Back in Boston

Here are some random photos I took when I returned to Boston:

Digital Prints

I’ve been working on creating little post cards of digitally altered photos I’ve taken. Here are a few examples:

  

  

Postdigital Landscapes

Photos taken in and around Ballyvaughan, Ireland in April 2009.

Click on photos for larger images:

Project Room Exhibition – Ballyvaughan

It has been a while since I’ve made a post here… it has been no-stop since the beginning of March. But I’m just about three weeks from finishing up here for the year and I hope to be able to make more posts in the coming weeks. I have quite a bit of material to post… photos, stories, artwork. 

Here are some photos from a solo show I had at “The Project Room Gallery” in Ballyvaughan, Co. Clare a couple of weeks ago:

            

New Webmerges

 

 

Here are some examples of how the ‘webmerges’ have progressed. The original image from last month had about 60-70 images overlaid at equal opacity and without any adjustments to color or saturation. With these new ones, the number of merged images are the same, but I’ve started to play around with the opacity and saturation much more to bring forward images and headlines more effectively. All of the screenshots are from the dozens of sites and blogs that I visit on a daily basis, even the right wing sites like Drudge and World Net Daily (keeping friends close; enemies closer). That certainly offers an interesting visual and textual juxtaposition to material from more progressive sites that fall in line with many of my political and ethical leanings.

This intentional manipulation may be effective from a political and social view, but I am just now starting to focus on really working the formal and aesthetic quality of the overall image. I am increasingly working with image/text patterns along with color balance. So unlike the original webmerges, I am starting to look into certain portions of the screenshots that can be deliberately cropped and adjusted to fit a particular formal structure. That’s down the road a bit, along with animating the imagery on a screen. But for now, here is a collection of the preliminary works:

*Please note that the color may be a bit too saturated because it needed to be set that way for printing on the archival paper*

 

 

A Day in the Life on the Web

Contrary to what one may think, it’s pretty easy to get Internet access here in rural western Ireland. It may not work all the time. We depend on a signal across the bay in Galway and there are issues the signals ricochetting off the two mountains that surround the school.  Of course, with 60 mph coastal wind gusts occurring seemingly every other day now, towers and receivers go down very frequently. 

Nonetheless, it is actually a breath f fresh air to not be so bound to the Web all the time. After all, just a look out of my bedroom window reveals the rolling green fields leading up to some of the most phenomenal coastal mountain/hill views. I find myself taking it for granted sometimes, but it is a wonderful site to open my curtains to on those dark, dreary mornings (i.e., every morning).

One thing I have realized during these server outages is how dependent I have become on the Internet. It’s become a ritual for me in the morning, with all my bookmarks organized on www.delicious.com. They’re all lined in order of email, finance, photo/video sharing, World news, US news, Irish news, Boston news, fake news, technology news, reference, blogs, weather — everything I need at my fingertips. And I click on them all in order, methodically throughout the day as if it’s cranking out information on an assembly line. 

About a week ago I decided to see what it would look like if all the dozens of pages, visited multiple times a day (not to mention links that take me off into crazy tangents) would look like in one mash-up image. So after a long while taking screenshots of my history browser from last Thursday, I superimposed all 174 pages on each other to create an abstract digital painting of information.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A LARGER VERSION, THEN CLICK AGAIN FOR EVEN MORE DETAIL

 

Ongoing…

The second piece I submitted to the Standing Back exhibition was a couple of months in the making. It really took that long because it is a composite digital photograph of 4219 portraits. The photographs that constitute the image below are of every US soldier who lost their life serving in Iraq thus far. So it was a real undertaking tracking down all of the images on the Internet. In fact, the image should comprise 4228 portraits at this point, but some of the fallen soldiers’ photos could not be located regardless of how much I scoured the web. 

 

I took on this very difficult and emotionally draining task for two reasons. First, it was more than just finding images and superimposing them on top of each other. It was more significant to me because there was a process involved — and a deeply touching one at that. I made a point to read a short biography (a couple of sentences or a paragraph or so) of each soldier I came across. That was not so difficult, since there are countless sites remembering the fallen from all countries serving in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There were dozens of different biographies of varying length for each soldier, but for the sake of time I could only just read truncated summaries of describing their (short) lives.

