-generation ethnic-minority Australian woman of Indian heritage. As an academic she exercised power through this subjectivity, but it was the common ground of racialised experiences and her dependence on them for the successful completion of the project that forged collaborations across difference. This position of differentiated as well as 'radical vulnerability' has been highlighted as productive in creating a corporeal politics of solidarity by feminist scholars such as Richa Nagar (2014), Judith Butler (2016), Sara Ahmed (2017) and Laura Pulido (2018). This is the solidarity across differences that enabled Michele to engage asylum seekers in video-photography in public spaces at beaches, football ovals and streets outside detention centres.
Caring with: The collaborative process of video editing
What does one do with the videos and where to start? Michele watched the videos several times wondering how to make sense of the visceral nature of these images taken by urban citizens expulsed from the daily vitality of everyday urban life. Thinking with images enabled Michele (Lobo 2018; 2019) to focus on a multiplicity of forces that increase or decrease bodily capacities to affect and be affected; images move bodies to respond (McCormack 2013). Michele engaged in a collaborative process of affective labour with a team of researchers committed to using film as a medium to bring about social change. She watched these videos in a dark studio room (more than 50 hours of footage watched several times) with Madeline Wilmot, an undergraduate film studies student. Madeline collated and edited all the videos over 2 years to produce high definition 1-hr documentary style films of events that unfolded in public spaces such as afternoon walks along the beach, vigils on the street outside the detention centre and football matches at a suburban oval. As the project unfolded the video editing of shorter 15-minute films, 5-minute films and/or video artworks were done by experienced researchers/doctoral students, Kaya Barry, David Kelly and Johanna Funk who used their creative skills.
Indigenous, ethnic-minority migrants, refugees and asylum seekers who participated in the larger project had the opportunity to comment on the 1-hour documentary-style videos which were edited in accordance with their feedback. This feedback process was facilitated through representatives from government, Indigenous, faith-affiliated, refugee/asylum seeker advocacy and ethnic minority organisations who supported the project. Michele, however, was not present when those who participated watched the films and provided the feedback. Although this barrier to receiving the feedback directly raises other forms of ethical dilemmas in the communication process, the aim was to give an opportunity to individuals so that they could engage and reflect on the documentary-style videos and have the ability to request edits, removal of sections, and so on. These documentary-style videos in the longer 1-hour format aimed to portray their experiences, capture their stories, and be a product that could easily communicate the research to a general audience. In this manner, these videos were productive in transgressing barriers between researchers, the researched and the broader community that may otherwise not have occurred without the video component of the research. Asylum seekers emerged as knowledge producers within the academy and beyond, rather than shadow citizenry who haunt the city and are expulsed from the vitality of everyday urban life (Merrifield 2015). Listening to their stories of brutal bordering practices that motivated self-harm, which many of the asylum seekers had gone through, Michele began to think about how asylum seekers could have a stronger voice and be heard from this 'participatory twilight zone' (Merrifield 2015, p. 7).
Following the production of documentary-style videos, Kaya came on board, with her expertise as an artist-researcher with specialist video skills. We decided to engage with the original video footage in a more experimental editing process of thinking-feeling-doing. Our collaborative editing process involved lengthy conversations and the exchange of ideas attentive to the multi-sensory textures, atmospheres and material infrastructures (for example, roads, beaches, ovals, and other public spaces) of the city. The outcome was a series of short 5-minute video artworks. These video artworks were mixes of visuals and sounds that foregrounded ambience, human sounds, or more-than-human sounds of landscape, birds and weather. Through long discussions and Kaya's creative video skills, the technical process of editing was experimental and incorporated affects that we each identified through sound, motion and visuals. Thematically, we wanted to explore how the materiality of public spaces (road, beach and oval) manifested through the recorded videos of participants. Some were more convivial, others sombre, as the videos were of various places and situations such as walk-alongs at Casuarina beach with Salman, a young man from Myanmar (Figures 1 and 2); a vigil for Reza Berati (who died in detention in Manus Island) along the road outside the detention centre taken by Mansour from Iran (Figure 3); and a football match at Bagot Park where Arun and Mahinder (asylum seekers from Sri Lanka) played every week (Figure 4).
The beach—A moment of pause during the walk-along with Salman. Video still courtesy of the Authors.
Casuarina beach—Mangroves, sand, sun and a sacred offshore reef captured along the walk with Salman. Video still courtesy of the Authors.
The road outside the detention centre: slow yet shaky handheld video at the Vigil for Reza Berati who died in Manus Island, Papua New Guinea by Mansour. Video still courtesy of the Authors.
Bagot football oval: Arun and Mahinder play football and chat under a shady tree. Video still courtesy of the Authors.
