DACALOGUE

In 2012, President Barack Obama passed an executive order that granted work permits and temporary protection from deportation to over 800,000 undocumented immigrants that were brought to the United States as children. The program was called "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals," or DACA for short. In September 2017, the Trump administration announced that it was ending the program and phasing out deportation protections for its beneficiaries, also known as Dreamers. The DACA program has been in limbo since that announcement, as challenges to the rescission travel through Federal Courts.

In contrast to the narratives seen in the U.S. media, DACA beneficiaries are not a monolithic group. Dreamers come from every part of the world and from every walk of life. They have spent most of their young lives in the U.S., attending school and keeping a clean record. Some attend college, while others enroll in the military. Many were brought to the U.S. through the Mexican border, but many also overstayed their visas following an authorized entry. While each Dreamer has their own story to tell, what binds them together is the fact of documentation they obtained through the DACA program. Being undocumented in the U.S. means being denied access to the forms of documentation that enable life in civil society: work permits, driver's licenses, social security cards, health insurance cards, college financial aid programs, and so forth.

DACALOGUE is a study of immigration media as it pertains to the artist's experience with the DACA program between 2013 to 2018. States use sanctioned media as sites of control over immigrants, restricting access to civil society through a regime comprised of visas, work permits, State IDs, as well as biometric and health data. Using scanner art and glitch aesthetics, DACALOGUE explores how state power distorts notions of personhood.

In 2018, DACALOGUE was awarded the ArtSlant Prize IX (Second Place), and was long-listed for the Lumen Prize. It has also been exhibited several times around the country and abroad:

> SPRINT/BREAK Art Show - New York City - March 2018

> Generation Zero - Riverside Museum of Art - Riverside, California - March 2018

> Blue \x80 - Villette Makerz - Paris, France - October 2018

> Border Control - Stamps Gallery - University of Michigan in Ann Arbor - September 2019
> La Frontera: A New Latinx Lexicon - Humble Arts Foundation - Online Exhibition - December 2020
> Glitch is the Soul of the Machine - iDMAa Broken Media Conference - Winona State University - June 2021