This short video, made during the Educator’s Workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA), is a teaser/trailer for a paper on which I’m currently working. The paper is on Barack Obama’s rhetoric of “unity” as relying on an ironic sense of community and conflict in contemporary politics; it is also about the potential pitfalls and failures of such rhetoric, which we have seen strongly in the past couple of months in the most recent “debate” over health care reform.

“Sudan, 2002″
4.5 ft x 45 ft
acrylic paint, plastic

This piece, a walkway installed for approximately a month on the main floor of a University of Illinois building, was our first major public intervention. Intended to highlight not just the ongoing genocide in Sudan but the complicity we have had in all the genocides over the past century, it forced viewers to walk on images, enlarged photographs painted onto clear plastic, depicting the atrocities of war. Over the course of its installation many people were profoundly impacted, especially those with personal connections to genocide, and several classes met in the hallway to discuss the piece.

2 4 ft cubes
acrylic paint, paper, ink, foam

This piece, installed for several months in front of the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, is now being rebuilt for an installation in a residential neighborhood in Urbana, IL.  The dice are covered with AIDS statistics, everything from deaths to infection rates to the impact of orphans and economic ruin on world security and terrorist threats.  They are only visible in the dots.  The piece is also a reference to Einstein’s quote, “God does not play dice with the universe.”  But if he doesn’t, then how do we account for our luck and others’ misfortune?  And how do we do anything to change things?   This piece was our most interactive to date, with viewers constantly moving and playing with the incredibly light dice.  It is also what inspired, to some extent, our apparel line, and is similar to where we hope to go in the future with our work.

10 ft x 20 ft x 10 ft
aluminum, copper, wood

Shown here in its 2 month installation between the Law Building and the Art and Design Building at the University of Illinois, this piece was later moved to a six month international sculpture show in Galena, Illinois. It used statistical information to represent the wealth and populations of countries around the world, placed in their positions on a map. The USA was 9.5 ft tall (GDP) and 20″ in diameter, ethiopia was 12″ in diameter and a single sheet of metal, and China was 14 ” tall and 40″ in diameter, to give you an idea of the differences. Iraq and Afghanistan, very close to one another, were less than half an inch tall.

18 boxes, 6 ft x 2 ft
paint, grass, wood, aluminum

Installed first at the 2003 Artists Against AIDS exhibition and then for 3 months between the Art and Design and Law buildings at the University of Illinois, this piece had a profound impact on many of its viewers.  A complete life cycle, from low grass to high to death to reseeding, it represented the approximate number of children under 12 to die of AIDS in 2002 (over 60,000).  Each blade of grass stood for a child, and the statistics were created using a method of sqare footage, approximately 3000 blades per square foot.  This is, unfortunately, a little too similar to the ways in which we estimate AIDS deaths.  Regions, places, times, but no concrete information.  A little too ironic, perhaps, but tragic nonetheless.