We decided to juxtapose the images, by splitting the screen horizontally and vertically, and putting the videos side-by-side (Figure 5). We played around with enhancing these juxtapositions through varying the thickness of the frames in the videos or altering how the videos were split (for example, a half-half divide, Figure 4, or a third-two thirds division, Figure 3). These editing decisions, by pairing visuals with the movement occurring on screen created new kinds of lines in the videos. They also brought together, in sometimes jarring or unexpected ways, different places or views of the various participants who had taken the original video footage. Although these small black frames that can be seen in the still images (Figures 2-5) might be seen as a type of 'border', when the videos are played, and the visuals are seen in-motion, the effect is less of a border or container, and more of a comparison or contrast between spaces and places. Although we were cautious in exploring our lines of inquiry through creative editing processes, we also retained our agency as artist-researchers. In a sense, every editing decision was imbued with power, but it was ethical responsibility that also regulated our agency in the process and retained the agency of participants who did the original video recordings. It was more than an act of borrowing the footage and remixing videos to create something that was aesthetically pleasing. Rather, it was 'the act of appropriating and labelling it as 'art' [that] transforms the viewer's relationships and understanding' (Barry 2019, p. 209). Herein lies the ethical dilemma that is brought to the surface when using creative techniques, and especially audio-visual material that was captured by someone else. These ideas of ownership and authorship, of telling stories accurately, which, at times, rub up against our own tendencies to experiment with practices of aesthetics and attunement of our responses and emotional connections to the videos, became a recurring concern in our editing process. The overarching goal was to use these participatory videos to transform narratives, through creative processes, that could be capable of driving social change in a political context where asylum seekers are constructed in images and media as unwelcome 'others' (Bleiker et al 2013). This is how we negotiated the ethical dilemma that surfaces when using creative techniques to edit audio-visual material by racialised and vulnerable participants.
Oval-beach-road: Merging place and experience through juxtapositions. Video still courtesy of the Authors.
In addition, Kaya edited the majority of creative videos primarily through the audio first paying attention more to how the action was captured through the sounds, such as the ambient noises, the chatter of birds and people, the hum of car engines driving past, the rocking motion of the breaking waves on the shore, or the wind buffering against the microphone. The blending of these audio-visuals, in this way that is not entirely representational, seek to push past any kind of previously imposed borders (public/private space, individual/collective groups, and so on). In this manner, these montages, juxtapositions, fades, and turbulent motions open up ways to move across spatio-temporal borders and instead evoke in-situ forms of attunement to the individual's experience who took the video footage.
In the editing process we decided that Kaya would cut the video by focusing on particular voices and ambient sounds, rather than seeking to maintain a steady framing in a visual sense. We listened to the sounds of the wind, the birds or the sea, to show how self/other, white/non-white, citizen/asylum seeker, life/non-life, human/nonhuman, material/symbolic borders were transgressed. We mixed their images with videos take by ethnic-minority migrants and refugees to produce a 15-minute compilation of affective space-times. It was more difficult, however, to get feedback on these artistic montages from asylum seekers because they were produced at a much later stage in the project when fieldwork had been completed. These 2-minute artworks compiled into a15-minute video montage were screened at a creative event that engaged stakeholders and participants at Charles Darwin University, Darwin. The asylum seekers who recorded the participatory videos were personally invited but were not present at this event. It is likely that they did not feel welcome in this space or had other pressing responsibilities. If there were asylum seekers present at this gathering, this fixed subjectivity that guided Michele's selection of them as participants was an unconscious bordering practice that was transgressed. Our editing decisions, however, failed to capture the turbulent forces that exceeded the frame, contributed to their daily exhaustion and moved them to cry out for justice.
We began to experiment with the vortex as a form of digital activism that could collapse, spin and intervene in neat juxtapositions of affective space-times (Figure 6, and see an excerpt online: https://youtu.be/Ajmzw6oLFT8). Mapping concepts from the natural sciences on to the social sciences is an emerging practice within geography that enables the translation of affective registers that are more-than-representational and therefore difficult to capture (Boyd & Edwardes 2019; Cresswell & Martin 2012; Lobo 2014; Merrifield 2015). The concept of the vortex emerged as an artistic style of feeling and doing that moved us beyond ocular sensibilities that might be privileged in the analysis of images as representations. It also fits within broader scholarly merges of practice and theory around visual methods and the non-representational that has been embraced within creative arts research (Boyd & Edwardes 2019)
Capturing turbulence in the videos through an audio-visual vortex. Video still courtesy of the Authors.
Caring with: the video vortex interrupts dehumanising space-times
We use the vortex as a digital technique or another expression of "caring with" that draws attention to the turbulent dynamics of urban life for asylum seekers who are dehumanised and criminalised but struggle on. Within contemporary research digital activism is enabled through technologies and sharing platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Whatsapp (Fincher et al 2019). But such forms of digital citizenship were rarely performed by asylum seekers Michele met in Darwin. A frugal lifestyle (asylum seekers have no work rights), limited credit on mobile phones, weak or no wifi networks meant these technological objects were more likely to be used to maintain connections with friends, family and representatives from social welfare organisations – the posting of photographs and videos on social media sites was not an everyday activity that engaged them. Their videos taken in public spaces using the small camera we shared with them during the project opened a new window of experience into a carceral city and seeded creative thinking on the vortex as a way by which we could highlight and transgress borders.
