Consequences
blackout
How can you not think of a blackout image?
Some time ago i felt that there were too many pictures in the world. I felt overwhelmed. I was feeling overwhelmed at the flood of images swashing through the world. I lived and contributed to a mediated space saturated with images. A question also pierced my practice. “why should i contribute one more image to this?” Our bodies are political constructs. Aware of the hyper manipulation of sentiment in social and news media. I focused on the news cycle. At the time as an occasional Quaker –I sat in a space without symbols, contemplating not making pictures. A difficult thought to navigate.
"Like Lotus Eaters, we have succumbed to numbing feeds populated mostly by ego and we mindlessly consume the fruits of our narcissism." Sophia Efthimiatou
The idea of hacking webpages was intoxicating. I could erase all the pictures.
The news cycle is comparable to the daily calls to prayer. The Adhan, the Divine Praises, and the news cycle all divide the day in to periods of hours. A timed repeated act of attention to an exteriority. Acts of repetition are powerful. Acts of repetition in religious rituals erase time through the very repetition of the act. These events acts as anchors which can be refuges for a psyche against the forces in our lives.
The Work. 2022
The project consists of a web animation and soundtrack with automated web sessions pulling live news sites and manipulating the site to re-shape the content. Three times a day a sound announces each bulletin. At the beginning of each day the days news is downloaded and integrated into local webpages.
The work uses a redaction but isn’t leaning on this as the primary gesture rather the blackening of images relates to lightness and a political refusal. I refuse. I reject the claims of dominant cultural values that seek control and makes lies of our lives.
9 monitors. 12 news feeds. 1 animation. Sound.
Making this project requires a custom chrome browser plugin.
You can follow the development of Nano Black plugin at Github. Try downloading it yourself to make images of consequence.
Fade to black: blackout / darkness themes and references
References: