This proposal investigates the "Joshua Project," a website and database that, in its own words, "highlights the peoples and places with the least access to the gospel in order to prioritise mission efforts." It is a central infrastructural node of contemporary fundamentalist evangelical missions - above all North American - that classifies the world's population by degree of Christian conversion and targets Indigenous communities, especially isolated ones, as "the unreached." Encoded in this missionary logic is the old colonial mythology of the savage, re-rendered as data. 

Treating the database as a machine for producing truth, this project asks how it is built: how it classifies non-Christians - Indigenous peoples in particular - as targets for "contact," and how its ideology is encoded into its own infrastructure. The objective is to develop a forensic gaze onto this computational system in order to decompose it and expose its violence. The prototype would assemble a counter-model that renders the database visible as what it is: a targeting device built on a racist ideology.

Team 

This prototype is developed by a team formed by the author of the original proposal  Amanda Klajner @amandagklajner together with: 

Vassilis Krikonis @vassilis__krikonis  

Lamia Zaghloul 

Andreea Iliescu @ailiescu7 

Adriana Martín adrianaberges.com / @adrianaberges