A vortex draws attention to a 'volatile, intense and centralized dynamics' (Hall & Savage 2015, p. 82) but also the possibilities for disruption and transgression that produce a shifting state of flux and mobility (Cohen & Colebrook 2017; Merrifield 2015). This capacity for transgression was crucial to negotiating the ethical dilemmas we faced in using the vortex as an experimental art practice given the dynamics of swirling winds and watery whirlpools that had affected asylum seekers who had made risky journeys by boat. It was flux and mobility that we had in mind as we swirled the videos taken by asylum seekers and tried to interrupt and reassemble dehumanising space-times. Our videos echoed with romantic yearnings by William Blake (Cohen & Colebrook 2017, p. 129) who used the vortex to express 'something evermore about to be'. For Blake this was a call for a human spirit that surpassed the material limits of the actual earth. For us it was the multiplicity of rigid borders and brutal hierarchies that asylum seekers must surpass: self/other, white/non-white, citizen/stranger, life/non-life, human/nonhuman, material/symbolic, as well as land/sea in 'fortress' nations like Australia with white majority cultures that lured us to using the vortex as an experimental creative practice.
To return to our earlier issues and queries of playing with representing the video on-screen, and the problematics of deciding whether to leave the videos on-screen as 'true' representations of the footage (for example, the original footage recorded and unedited), or whether we could be more playful in the manner in which we displayed, mixed, and re-mixed the footage, the notion of a 'vortex' became a way for us to think through these more technical and visual decisions that we were making. Therefore, while these videos with spinning space-times produce a disorienting urban milieu making it hard to follow their meaning and what they show, they animate the vortex through the bodies and worlds of asylum seekers that are absent, yet present through their movements that interrupt dehumanising space-times. Or, could the vortex be an artistic practice of making abstract expressionism concrete, as evident in the paintings of Jackson Pollock highlighted by Merrifield (2013). Reflecting on a painting by Jackson Pollock, titled No. 32, Merrifield (2013, p. 921) argues the fusion of two colours: a black canvas and splattered jet-black swirls produces a composition that appears to suck you 'into its spiralling vortex' if you venture too close but also radiates energy through eruptions and explosions. The vortex creates a 'new political space-time' (Merrifield 2013, p. 194) that has no centre, beginning, middle or end; it is unframed through boundless kinetic energy that emerges from chaotic co-composition.
In this manner, Pollock's Abstract Expressionism paintings, and Merrifield's conceptual scoping of the vortex through analysing Pollock's work, both bring to the surface the complexity of artistic expression, method, and materials. The tensions between representation and creativity are heightened through the notion of the vortex as both a material-corporeal mode of production that opens up alternatives that move beyond representation. One might suggest, it is more-than-representational in that it cannot be configured (or figurative) as a definitive, bordered, expression. Perhaps, following Merrifield (2013, p. 920), the video vortex is a kind of kaleidoscope as well as a 'collideorscape' that enable us to imagine a political reality that focuses on the transgression and fluidity of borders. Cohen and Colebrook (2017, p. 131) echo these thoughts when they describe Blake's vortex: 'the vortex is both an infinite force that destroys the myopia and stability of the present and or infinite drive that has always imagined itself as self-surpassing'.
The notion of a vortex is not a rigid structure to be adhered to in the creative outputs, to be clear, this is not what we are suggesting. Rather, we came to the notion of the vortex as both a device that moves beyond representative and image-based modes of expression, and instead embraces the ebbs and flows of challenges, concerns, and at times constraints that guide and shape the creative process. The intention from the start was to capture experiences of participants and give them a platform to tell their stories, but in the collaborative process, this is not always easy or straightforward in making the content 'presentable' to various audiences (participants, general public, and scholarly community). It is important that at no point did we want to distort the narratives, and in addition to these more experimental vortex video artworks, Michele maintained and produced documentary style videos with subtitles and transcripts that became a record of the participation and narratives of individuals. However, it shows that creative research that embraces collaboration has an ongoing set of negotiations, experimentations, and at times, compromises, in accepting the multiple versions and visions as people contribute to a project. The vortex in the video artworks that we have discussed here expressed the shape of our hesitant encounters and collaborations—unsure what would look suitable on screen, but also mindful of being accurate to the sensations that cannot be easily expressed simply through words.
