Structural Patterns

Not My President

The underlying narrative to the many promises that Trump made to his following during the long presidential campaign was a return to the idyllic and fictive whiteness of post World War II America. This is a socially conservative and materialistic culture obsessed with modern appliances, ease of life, conformity and the centrality of white privilege… This is Trump’s America First.

So how can the current administration divert the progression of the browning of America, the progression of religious diversity, the progression of the diversification of race and gender identity?

The Trump administration hopes to do so by sealing up the border by adding to the existing wall to keep the Latinos out and by instituting the Muslim Ban. In order to veil the America First racist agenda, Trump deals in fear, because these presidential executive orders are enacted in order to protect the United States from terrorism and crime. It is well documented that no terror attacks have been enacted by citizens of the 7 targeted nations. In Trump’s America First Brown equals Terror and Whiteness equals Safety, Normality and Privilege

The 2017 Presidential Inauguration inspired this mashup:

I’m ordering this t-shirt for myself.

So I export a lot of my illustrations or frames from my animations to images that can be printed onto various products from t-shirts to coffee mugs to stickers and I post them to RedBubble or Society6 or TeePublic. This design I really like and I partly do this because I want to wear some of the stuff that I draw, and this is such a case.

Our clicks appear to be worth money not merely to the mad-men of today, but to the digital overloads that increasingly control the internet. Due to Google popularity and value, it has gained a great deal of control over the surface layers of the internet and in doing so has gained control over a portion of human consciousness. Human consciousness that is very valuable… It can be manipulated and monetized. As with all media, the messages that you see and hear are dictated by the ownership. Once it was thought that no one owned the internet or the web, that it was a free and open space for discourse and exchange. This has not been true for sometime; it really was never true, but early on it was at least less monitored and shaped.

The browser add-on AdNauseam is “designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from tracking by advertising networks. At the same time, AdNauseam serves as a means of amplifying users’ discontent with advertising networks that disregard privacy and facilitate bulk surveillance agendas.” We should not be tracked unless we have agreed to be tracked and not in small print.

AdNauseam – Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To from mushon on Vimeo.