Obsidian Arts Presents Root Shock
www.obsidianarts.org

What causes root shock? Who imposes root shock? Who survives it? What happens to cultural, moral, physical, spiritual, economic, social, psychological roots?

Inspired by Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s book “Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America And What We Can Do About it”, Obsidian Arts (curated by Marlina Gonzalez) presents a show around the concept of the not-so-random acts of social dismemberment and transplantations imposed on any culture perceived as “the other’.

The show features:
Catherine Kennedy (Liberia)
Usry Alleyne (Guyana)
Heba Amin (Egypt)
Sankara Djeki (Cameroon)

Saturday August 16, 2008
Opening Reception 7pm to 10pm

Projecting from inside the Marriot hotel room from the 21st floor in downtown San Jose for the fun of it! We (MAW) were there for the ZERO1 Festival in June 2008.

Photos courtesy of Peter Thompson

Minneapols Art on Wheels
Minneapolis-San Jose road trip, summer 2008.

(click on slideshow to see larger versions)

MAW goes to the ZERO 1 New Media Biennial in San Jose, California, trekking across 10 states and projecting in a variety of sites ranging from the Badlands of Interior, South Dakota, to the sand dunes of Winnemucca, Nevada, and the streets of downtown San Jose. Documentation is viewable on the MAW website.

Fragmented City on Google Earth

View my Google Earth model here.

(If you don’t have Google Earth, download it for free here).

April 30, 2008
Heba’s, Ali’s, and Tyler’s projects

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ali/cola3950artforthepeople/2008/05/maw_hits_the_north_side.html

Bush’s state of the union address in 2002 which coined the ridiculous phrase “axis of evil” opened endless opportunities for art-making. The phrase resurfaced for me with the latest outpour of idiotic headlines regarding Ahmadinejad’s US visit:
“EVIL HAS LANDED”……

I was interested in creating a composite of the leaders of the six evil countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea) to create the ultimate EVIL! My first approach was to extract a group of pixels from each image, output them in a new matrix, and create a new image consisting of pixels from all six original images. The end result is an abstract, unrecognizable face.

The second approach was to extract portions of each of the six original matrices, output them as matrix layers in the new matrix. The end result is a collage made up of squares of the different parts of the six EVIL leaders. This approach creates a more recognizable face than the first.

(doesn’t this oddly look like Bush?)

The initial concept was to create humorous combinations of faces as a way to stress the silliness of the idea of the “axis of evil”. But other concepts started to surface, more meaningful, and more serious ones that could be explored further. Among them is this idea of how do we put a face on the word evil? What attributes create an evil person? Who can be evil? It started to raise this issue of surveillance and how we can pinpoint evil among regular people. This could make for an interesting facial profiling project.