Conclusion: Video echoes
In this article we set out to question how the turn to creative modes of knowledge production do not just bring together researchers, participants and audiences, but also attempt to disrupt the representations of bordering technologies that criminalise and dehumanise asylum seekers. From the context of Australia, the representations of global migration are fuelled by images from the North—refugee and asylum seekers crossing sea and land borders, camped in public squares and places, and housed in detainment and processing centres that are accessible to the public. In Australia, the network of ever shifting 'borders' that segregates asylum seekers are never that clear or easily identified for the lay person—lodges and apartments, even hotels, serve as detainment centres, and the offshoring system of processing means indefinite detention for people who are seeking basic human rights. Boats are intercepted in Australian waters far from the coastline—and only government approved media footage makes it back to shore for public viewing. Therefore, the Australian imaginary of refugee and asylum seekers remains limited, and heavily mediated, with individual narratives and experiences of living in uncertain, turbulent conditions enforced by the Australian government, almost entirely censored and blocked off by media law-driven bordering acts. It is crucial, therefore, that expressions and narratives continue to be articulated in diverse, experimental, and collaborative ways, by researchers, activists, campaigners, and professionals involved directly with people awaiting asylum.
In our ongoing work we continue to think about the ethical dilemmas in the creative and participatory process. We continue to question how creative and participatory aspects might challenge dominant media representations that focus on an aesthetics of breaking waves, annoying surges and dangerous flows. As our examples and collaborative learning experience has shown, our videos that were made by and with consultation with asylum seekers was an embodied as well as sensory experience that aimed to disrupt limiting dominant and mainstream representations; it was more than an intellectual pursuit. Our experience in the Australian context suggests that large, high-profile gallery and museum exhibits, created by already renowned artists and activists do create publicity and garner media attention—in some ways they also universalise the experiences of refugee and asylum seekers, and cement borders for those already living in detainment, incarceration, and exile in Australia and offshore territories. Although our process was experimental and emergent, collaboration, dialogues, and ongoing exchange between us as researchers, artists, and the participants was crucial but challenging.
The notion of the vortex emerged through the practice-led approach to video production—not as a distortion tool or visual device, but rather as emblematic or attentive responses to the concerns and dilemmas that we faced in the process. Visually, it sets a tone for the murky and turbulent experiences of life in Australia—merging public spaces with private reflection, daylight with shade and darkness, urban with the natural, and paid attention to the sonic, haptic, and unexpected sensations as he participants walked, explored, waited or recounted their experiences. Sometimes this was verbally, other times it was in a shared silence of wandering. The birds, cars, other people, waves, and weight of a sandy footstep on the concrete path merge together into the vortex. At the same time, it is crucial that we remember the agency we have as researchers and artists. While in some moments no singular visual can capture the affective puncture of the situation, addressing what kinds of attentions and representations manifest in the creative process is always crucial and needs to be reflected upon. As Lisle and Johnson question: 'If migrants are already dehumanized and devalued, what is the point in demonstrating how non-human life-worlds constitute even the most precarious and degraded spaces?' (2018, p. 14). It is at this moment when our personal interests and attentions need to be carefully negotiated in the crafting and production of any kind of creative product.
While the process that we have recounted in this article cannot be seen as a model or template for how future research with persons or communities should unfold, we hope that these reflections offer a nuanced recount of the ethical considerations and encounters that often arise through creative and collaborative research. We also respond to the influences that impress upon us; our own tastes in arts, research, and aesthetics influence how we might want to craft a project, or the execution or style of a particular creative product. This is important, especially for researchers operating within the spaces of migration, refugee and asylum seekers, to be reflective of dominant aesthetics, visuals and narratives that guide public (and global) representations and, inevitably, seep through into our own personal tastes and ideals of how things should look, feel, and present. Although the risk is that these representations can sometimes erect more barriers, only permitting certain kinds of creative works to be expressed and let through the borders—whether this be exhibition in public galleries, museums, or even in academic reporting—our hope is that our experimental creative research practices in this article is also political in the way it produces alternative views of asylum seeker lives.
MICHELE LOBO is a Lecturer in Geography, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She is a social and cultural geographer who explores race, affect, encounter and co-belonging through experimental work with Indigenous peoples and ethnic/ethno-religious minority migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. She is Editor, Social & Cultural Geography, and Editor, Book Reviews/Critical Dialogues, Postcolonial Studies Journal.
KAYA BARRY is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Griffith University working in the areas of mobilities, cultural geography, migration, material cultures and creative arts research. Her recent projects have resulted in numerous exhibitions and publications that draw on site-specific ethnographic engagements with tourists, migrants, and local communities in Australia and Europe.
This research was funded by an Australian Research Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE 130100250, 2013). Special thanks to the participants, Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation, Multicultural Council of the Northern Territory, Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Networks, NGOs and the Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University.
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Pulido, L 2018, 'Geographies of race and ethnicity III: Settler colonialism and nonnative people of color', Progress in Human Geography, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 309-318.
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Scarles, C 2010, 'Where words fail, visual ignite: opportunities for visual authoethnography in tourism research', Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 905-926.
Tolia-Kelly, D 2008, 'Motion/emotion: picturing translocal landscapes in the Nurturing Ecologies research project', Mobilities, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 117-140.
