Assignment 8 - Crowdsourcing

Part I - Existing Project Participation

The Johnny Cash Project
username: taiki24
password: pixelforms


Iraqi Memorial Project

This piece combines sculpture, installation, land art and digital data into an unexpected large-scale guerrilla memorial.  It is composed of one-hundred 3' by 3' cement sculptures that contain USB accessible read-only files on data drives.  The one-hundred separate sculptures represent the approximately 100,000 civilian deaths that occurred in the Iraq War.

The sculptures would be placed over an expansive swath of land in the Southwestern United States, covering parts of Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona.  They would be laid so that they form the exact paths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as they pass through Iraq.  The rivers denote life and our journey through it, as well as a path along which goods and information are exchanged.

Each data drive will contain a complete list of names of the known dead.  This redundancy will protect the information after inevitable tampering.  They will also contain GPS coordinates for every sculpture as well as photos, obituaries, and an explanation of the project.

Around the upper part of each sculpture will be an inscription that reads "let them never be forgotten" in both Arabic and English.

 

Part II - Project Proposal

The name of my proposed project is "reCombine".  I would solicit nude images from participants that adhered to a strict set of guidelines, then use an algorithm to randomly take seven pieces from set areas of seven images, combining them into grotesque forms.  

The concept of this piece is to subvert voyeurism  as it presently exists in the internet, turning plain nudes into chimeras composed of chopped up bits and pieces.  It's the Exquisite Corpse, applied through digital photography and expanded for the internet era.

Participants do not necessarily  need to submit images, but can select images already uploaded into the database and combine them either selectively or randomly.  A piece is taken from each of the seven images corresponding to the head, upper torso, lower torso, right arm, left arm, right leg, and left leg sections to assemble a recombination. 

Assignment 7 - Website / Meat-space Interventions

Part I - Website Re-Design


Focus on the Family Intervention.  Original site is here.  Content from Westboro Baptist Church.

Part II - Meat-space Intervention

Placed on advertisements on four poles along 9th Street from Sierra to Evans.  Created with wheat-paste, standard printer paper and Adobe CS5.

Reading 4 - Raley

    1)  The two main interrelated tactics used in tactical media are hacking an existing object in order to change its nature (repurposing of data or machines), or hacking for the purpose of suppressing or changing a message in the system (DDOS attacks, twitter account hacks).  The first is more regularly considered an artistic/studious endeavor, while the other is considered criminal and garners more headlines.  Going forward, which will most help hacktivists to fully realize their goals?

2)  In this rapidly changing digital environment, digital interventionist works produced just ten years ago can already seem obsolete, tied inexorably to the era in which they were created.  Does this ephemeral, era-specific nature give these projects urgency, or does it just necessitate constantly evolving works from adaptable practitioners?

Assignment 7 - Preliminary Proposals

Part I - Website Re-Design

For this piece I want to expose the views of anti-LGBT hate groups in America.  The organization "Focus on the Family" promotes itself as a wholesome Christian organization, while also funding efforts to demonize LGTB individuals and lobby for bills that restrict their rights and freedoms.  In my re-design, I replaced the content of Focus on the Family's homepage with the content from the Westboro Baptist Church's "God Hates Fags" website.  While the expression is far more obscene and unhinged, they both draw from the same ugly homophobia.  One says it louder and clearer, while the other manages to inflict far more damage on a wider scale. 

Mock-Up for Website Re-Design

Original Website

Part II - Meat-space Intervention

For this piece, I want to call attention to the proliferation of illegal advertisement in urban areas.  While most people are quick to denounce graffiti created by individuals, most turn a blind eye to the deluge of posters, fliers and other postings that are equally as illegal.  Somehow, selling a product is less bad than putting up art or marking a name.  I plan to put up several wheat-pasted fliers around downtown that make this point.

Flier Mock-Up