The Poster Children
(2007), 4 monitors, 2 custom PCs
80" x 12" x 4"
9' loop, silent
Edition of 5 plus 2 APs
The Poster Children is one work in a suite of animated,
multi-monitor pieces influenced by the narrative and cartoon-like
formats of Asian screen and scroll paintings.
In this panoramic animation, two representative groups at the top of
the food chain—people and polar bears—share a quasi-pristine
dystopia comprised of slow-moving icebergs and piles of e-waste
(discarded electronics components). Each is the poster child for a
distinct social issue, and both are natural enemies. Are they a danger
to each other, or mutual protectors in a new world, ordered by extreme
and reconfiguring environments of the north pole and the Internet?
In 2007, two unconnected social issues floated to the surface of the
news. First, is the now-famous image of a pair of polar bears standing
on a sculptural chunk of free-floating ice. Al Gore used the image in
his slide presentations, intended to raise panic and awareness—the ice
is melting, the polar bears are stranded on what little ice remains, and
are drowning. The photo quickly became the icon for global warming. It
happened that a marine biology grad student named Amanda Byrd took this
photo in 2004 while on a research boat, at the warm end of summer, a
time when the land's fringe ice naturally melts. A Canadian Ice Service
worker named Dan Crosbie took a copy of the picture from the shared
computer on board the icebreaker vessel, claimed it as his own, and gave
it to Environment Canada, who in turn distributed the image to 7 media
agencies. Soon after, the Toronto Telegraph, The New York Times,
London's Daily Mail and other major papers ran the photograph as the
primary illustration of global warming. Then Amanda Byrd came forward
publicly, angered that she hadn't been credited for the image. With this
revelation, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing pundits lambasted the
image as propaganda promoted by "environmentalist wackos and the . . .
Media . . .." 2007 also saw the birth of Knut, the Berlin Zoo's hand-raised
baby polar bear. Videos of Knut spread like wildfire on youtube,
reestablishing the polar bear's status of "cutest."
The second issue/image is that of the Virginia Tech Shooter, who
perpetrated the "worst school shooting in history." The best-known
images of Cho Seung-Hui are from his suicide video, which he mailed to
NBC. In it he looks like he stepped out of (or into) one of John Woo's
hard-boiled and ultra-violent films. NBC dubbed the killer's video a
"multimedia manifesto." The NBC video was posted to youtube, which led
to a spate of youtube responses, including anti-asian hate videos
masquerading as news items, music video eulogies, amateur stagings of
Cho Seung-Hui's drama class plays and a copycat "youtube killer" in
Finland. Online debates and diatribes erupted about race, immigration,
and the ethics of populist media distribution, almost as many as debates
about gun laws. I was interested in this shooting in part because the
killer was not white (or pink), and I began to research "kids with guns"
online. My search procured a dazzling array of videos on youtube, many
of proud parents teaching their young sons and daughters how to shoot
firearms. These pink children became my source material for the
rotoscoped characters in The Poster Children.
Mediated images of the cute and the helpless—endangered animals and
children—form the population that is literally collaged into The
Poster Children's arctic dystopia. The Arctic itself is presented as
a flat frontier in which sky and water become one plane; a
white-washable, remote stage. Not much happens in here, in this
infinitely repeated performance of gestures, a bricolaged display window
for an anti-Eden. It is the domain of the innocent: polar bears ranging
from cute to carnivorous share real estate with bored pink children who
shoot aimlessly at the water. The islands that convey this cast around
and around the picture plane are made of ice, but also of e-waste—the
junk detritus of the technology that disseminates this media.
Out there along the media conduits are constantly re-collaging
territories. The Arctic was recently promoted to yardstick of our
planet's doom. Images of icebergs, animals and kids may be poor signs
for harsh realities, but are treated like treasures stolen to fund
temporary kingdoms, which spread like viruses, wash up on e-shores, and
are quickly forgotten. The Poster Children's cast of characters
are allowed a break from their ideological duties as mercenary
images-for-hire; and on this unified field of an Arctic fantasy, they
(or the viewers) might duke out their own turf wars, live side-by-side,
or die trying.
References
"Polar Bears May Be Listed as Threatened in the USA." Environment News Service, International Daily Newswire, January 2, 2007.
"How the Environmental Extremists Manipulate the Masses," by Carole "CJ" Williams. NewsWithViews.com, January 26, 2008.
"Snap! Freezing Bears." ABC Television Australia, MediaWatch, Transcript, February 4, 2007.
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