President George W. Bush's final State of the Union address will be analyzed as well as televised thanks to the State of the Union website, a software art project by Brad Borevitz. The address is scheduled to be delivered to Congress and the American people by the President on January 28th. Within an hour after the text of the speech is released, visitors to the website at http://stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net will be able to see the results.
State of the Union provides searchable access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to the present. Using visualization software, the site allows a user to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context. State of the Union focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. From this information, users are invited to try and understand the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.
As we are in the midst of a presidential campaign, and the vagaries of political rhetoric flood the media, it is especially important this year to be able to analyze and understand how politicians use words to court us, to convince us, and ultimately to gain access to positions of power and control. Lamenting the triumph of iconicity over rhetoricity, Borevitz describes the gradual changes in political speech from argument to brand. The project asks us to consider if evidence for this assertion exists in the language of the State of the Union address which stands as a controlled sample of political speech over the course of U.S. history.
Brad Borevitz is an artist whose work focuses on language, politics and software. He has produced websites, videos, software applications, and robots, all of which have at their core a deep commitment to understanding the political and cultural implications of computer technology. He is a recent participant in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program and holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego.
February, 2008