politics

Obama's State of the Union 2010 Visualized

President Barack Obama's State of the Union address has been analyzed and visualized at the State of the Union website. The address was delivered to Congress and the American people by the President on January 27th.

Star Spangled Banner

On the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, I collaborated with Lee Montgomery on a musical protest: the star spangled banner played backwards five times.

Elegies

In Motherwell's  "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," abstractions of bull testicals serve as symbolic links with heroic death in the bloodly tragic war with fascism. He ties the Spanish bullfighting culture—a spectacle of life and death embeded within the everyday—to the contemplation of a specific historical loss.

The Impact of Neoliberal Policies on Education in California

This text was meant to be delivered at a teach in at the State Building in San Francisco on March 1, 2012, as part of the Occupy Education National Day of Action. (Instead, this happened: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1O8ujvJENI#t=10m00s >.)

Image is Dialectics at a Standstill

Forty years seperate the events captured in these images, one from May 1968 Paris and the other from November 2011 New York. The pixels from each have been rearranged to approximate the image of the other.

Parametric Protest

The current Occupy protests embody a structure of dissemination and of identification that is also in evidence in computational media.

Occupy ________

A guide for those still feigning perplexity. (Do you know who you are?)

Degradation Study

In this experiment I fed back images into the system which created them so that the subsequent image degraded in each instantiation.

This fade to black approximates the effects of massified circulation of images where it seems that over time the images which once shocked, after repeated exposure, seem hardly able to elicit any response at all.

The Reality Is Not Conveyed

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes, "The reality is not conveyed by what is represented within the image, but through the challenge to representation that reality delivers." As I set up my drawing machine to reproduce the images from Abu Ghraib, I had that problem in mind.