Tzanelli, R 2017, 'Schematising hospitality: Ai WeiWei's activist artwork as a form of dark travel', Mobilities, Online first article, doi:10.1080/17450101.2017.1411817.
Weiwei, A 2018, Humanity, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
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Lobo,Michele., and Kaya Barry"Transgressing borders with participatory video technologies: Reflections on creative knowledge production with asylum seekers in Australia"Borderlands journal 18.no.2(2019):8-36doi:10.21307/borderlands-2019-009.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
International rhino task force to combat illegal poaching and trade
Cambridge, UK, 20th August 2008—The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is establishing a Rhinoceros Enforcement Task Force to counter rising levels of rhino poaching and illicit horn trade in Asia and Africa.
CITES is establishing a Task Force to counter rising levels of rhino poaching. © Martin Harvey/ WWF-Canon
The move follows a report from the CITES Secretariat expressing concerns over reports of increasing poaching and illegal trade in rhinoceros horn, and the highly-organized nature of these activities. The report noted that considerable profits appear to be involved in rhino poaching, with strong grounds to suspect the involvement of money-laundering.
TRAFFIC and WWF welcomed the initiative: "Countries in Asia and Africa are up against an insidious, organized illegal rhino horn trade, which can only be stopped through the formation of the rhino task force," said Dr Susan Lieberman, Head of WWF International's Species Programme.
Despite some noteworthy enforcement successes in southern Africa and South Asia, the plight of rhinos in Asia and Africa is growing ever more alarming. In Zimbabwe, currently around 70% of all detected rhino deaths are of animals killed illegally, a particularly worrying statistic given there are effectively no new, safe areas to move animals to.
In Asia, poachers have targeted rhinos in Indian national parks, with more than 35 rhinos killed in and around Kaziranga National Park in Assam since 2007, and rhino populations in Orang also being poached. The sudden upsurge in rhino killings is a major challenge for regional enforcement agencies, and the Army has been called in for support. WWF and TRAFFIC are also co-ordinating emergency support. Between 2000 and 2006, over 130 rhinos were killed in various parts of Nepal. With civil unrest affecting large parts of the country, poachers apparently took advantage of the situation. The country has now taken up strict measures to combat poaching and illegal trade and has stressed the importance of involving local communities in anti-poaching activities.
A TRAFFIC report released at the 14th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES last year had warned of increases in the volume of rhino horn entering illegal trade from Africa since 2000, with poaching most severe in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). More than 60% of the rhino population in DRC was illegally killed between 2003 and 2005. In Zimbabwe, poaching accounted for two-thirds of all rhino mortalities over the same period, affecting one in eight animals.
Earlier this year, TRAFFIC facilitated a hands-on workshop between law enforcement personnel from South Africa and Zimbabwe to discuss specific outstanding law enforcement cases involving illegal cross-border trade in rhino horn with the objective of moving key investigations forward towards legal actions against alleged suspects. TRAFFIC has also worked with enforcement officials of India, Nepal and Bhutan to strengthen trans-border co-operation on wildlife crime issues.
"Better cross-border co-operation and information sharing between enforcement agencies is key to tackling the highly organized poaching operations operating in Africa and Asia," said Simon Milledge, TRAFFIC's Rhino Co-ordinator.
Most rhino poaching is to supply horns for use in traditional Asian medicines, although there is growing evidence the demand for horns (for use as traditional dagger handles) is re-emerging in the Middle East. A new trend in South Africa is for illicitly acquired horns from the private sector to be claimed as legitimate sport hunting trophies and exported. Vietnamese citizens have been implicated, and Viet Nam is emerging as a key player in the illegal horn trade.
The formation of the Rhinoceros Task Force was endorsed by the CITES Standing Committee in July, and the first meeting will take place in Kenya in November 2008. Like other CITES Enforcement Task Forces, it will be co-ordinated by the CITES Secretariat.
featured in: Africa Mammals Enforcement & Training
RhODIS Collaborative action planning workshop proceedings
Insights from the Incarcerated: An assessment of the illicit supply chain in wildlife in South Africa
Case Digest: An Initial Analysis of the Financial Flows and Payment Mechanisms Behind Wildlife and Forest Crime


#thenewscompany – A large number of weekend visitors of all ages particularly children were seen today on the 10th day of the Amar Ekushey Granthamela-2018, which has turned into a vibrant and festive gathering of booklovers, authors, publishers and researchers.
The stall attendants were seen busy dealing with the visitors and smiles flashed on the face of the publishers as holiday crowd flocked to different stalls and pavilions.
According to the website of Bangla Academy, a total of 1134 books of different genres of literature and branches of knowledge were published in the book fair till today.
With the first two hours from 11am to 1pm dedicated to kids as children's hour, children's presence was impressive in the morning, while the number of visitors of all ages increased as the children's hours ended, fair sources said.
