POWER – Vol. 8, No. 1, 2011
J.M. Badoud In search for the words to express the symbolism of contemporary U.S. military service, I reconstructed the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal (GWOTEM) Ribbon. President Bush established this award to recognize overseas military service in the fight against terrorism since September 11th. Like the Purple Heart, Silver Star, Iraq Campaign and the many other medals, the GWOTEM Ribbon is proudly worn on the chest of each soldier’s Class A uniform. I...
Diana Heise Duration is a single channel digital video and an experiment in database structure that explores the effects of militarism. The piece uses moving images that were photographed on gun missions during the Vietnam War. With inspiration from structuralist film, the images in the video are organized by the length of time that the camera was recording, the moments between on and off. As I was interviewing members of the military, I found...
CyrÃaco Lopes Criminals (Rio de Janeiro) is made of altered images of criminals taken from the Brazilian press. They are the soldiers of an undeclared civil war, victims and perpetrators, actors of an environment that learned to live with a murder rate similar to countries at war. In this work, the news media becomes a theater of violence and eroticism as these Rio de Janeiro marginal-heroes are posed like stars for the paparazzi at...
Bob Paris Our Clean Battlefield comments on the sanitized way that American television news reports on the nation’s wars. TV’s preference to avoid actual human casualties and chart the progress of the war by satellite fly-overs, special effects, and animations gives the conflict an insidious unreality that distances viewers from the true human cost of war. Its portrayal of unbloodied militarism becomes a propagandistic device to calm moral objection and critical scrutiny. ...
Oscar Perez Our reality is based on the shaping of our of sensory information, but these tools have limitations, unable to capture the full spectrum of our surroundings. Add geographical and cultural differences to the equation and an uncomfortable picture begins to emerge; our belief system, which is what we base our lives on and how we view the world, is, in fact, probably false. As unnerving as that may be for many...