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.