The organizers of the fair arranged different programmes including essay writings, painting, discussion and cultural function for children on the occasion of children's hour.
Children mainly thronged to different stalls and many of them were seen buying books on fairy tales, ghosts, puzzles, alphabets, cartoons and comics. As the first two hours from 11am to 1pm dedicated to kids as children's hour on Friday and Saturday, publishers expect increased sale of children's books on these two days compared to other working days. They said generally, children like those books, which have colorful and impressive illustration.
They also laid emphasis on child-friendly content to encourage them in reading more books as now-a-days they are largely habituated to using technology.
Writers, booklovers and publishers observed that the Amar Ekushey Book Fair has now become a festival of all ages of people. This is a great success of the book fair, they added.
The people of all ages eagerly keep waiting for the fair throughout the year to buy new books of their favorite writers, share and exchange on literary works, he added.
Necessary security arrangements have already been made with the installation of 250 closed circuit camera televisions (CCTVs) in and around the Bangla Academy complex. The law enforcers have been deployed in large numbers to ensure foolproof security.
Russia's leading social network banned by "mistake"


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Пілот — американська ракета-носій і протиракетна зброя, розроблена Військово-морською базою випробувань боєприпасів (). Інші назви: офіційна NOTS-EV-1 Pilot, неофіційна NOTSNIK — утворена поєднанням слів «NOTS» і «супутник». Здійснено 10 запусків у липні й серпні 1958 року, усі невдалі. Перша ракета-носій, яка запускалась у повітрі. Перша повність твердопаливна ракета носій. Ракета була частиною програми «Пілот».

Існувало два варіанти: Пілот-1, з діючим першим ступенем і ваговими макетами інших, використовувалась для наземних випробувань на повітряній базі випробувань зброї військово-морського флоту США Чіна-Лейк (); Пілот-2, запускалась у повітрі з літака Douglas F4D Skyray, який злітав з повітряної бази військово-морського флоту США Поінт-Мугу () і запускав ракети в зоні викиду над протокою Санта-Барбара ().

Проєкт «Пілот» закрито в серпні 1958 року і замінено NOTS-EV-2 Caleb. Проєкт був засекреченим до 1994 року.

Список запусків
Усі запуски здійснено 1958 року. З десяти запусків чотири були типу Пілот-1, шість типу Пілот-2.

Джерела
 Pilot (NOTS-EV-1, NOTSNIK)
 Проєкт Пілот і проєкт Калеб
 Проєкт Пілот
 Список невдалих космічних запусків

Космонавтика США
Ракети-носії США
Програма Пілот

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Forums > Bikes > Professional Cycling >
Hoooooraaayyyy!!
Discussion in 'Professional Cycling' started by thecyclist, Jun 11, 2008.
TheDarkLord New Member
thecyclist said:
It's 45 days. The UCI didn't use that rule, they said it was too harsh and that they would get rid of it at their next meeting. But what are the chances that he was the only rider to violate this rule? For all we know the whole top 10 could be guilty of this.
There is plenty of dirt on Valverde and I don't agree that his case is somehow outdated. He could have confessed back then, but chose not to, so whatever consequences it will have in the future it's his own fault.
Also if he is now able to win the TDF, it's hard to believe he is not doing the same thing as back then.
By the way the shoebox thing was also several years old, yet I still believe it added fuel to the whole thing. Fans were booing etc. so ASO had to get rid of him.
I seriously don't think the whole top 10 missed a test within 45 days of the Tour. That aside, the point is that ASO still has to find a plausible excuse to kick out a rider. They can't simply chuck out someone because the fans are booing. And if they say that they are kicking out Piti because he hasn't confessed in OP, they will really look like fools. It is not a question of whether the rider in question is doping or not - unless they test positive, mere suspicion of doping cannot be used as an excuse to kick out someone in the middle of or near the end of the Tour. An excuse has to be stronger than that.
#21 TheDarkLord, Jun 12, 2008
poulidor New Member
So it's ok that they pick and choose who to throw out so that they can get the winner they want? Then it's more of a popularity contest than a sports event. And we are not talking about riders who already served their suspensions like Millar.
I don't get your point here.
ASO are hypocrites if Valverde get's the yellow jersey (and is in a position where it looks like he could win) and they don't get rid of him like they did with Rasmussen. There is and was more dirt on Piti than there was on Rasmussen.
You are forgetting that Astana was banned because of to many AAF!
The choice of ASO had be done on real facts.
My points was there. If you had brought enough proofs to ASO about Puerto, sure they would have barred a lot of Puertistes.
#22 poulidor, Jun 12, 2008
thecyclist New Member
TheDarkLord said:
I seriously don't think the whole top 10 missed a test within 45 days of the Tour.
Maybe not but they could have and we wouldn't know about it. I doubt Rasmussen was the only one.
Also this was not the reason that was given for throwing him out anyway.
