Mechanical ventilator and dust aggravation chamber

Early draft of the film component in Gulf War Illness. In its current form, this essay-film explores how respiratory systems in Yuma and Iraq face parallel precarity as a result of analogous climate hostilities and nearby military activity. Given this shared experience, the film highlights how current climate change models expose a morbid irony in the ways in which Yuma’s climate has been leveraged to build weapons which have historically decimated Baghdad.

Part of this project has included downloading, parsing, and sorting existing declassified military research from YPG. Pertinent topics have been: analogous climates, management of desert hostilities, as well as innovation in response to these hostilities, to name a few. This has produced a baseline archive of documents, which I am currently creating a meaningful archive-structure and tagging system for. Next phases in this research would be evaluating the relevance and application of this research for regular individuals, as well as, additional channels for such documents to be sourced and eventually dispersed. Of course, this extends beyond the desert, where analogous climates exist in numerous global contexts. At its core, this project explores how such assets can be leveraged to produce mutualistic computation where the vulnerable in many regions become tightly networked beneficiaries, rather than in favor of a single despot such as the US military.