Archive for December, 2013
The Adventures of Dorrit Little by Monica Johnson
Dorrit Little Opts Out of Student Debt
Artist Monica Johnson created the online graphic novel “The Adventures of Dorrit Little” to bring some transparency to the mechanisms of the student debt system in the United States. According to the About page, the average undergraduate student loan debt is $27,000 and the average graduate student loan debt range is $30,000 to $120,000. This country has effectively created an educated population in indentured servitude.
The graphic novel is a quick read, however in eight chapters, the artist presents a concise and clear history of the origins of the student debt system and why it continues to prosper. If you live with student debt it is a very worthwhile read! Go to The Adventures of Dorrit Little by Monica McKelvey Johnson!
Helsinki Web Sketches
A composition with photography, three.js and rotoscope animation
Through the BOMBLOG, I just launched a series of compositions titled “Helsinki Web Sketches” that combine photos that I took during a residency at HIAP with WebGL code using three.js, rotoscope animations and video. Interact with the pages and click through them to see the various sketches.
The Helsinki Web Sketches are designed for modern desktop browsers that support WebGL.
Click the water to continue in this Sketch
Play the NSA Game
Don’t make the wrong choice! Pick the word that isn’t on the NSA surveillance list.
Play the NSA Game by choosing which word is a “Terrorist Threat or Harmless Phrase?” an NSA word guessing game. You will see two words, one is listed in the NSA’s watch list, the other is not, can you guess which one is not listed? The two words are set against a blue sky background with puffy clouds, flying birds, green grass and a nice tree. However, every time that you guess wrong a hidden image below the natural landscape is revealed, a dark image of a surveillance society.
Four wrong guesses and the natural landscape is entirely gone, instead a Google search window appears with your bad picks filled into the search field… Click search and your IP may now be added to the NSA watch list as you search for key terms on the NSA database.
Once you loose the game, which you eventually will, your bad choices will be typed into a Google search field, click search and risk having your IP added to the NSA red list!
The project is a second of a series by artist Grayson Earle who a few weeks ago created NSA Haiku Generator that does just what the title describes. With both of these projects the artist is problematizing the fact that the NSA maintains such a list and the list itself. The games portray how inane the list is and contribute to their pointlessness by generating more searches with these terms by anyone playing the games.
See a physical installation by the artist titled “NSA Lights” at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute this Saturday, December 14th, 2013 located at 47-49 East 65th Street, New York as part of Hunter’s Integrated Media Arts MFA exhibition.