Participatory, civics-education performance
September, October 2020
Design
Development
'Board Op'
Joseph Amodei
Rachel Gita Karp
Rory Kulz
"Do we choose our politicians, or do our politicians choose us?
Packing and Cracking is an interactive mapmaking event about gerrymandering: the pervasive practice of politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around.
Through participatory drawing and map-drawing games, Packing and Cracking uses critical cartography, gerrymandering history, and interviews with politicians and reformers today to show how easy and disenfranchising gerrymandering can be and ask what, if anything, we should do about it."
This custom software was used in Packing and Cracking's presentation through the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September 2020, and through University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Process Series in October 2020.
Find the full documentation on Github.
Watch the full-length documentation of Packing and Cracking at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Process Series, October 2020:
Audience members draw personal maps at the beginning of the performance:
These personal maps help challenge the authority of the maps we see all around us.
I adapted the drawing tool for its three uses in the performance:
And Game 9, in which audience members draw what they think the heavily gerrymandered districts of their state look like.
The drawings below come from Game 9, when facilitators and audience members draw on top of the heavily gerrymandered districts in their state.
Above, audience members submitted locations of their choice that we geocoded and plotted on a map of North Carolina's congressional districts, highlighting the hidden ways these district lines split up the state.
Audience members submitted their locations for the above map in Game 5. On the back-end, we used the Google APIs to do the geocoding and plotting.
In Game 12, we used Mapbox to let audience members explore the current U.S. Congressional Districts.
On the back-end, we used the Google Civics API to get the Congressional District of any user-submitted address, and the name of the representative:
A "board-op" moved the performance through its pre-defined cues using a webpage side by side with the virtual performance:
As such, we developed the admin page to allow us to assign them to different teams:
This system let us better curate our audience's attention and improve the performance's accessibility.