That aside, the point is that ASO still has to find a plausible excuse to kick out a rider. They can't simply chuck out someone because the fans are booing. And if they say that they are kicking out Piti because he hasn't confessed in OP, they will really look like fools. It is not a question of whether the rider in question is doping or not - unless they test positive, mere suspicion of doping cannot be used as an excuse to kick out someone in the middle of or near the end of the Tour. An excuse has to be stronger than that.
They will look like bigger fools if they let him win. Being involved in puerto is still a big deal. Do you think ASO would like to see Mancebo, Sevilla and Botero at the Tour? I doubt it.
If the Valv. (Piti) thing causes a stir at the TDF, then ASO can just put preasure on CdE to take Valverde out of the race. That's what they did with Rabobank last year.
Or even better prevent him from starting in the first place.
#23 thecyclist, Jun 12, 2008
Crankyfeet New Member
I think TDL brings up very valid points. The powers that be have got to deal with information about wrongdoing when it comes out. But they are hamstrung by legal issues. Everyone can be 95% sure that Valverde was a Fuentes doping client, but unless you can prove it in court (and the Spanish authorities release the evidence) it's still conjecture. If they start banning riders because they think it's "likely" they are dopers... then it just becomes a mess... and threatens the rights of all cyclists to exercise their trade without prejudice and kangaroo court judgments.
A similar hypothetical analogy would have occurred if the OJ Simpson trial had happened in the middle of OJ's football career. Assuming there was no civil case to muddy the picture... after being acquitted of murder... the NFL would have had to witness him playing and starring on the football field while perhaps 80% of America thought he was a cold-blooded murderer. To ban him from the NFL would have incited litigation from OJ accusing them of groundless discrimination.
So they have to let Valverde ride IMO... unless fresh evidence comes out that gives them an excuse to take action.
If Valverde is banned on circumstantial linking to Fuentes... we could perhaps ban Cadel Evans similarly based on circumstantial evidence that he worked with Ferrari... though I realise that Fuentes has more legal evidence of doping activities. There are a host of other riders the authorities could ban on reasonable suspicion. IMO, Rass was removed last year based on evidence of an infraction of a rule and a lie.
#24 Crankyfeet, Jun 12, 2008
poulidor said:
I don't know what you are talking about with Astana? The Leipheimer thing in my first post? I was just making fun of the people who say Contador's Giro win would force ASO to reconsider and stuff like that, forgetting that the reason they were not invited had nothing to do with how good or bad a team they were.
And most of the known puerto riders are not starting the Tour. Valverde is, probably because some clowns in Spain keep insisting he isn't involved, but it's obvious to everyone that they are just trying to protect him. The evidence against him is there and hopefully some journalists will bring up puerto if he get's in the yellow jersey.
It isn't profound of me to state this obvious point.. but you highlight one of the main lingering problems in the war against doping in cycling. Because so many within the authority structure (probably not just UCI... but the national federations and even the race owners) have a complicit past in the hiding of the real picture of doping... they are afraid that a complete clean-out of everyone will end up with people all talking under oath and implicating their own nefarious involvement. This coupled with their belief and fear that... if the true picture of doping is revealed... cycling would die overnight politically and financially, means that they are fighting the war half-heartedly... trying to PR manage the battle and make token arbitrary sacrifices.
The net outcome of this is inconsistent treatment of cyclists. It looks real bad to any observer who can see further than the news headlines.
The cyclists have their heads on the chopping block all the time... but the authorities are almost unaccountable to anyone.
I am fully behind the cyclists. I think doping is real bad... and kills people and the dreams of honest cyclists who want to ride clean. I really would love to see cycling clean and watch races confident that the doping controls ensured a clean sport. But I also think that pro cyclists have had little choice in the past other than to dope... if they wanted to express their natural talent on the world stage. Doping is a systemic problem in many sports... cycling especially IMO due to it's heavy reliance on biomechanics. But the athletes are the lambs slaughtered when they had no real choice IMO but to walk into the slaughter-house if they wanted to continue their passion.
thunder New Member
Crankyfeet said:
if I am clean, and I am Cadel Evans calibre, on the cusp on winning. I blow the lid, I create havoc, I call Valv.(piti) for what he is. I don't let him beat me at the Tour, if he is doping.
These guys are alpha male pro sportsman. They don't ride to lose. They ride to win. Some might suck wheels cos they see it as their best chance of winning.
But if you can get in a shit fight to win, why can't you use the press, and take it to Valverde and Contador, and Rasmussen.
Evans is close to winning the Tour, he does not have to worry about making enemies, he only has to look for the wheel of his main threat, and gun the tts. He can create havoc in the press, and really hurt those guys, and turn up the heat.
Yeah, it won't really endear him to the peloton, but if the French peloton is mostly clean, and the peloton getting cleaner, he will not be run out of town like Bassons.
They guy can win the Tour. Use the power, take the fight into the PR sphere, off the bike. Pressure the guys in the media, get the lawyers in, hurt them.