Of the 4000+ US soldiers who have died in Iraq since 2003, 97 were female, 25% were minorities, and 29% were under the age of 22. They all had stories (and I was able to read a little bit of each one) until they lost their lives in a war that nearly two-thirds of Americans (including myself) oppose.

The second major reason for attempting such an emotionally difficult project was to bring to light that the corporate media simply is not paying attention to the war anymore. According to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, network news coverage of the war dropped from 24% of all news covered in broadcasts in 2007 to 3% in 2008 (and down to 1% for cable news networks from 23%). This is the third-longest war in US history and it has essentially been forgotten by the media. 

According to another survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press only 28% of the American public could cite the approximate US casualty rate in 2008, compared to 54% in 2007. This tells me that media coverage of the war in Iraq is a stark indicator of the declining public interest.

I know most people don’t want to think about the war or those who have lost their lives. Some of the waning interest can be attributed to the war dragging into its sixth year. And I also know that there are far fewer casualties now than there were in 2007. And of course, there were huge distractions with the 2008 Presidential Election and the economic crisis stealing much of the airtime last year. However, the media and the people cannot turn their attention away from what is continuing in Iraq simply because fewer soldiers are dying each week.

Because the occupation in Iraq is no longer considered a top priority to the press and the public, I made sure that every portrait in the image lined up directly at the eyes. I wanted to have the composite fallen soldier stare back at us if we are no longer willing to pay attention to them. The interesting thing is that having more than four-thousand set of eyes superimposed over each other creates a sort of black hole in each eye. It could be thought of as a representation of the emptiness left in each of their families, or a symbol of the darkness that has been cast on the US in the international community as a result of the invasion of Iraq.

Regardless of what one may take away from the context of the image, or how they feel about the war itself, it is most important to not forget all of the sacrifices that were made by these soldiers. I hope it will provide an opportunity for the viewer to stare right back into those 4000+ faces and acknowledge that this piece is titled Ongoing for a reason. As long as US soldiers are dying in Iraq, this image will continue to evolve. (The frightening thing is that it would simply be impossible to create a similar composite of all of the Iraqis who have lost their lives as a result of the invasion.) The process is not over for me, as I just read the biography of 21 year-old Matthew Pollini (from my home state of Massachusetts) who died on Thursday in al-Kut. His portrait was added today to the digital image along with the portraits of three other soldiers who died last week. 

There are many reasons to feel good about completing a piece. It’s great to have all that hard work and all those long hours in the studio pay off. It is also good to have another work added to my portfolio. And it’s an adventure to move on and start on something new. But there will be a unique and significant meaning attributed to the completion of this project. It will be more than just another work to file away or set aside once it is complete. It will be an indication that things are really going in the right direction and the talk of troop withdrawal wasn’t just rhetoric.

This image may continue to have the title Ongoing for quite a while, but I know the day will come when I can change it to something else — a title that will be irrevocable. However, until that day occurs, I will continue to pay attention and follow the stories of those who will make the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq (as well as Afghanistan and all other areas around the world where our soldiers are serving, regardless of why they have been deployed in a given place). I think if we all began to put faces, families and stories to the statistics, this piece would have been finished a long time ago — and it would be contain far fewer portraits.

First of Several Exhibitions for the Spring

I realized that with all of the gaps between posts and the ’soul-searching’ or political rambling in the posts that I actually write, I’ve neglected to show any of the artistic progress that’s been made. This has been a year of many creative roadblocks and trial and error dead-ends (spending nearly a month churning out over 200 subconscious/meditative drawings of neighborhood dogs would fit in one of those categories). 

The more I looked toward reconciling political propaganda with aesthetics, the less interested I became in exploring political issues through art. It turned into preaching about something that affects me on some level, mostly moral. However, it didn’t feel right because I was narrowly focused on single causes or issues and nearly all of them have far less of an impact on me than a cab driver from Iraq detained in GITMO for six years, or a family member of a fallen soldier. 

I decided to give up working on political pieces and show the last of anything overtly political in a show that opened at the Burren College of Art Gallery last week called Standing Back. It’s sort of a mid-year review of what’s being made by the graduate students here and a chance to ’stand back’ and assess where we are at, and what direction we see ourselves headed for the next three months. 

