Cherry Blossoms

Submitted by Benoit Bordeleau on Wed, 05/28/2008 - 13:56

Author(s):

«Cherry Blossoms» est une oeuvre performative ayant nécessité des appareils GPS. Dans la même veine que «Baghdad - San Francisco», de Paula Levine, l'artiste a transposé les coordonnées GPS de chaque perte humaine en Irak depuis mars 2003 sur une carte de la ville de Boston. La personne faisant l'expérience de l'oeuvre doit être munie d'un système de repérage GPS et d'un sac comportant des canons à confettis. Quand la personne traverse un endroit archivé dans le système (lieu d'une mort), les canons sont activés et font voler des petits bouts de papier sur lesquels sont inscrits le nom d'une victime. Cette oeuvre est documentée par des textes et des photographies prises durant les performances.

Contenus reliés

GPS

L'expérience de l'événement I: la guerre

Taxonomies

Citation(s)

According to an AP-Ipsos poll conducted in February 2007, Americans greatly underestimate the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war. While the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq reports more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone, and a recent John Hopkins study estimates over 650,000 civilian causalities between March 2003 and July 2006, the median estimate by Americans is 9,890. Margot Norris explains the discrepancy between public perception and body count data as the result of de facto practices by the Pentagon. By restricting press access to the suffering, the government systematically obscures public knowledge, which in turn blocks affect, empathy, and protest. The moral and political defeat in Vietnam helped usher in the illusion that human loss is irrelevant to military success. Cherry Blossoms addresses the disparity between human suffering and perception of that suffering. The project starts in a backpack outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location, to the center of the city, are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking like a mixture between smoke and shrapnel and the white blossoms of a cherry tree, completely engulfing the wearer. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death. With Cherry Blossoms human loss resonates beyond the boundary of conflict. (http://web.media.mit.edu/~alyssa/about.html)

Notes

« The data used for counting deaths per Baghdad neighborhood comes from the Iraq Body Count Database. This count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence, as well as excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order. Neighborhood locations were organized according to a map entitled U.S. and Russian military maps of Baghdad (2003), as obtained from the Geospatial Library, Harvard University. The neighborhood list was verfied by hand with an image of a 2003 NIMA map of Baghdad, as found on globalsecurity.org. This list is compared to the Iraq Body Count tallies. A large effort was made to accurately count deaths not listed in correlated neighborhoods. Articles were read for location based clues (e.g., markets, universties) and research was conducted to decide alternate spellings. These neighborhood counts are placed over the Boston Area by transferring the center of Baghdad to MIT. The translation of GPS coordinates was accomplished with the help of the GIS Laboratory, MIT. Further work and documentation of this process will be available soon. Circuitry includes a small microncontroller for memory and actuation, a GPS module for location, and a motor for releasing confetti. A program on the computer chip stores the Boston-Baghdad coordinates with the latest media reported deaths. Once in one of these "hot spots," the microcontroller queus a motor, which eventally punctures a small CO2 canon. The force of this action releases a cloud of confetti inscirbed with the names of the dead. The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently - like the effect of a fog or moonshine - gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance. -- Carl Von Clausewitz » (http://web.media.mit.edu/~alyssa/method.html)

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Cherry Blossoms

Wright, Alyssa