Ofcourse, it won't happen. Evans manager is Rominger ofcourse. And Evans may probably has the same skeletons.
#27 thunder, Jun 12, 2008
thecyclist, a French bank is paying over 2 million Euros into Valverde's coffers.
The ASO also protect the interests of their national companies, not just their riders and teams. A major bank is potentially alot more threatening to be offside, than Astana.
thunder said:
Very interesting point.
that is what is the stand-out anomaly.
If the French are so vehemently anti-doping, why do they tolerate a bank sponsoring a Spanish team, and undercutting their riders.
Yeah, Caisse were supposedly 50/50, but they have Brard, and one other guy whos name escapes me, yeah, Portal, Nicholas Portal. Both good timetriallers, and cobbled classics riders.
But, the French Fed, and the ASO could easily lend influence, wield influence, leverage their power and tell them to either have a testing program which can minimise their doping, like Damsgaard, or dont sponsor a bloody Spanish team full of dopers.
They have the Spanish/Banesto legacy (who were sponsors as recently as 2003)... but since they took over as lead sponsor in 2005 from Illes Balears... have they been gradually converting the roster to more French riders? Or do you think they are retaining their Spanish riders for doping reasons?
they only have got Brard and Portal in terms of riders who can perform at a Protour level and get results. I don't mean wins, I mean some jersey representation in either classifications or the end results.
They may have a young guy Passeron, or he might be at Agrituble or Saunier. Forget.
No, when Caisse came in, they bought about one third to a quarter of the roster as semi-competent French guys. I dont think they were a major part of the roster in terms of being critical, only critical in terms of financing.
As I said, Brard and Portal are the only two guys I know on the roster without checking it out. I would know all the riders no doubt, but I cannot recall any profile riders without looking at the squad.
Did ASO look like fools when they let AC, who is also linked to Puerto, win the Tour last year? The same logic applies to Valverde.
They apparently weren't able to throw out Rasmussen last year either but they put pressure on Rabobank and made them do it. Rabobank didn't have to prove in court that he lied to them.
I'm not so sure they wouldn't be able to get rid of Valverde if they wanted to.
But they are inviting his team and don't seem to have a problem with him. So they are not doing as much to get a clean Tour (and non-controversial winner) as they are letting on. I think they won't care until/unless the Valv. (Piti) thing causes hysteria like Rasmussen last year. But that probably won't happen since Valverde appears to be more popular.
There is evidence linking Valverde to actual doping and a bag of his blood with EPO in it. So he is not just linked to a doctor like Evans.
Yeah you are likely right. Another reason why they probably won't do anything.
Yeah I think so. They said they wanted a "beautiful winner" but after getting rid of Rasmussen they just got another controversial winner instead.
But it's not really the same, because if we look at what has come out so far, there is much more on Valverde.
But it's not really the same, because if we look at what has come out so far, there is much more evidence against Valverde.
You are confusing evidence and clues probably, but in the 2 cases you are false... Until 2006 for the 3 named (Rass, Contador and Valverde) we can easily say that they doped.
On 2007 TDF, the vast majority of cycling fans has few doubts about the doping of Rassmussen and Contador, but Valverde seems to be cleaner that the 2 guys.
Yes, but Rabobank was in the wrong thanks to that rule, and IMO, that's the only reason why there were able to yank him out. And they will probably pay a price for it too, since one cannot deny in the end that it was kind of shady.
But there is a timeline to follow too. I think it is too late to use OP, etc. as an excuse to ban Valverde now. Just to be clear, I'm not referring to ethics here - more to whether ASO can realistically keep him out of the race (now that they have invited the team).
You are confusing evidence and clues probably, but in the 2 cases you are false...
A bag of blood is evidence if you ask me.
Until 2006 for the 3 named (Rass, Contador and Valverde) we can easily say that they doped.
I wouldn't count on Valverde being clean.
The rule about missing a test in the 45 days before a GT? I think that's mostly the UCI's responsibility. But it was not the reason they gave for throwing him out anyway. The reason they gave was that he lied to the team about his whereabouts.
If Rabobank did know where he was, then it just shows that they won't shy away from kicking a rider out and fabricating some reason for doing so.
They may pay a price now, if Rasmussen wins the lawsuit, but had they refused to take him out I doubt they would be at the Tour this year.
Rasmussen also has to prove they knew, so he might not win the lawsuit even if he is telling the truth about Rabobank knowing where he was.
I know I said it would be even better if they prevented him from starting but my main point was that they will look like/are hypocrites if they let him win the race with this doping cloud hanging over him. They don't seem to have much of a problem with dopers winning as long as it doesn't bring too many negative headlines and such.
But if his involvement in Puerto causes enough trouble I think they will try to get rid of him. ASO and/or CdE could say that they got a hold of information that they didn't have before and use this as an excuse. Of course they won't do this unprovoked. Only if necesary.