Two of my pieces were included. One is a piece from an idea that’s been festering for a while. Before I left for Ireland last year, I recorded hundreds of hours of television news broadcasts as material to work with once I learned how to use video editing software. It took a while to teach myself at least the basics, but now I know a great deal about how to edit, alter, distort, superimpose — all perfect for this piece titled BR K NG N WS:

(The quality on YouTube is terrible, but it looks really nice on the monitor in the gallery.)

The most exciting part about working with this piece is the multi-layered themes. It’s the underlying meanings within the content that is open to so many different interpretations. Of course, the image of Osama Bin Laden certainly strikes a chord. But to me the image itself is ancillary to the overall composition. There are significant political contexts within the almost unbearably slow progression, but that is not quite what I am trying to achieve. This is mostly due to issues surrounding understanding this particular political context. One would have to try to find the date that this news story ‘broke’, September 7, 2007, and put together the fact that in the video that was released to the public, Bin Laden did not mention any acts of terror or violence against the United States. The gist of the message was denouncing capitalism and corporatism, and to urge people to convert to Islam..

I’m not denying that this is an innocuous message and that Bin Laden is not a sociopathic maniac. However, in the actual non-distorted broadcast, Fox News did not disclose the theme of Bin Laden’s message. Instead, they dwelled on the fact that it was a few days before the 6th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the US and that this message could be a “sign that another attack may be on the way to mark the anniversary”. 

The image of Bin Laden is spliced and superimposed over a subsequent story broadcast seconds later about the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperative summit held in Australia, which drew massive protests from anti-corporate-conglomerate groups, anti-bush protestors, and fair-wage coalitions. There was no mention of the protests on that Fox News broadcast — only that Bush was in Australia for an economic summit. Of course, one would have to analyze the contorted logo on this video to see that it actually was the APEC summit in Australia in September of 2007, and have some savant-like memory if they even saw the broadcast that day — not to mention the critical skills (and a skeptical perspective) to put all of these contexts together. 

If I wanted to dig deep into the fact that some corporate media channels are very biased and make a commentary about the subtleness of politically motivated omissions, I would show the full videos of the broadcasts and weave it all together in some way that may or may not be considered ‘art’. Instead, my goal was to slow everything down to a near-standstill. 

In my mind, slowing the video by 1/200 of the original speed undercuts the objective of media’s overpowering contribution to a culture of accelerated information to the point where five second snippets or thirty second stories are all we know in many cases. On many corporate news broadcasts (Nancy Grace on CNN, in particular) a cycle of images are flashed on the screen for five seconds at a time. However, over the course of a five minute segment, you’ll see the same image flashed on the screen up to thirty times. It feels like a form of subliminal messaging, drilling the imagery into the viewer’s head. 

Along with the pace of the video, I worked on ways to distort the sound and video in a way that it feels like the video is breaking down in some way. In fact, I got the idea for digitally distorting the image by focusing on the images on the screen after my cable box went on the fritz back home last year. I decided to really amp up the distortion through a few audio/video editing and animation computer programs to the point there parts are fragmented beyond recognition. This is my response  – not only to the distortion of reality through certain media agendas approaches to news broadcasting — but to the abbreviated and cut-up segments of news in a time where much of the public’s attention span has been so diminished to the point where news stories have to be limited in duration. But which came first, the media or the distracted mind? This is the crux of my overall thematic investigation explored through a variety of artistic expressions. 

Regardless on how this video is viewed, my goal is to give the viewer the opportunity to look deeper into the layers to find their own meaning. I see it as a piece about the effects of media and accelerated information on the mind in the guise of some form of political statement. We’re having a critique about the piece next week and it will be interesting to see what others think. 

Feel free to share your thoughts on the work either by leaving a comment or emailing me at lfreud_odix@yahoo.com.

Tomorrow I will post the other piece that is in the show and say a few words about that (hopefully not as much as I’ve said about this one)

Change and Moderation – Part 3

The housing bubble in Ireland was larger (relatively) than the one we experienced in the US. Even here in Ballyvaughan, home prices leaped tenfold between 1994 and 2004. Developments were still popping up everywhere when I toured the West coast in September of last year. Yet, when I revisited many of these sites earlier this month, I noticed that almost all of the work of these developments had been halted. Many of these projects resemble the partially collapsed centuries-old castles and outposts across the coast, simply sitting there frozen in time – at least for now.

