A Crossing Industry

A Crossing Industry is a video game exploring the economy of clandestine crossings in the occupied territories of Palestine. It is one component of a larger hybrid project mixing artistic creation, scientific research and interactive multimedia.

In A Crossing Industry, players guide an anthropologist as he investigates the impact of the border wall/fence on the harvesting of wild artichokes in a Palestinian village. During his mission, the anthropologist discovers the importance of the informal economy organised around clandestine crossings of Palestinians into Israel. This economy connects Palestinians to Israelis and reconfigures the public and private spaces of these two populations.

The storyline is based on the ethnographic research of Cédric Parizot (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université) between 1994 and 2010. The game works as a fictional documentary of these activities, allowing players to better understand the role of field research, and even to possibly better understand certain aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The game was designed and developed by the artist Douglas Edric Stanley (http://abstractmachine.net) in collaboration with Robin Moretti (http://robinmoretti.itch.io), with assistance from the students of the Atelier Hypermédia at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art as well as antiAtlas des frontières (http://www.antiatlas.net), a research group of artists, researchers and experts attempting to apprehend in a unique way the mutations of borders and spaces in our contemporaneous societies.