Text Projections
The majority of these pieces are part of a body of work that explores the relationships between the news media, the subjects of the tragedies the media portrays, and the American viewer. The work questions our roles and responses to the idea of suffering, which often becomes an abstract or removed concept for a culture anesthetized by media, entertainment and violence. The projected text pieces explore the power of language as an emotional trigger within a limited context.
The text for Japan: March 12, 2011 was made in response to the 8.9 earthquake (one of the largest in recorded history) and resulting tsunamis in Japan. When reading a New York Times article about the tragedy, I selected words and phrases from the article that seemed essential to the story and seemed to illicit some type of emotional response. Many words in the article appeared multiple times, as they do in the projection. The words were reorganized to emphasize the repetition and to explore the relationships between the words, often using alliteration or placing words that were similar in meaning or in the same tense next to one another. I questioned the power of the repetition and the effect it had on the reader. Does the word illicit a stronger response on its own or when repeated? Does the repetition of the word cause a desensitization and abstraction of it in the same way that we can become desensitized to images? What images come to mind upon reading these words? There were many questions to explore. This piece was one of many that examine language as an abstraction, as a story, as fact, as an emotional tool and as a response within the context of a media-saturated culture.
The text for Japan: March 12, 2011 was made in response to the 8.9 earthquake (one of the largest in recorded history) and resulting tsunamis in Japan. When reading a New York Times article about the tragedy, I selected words and phrases from the article that seemed essential to the story and seemed to illicit some type of emotional response. Many words in the article appeared multiple times, as they do in the projection. The words were reorganized to emphasize the repetition and to explore the relationships between the words, often using alliteration or placing words that were similar in meaning or in the same tense next to one another. I questioned the power of the repetition and the effect it had on the reader. Does the word illicit a stronger response on its own or when repeated? Does the repetition of the word cause a desensitization and abstraction of it in the same way that we can become desensitized to images? What images come to mind upon reading these words? There were many questions to explore. This piece was one of many that examine language as an abstraction, as a story, as fact, as an emotional tool and as a response within the context of a media-saturated culture.