I can see why many of the people here, just as shell-shocked as back in the States, are hesitant to welcome the rapid change that many Obama supporters have been expecting. It is safe to say that an Obama administration will certainly ease the fears and concerns of those with a perspective similar to the German student and the French couple I spoke with. Those days are over for now – that is, until the collective psyche forgets the lessons learned from the Bush Administration years down the road (boy, what a pessimist I am).

I think the perspectives of folks like Gerri are more relevant for thinking about change and moderation. He was in the thick of the ‘dot com bubble’ in the late 90s and the ‘housing bubble’ from this decade. Yet, he prudently was able to see through the hysteria. He’s an avid fan of horse racing, and his strategy for years to, as he says, “get out while you’re hot” was applied to many of his investments. He didn’t want to get caught up in the bubble long enough to be stuck in the middle when it bursts. I think this approach is very judicious, and I know how emotions can take over when it comes to rushes from speculation and risky ventures. (If I ever go to a casino, I always take only $50 or $100 and leave my bankcard behind, because I know how much the heat of the moment can take over).

The point of focusing so much on Gerri’s philosophy is that this crisis emerged under the watch of the supposedly levelheaded, centrist Fianna Fáil government. The Irish Financial Services Regulation Authority is supposed to oversee all mortgages to ensure banks were not lending to buyers that would clearly not be able to sustain their payments. Once the ‘Regulator’ began precipitously loosening the rules of borrowing over the past several years, banks began to offer clients increasingly unsustainable mortgages. This led to the situation we have now – not dissimilar to what went on with the sub-prime mortgages in the US.

Of course, regulation is not the only reason Ireland is in such a crisis. I will stop short of boring anyone (further) with talk of bank solvency, budget issues, and the international credit crunch – all contributing to the state of the Irish economy.

What is important to take away from this – and as Gerri points out – is that these were all economic policies introduced or supported by a government not all that different from that of the framework of Barack Obama’s economic team. Gerri and I both fear that the economic policies of the Obama administration. His fears are based on witnessing the economic policies lead to the downfall of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ under a centrist government. My fears are based on Obama’s appointees’ histories favoring tax cuts and higher interest rates.

However, on this landmark day of the Inauguration of Barack Obama, it is time to not only focus on just how this presidency will affect us all, but what we can do to ensure this presidency will substantially affect the direction of America. Yes, there are very grave concerns about the state of the economy and how it may prevent President Obama (feels so good to say that) from achieving all or even most of his goals. And yes I do have reservations about the fiscally liberal backgrounds of many of his economic appointees. However, to those who think that one man cannot change the path of a nation (including maybe myself a couple of months back), and especially to those people who think that an Obama administration will not be all that different than the Bush administration, I have a few things to address before I finish my rant.

An Obama administration will be light years away from the Bush administration. The stimulus package introduced by Obama alone – putting millions of people to work, dealing with energy efficiency, breaking our dependence on foreign oil, seriously dealing with global warming – would be something unheard of in the Bush administration. Obama’s policies on education and health care are fundamentally different – night and day compared to Bush’s policies.

However, the problem that Obama faces is something greater than partisan politics and any sort of inability to ‘reach across the isle’. The real problem is lobbyists representing multi-billion-dollar corporations (pharmaceutical, insurance, coal, oil, defense contracting, etc) with significant power and influence over Washington. It will take an army of millions of proponents of ‘real change’ to match up against such an enormous roadblock in the advancement of progressive policies. What Obama has that can work toward breaking down that stranglehold is an email list of over ten million of us who supported him during his campaign, not to mention the number who have joined his cause since. 

President Obama cannot create the change that we all hope for on his own. In fact, I don’t think he can do it by even by surrounding himself with all of the best advisors.  It will take the mobilization of all of us to help Obama and his allies in Congress to pass legislation that will pave the way for that real change. In his own eloquent and determined words from today’s Inauguration speech, “for as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies.”

The Obama presidency will start out on the same path as FDR’s first term in office. Roosevelt was not a particularly progressive president at the start of his administration.  It was the pressure from the people that pushed him toward such change that led to the recovery of our nation during another time of turmoil. This is our opportunity to influence change through action. Obama clearly wants this to happen – this was the theme of his speech today. However, he does not want to press for the change so soon and in such a dramatic fashion. Once we all stand behind him in solidarity, change will be inevitable. Ten million strong is certainly not a bad start.

Change and Moderation – Part 2 (Finally)

Since arriving in Ireland this part August, I’ve been trying to talk with as many people as possible. I’ve mostly been looking for any perspectives they have on US foreign policy. (Many of my conversations have taken a different turn recently, as the themes of my work have generally shifted away from politics over the past couple of months).  In talking with people from Europe and the UK, I’ve noticed two things: They were very well aware all of the political developments in the US, they were generally liberal in their beliefs, and they had an interesting outlook on the prospects of change in America – especially our foreign policy.

I remember particularly remember a conversation a couple of months back I had with a French couple. I met them on a daytrip in Galway and they looked like they were in their 60s. At one point, one of them recalled the May 1968 student protests and general strike in France that led to extraordinary social change. Yet they were very skeptical of the reality of a drastically different, bottom-up transformation of the American political landscape over a two, four, or even eight year period. I couldn’t understand why they would think that a form of grassroots change festering in the United States should be handled with caution.

But I realized after really getting deep into the conversation with them that this apprehension stemmed from a fear of the Bush administration, and they harkened back to Bush’s famous quote, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”. They were very well aware of the backlash of the U.S. public for French opposition to the Iraq War and had been coincidentally traveling to California during certain chains and service providers’ embarrassing attempt to boycott French goods or products that had the word ‘French’ in them (‘freedom fries’ just tasted different than ‘french fries’). Even in such a liberal city as San Francisco, this French couple were treated with what they called “subtle disdain”.

When I traveled to Paris last month, I noticed a few slightly tense moments with Parisians – particularly related to the language barrier. However, being an American traveling in Paris was not nearly the experience I expected. Putting things in perspective, most of the interactions were with service providers. I was fortunate enough to have a companion who spoke a fair amount of French, and as long as I made the effort to at least attempt to speak just a few words of the native tongue, they were willing to reply in English. On the whole, I was very impressed with how I was treated as an American in France (even though I was in Paris and it was for only a few days), and it’s a shame that the French tourists I bonded with had a relatively difficult time traveling in the States.

I received a similar reaction from talking to a German student on a bus to Galway. He was not as fearful personally as the French couple was of the direction in which the Bush administration was going in 2002-2003. He spoke mostly of the perspective of the European news sources that kept him informed of the developments U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different type of information from what we were fed by American news organizations complicit with the Bush Doctrine.

This was the same viewpoint I heard from many British and Irish people when I brought up the subject of change in the U.S. under the Bush administration. They were viewing a different kind of news than we were (and they still are, as I can see clearly when I flip on RTE News or BBC News). In fact, while we were watching the statue of Sadaam being toppled on CNN, they were seeing a split screen on CNN International, with one half showing the statue falling and the jubilation of the Iraqi people, and the other half showing Iraqi civilians in hospitals with injuries sustained from the coalition bombings.

I’ve had many conversations with a local resident here in Ballyvaughan named Gerri. He’s in his early seventies and we met at the gym where he was rehabilitating an injured shoulder sustained when one of his cows bolted on him. He loves America – he even says he’s always loved the British. Hearing his thoughts on the UK made me do a bit of a double take. However, he is certainly not uninformed in the least. He served as a water treatment engineer for County Clare and is now happily retired, as he invested very wisely on some IPOs in the late 90s.

Gerri shares the same point of view on change as many of the other people I have chatted with in my travels. His perspective comes from witnessing first hand the rise and fall their economy. It was known as the  ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland’s astonishingly rapidly growing economy, leading it to rise from poverty and emigration in the 1990s to have the fourth largest GDP per capita in the world by 2007. 

Things took a turn for the worse very quickly, as Ireland has been one of the hardest hit by the recession. The question here now is whether it can keep from falling into a depression. 

No, part 3 will not take another two and a half months…