A Very Dark Digital Graphic Arts Proposal

Digital imaging's greatest strength is, I believe, real-time symbol manipulation: rich game-like displays of information, like a radar weather map or, classically, the almost elegant movement of aircraft in a flight pattern.

Seeing this week's explosions news, I'have come to the feeling that one intentional explosion tearing through human beings in much like another, the gaping, endless suffering of Palestinians and Israelis, Congoese, Timorans, residents of Mubai and London and New York and Darfur, Sunnis and Shiites, Afghanis, Russians and Chenians, etcetera etcetera etcetera, is only human suffering, and is therefore of the most intense human reality, and is therefore of absolute human equality.

The "news," expressed in words or limited picture views, boiled thoroughly in one ideology or another does not describe it. It becomes train wreck news noise, innuring us rather than enlightening us, subtly convincing us, I fear, that all this horror is inevitable, and change is hopeless, and the effort would only bring more about.

This is false, too, maybe the worst falseness, and a cause of cynicism. Wars do end. Explosions rise and then they fall. People one moment stop getting up in the morning and murdering each other with the new invincible technologies, from missiles to machetes. Peace arrives unheralded, like a soft breeze, rising and falling. It was that way in Lebanon until last week.

PROPOSAL

This would be a place, largely of mourning and reflection: a neo-gothic kind of very small church, domed but open partly to the sky, four huge stone-like display screens, with a high medieval presentation: dark woods, carved reliefs of tortured and angelic spirits, stone floors surround the screens. It's important to the piece that the presentation of the screens obliviates any impression of contemporary industrial design. It must feel utterly ageless.

Before each screen are kneeling benches, before a small, deep fountain pool cut into dark stone. On each screen is a constantly updated black line world map on a muted white background. I imagine the graphics heavily influenced by a combination of Tufte's work on visual display by way of Albrecht Dürer (rock star of the 16th century) the contemporary artist Do Ho Suh (a huge floor composed of glass with tens of thousands of plastic people holding up the viewer) and the real-time aircraft display put forward by our Mr. Sum. The proposed work would reflect on the vast quantity of news information we receive, a google of human misery, and of the more tenuous possibilities of joy or even redemption.

This project display would be a four-sided apse-like structure, with very large, extremely high resolution world maps displaying real-time phenomena in the following areas.

Death by Intentional Violence. Using, I imagine, complex and hideously difficult software which searches real time news reports (particularly Reuters Humanitarian Alertnet) and automatically projects, Risk-like, concentrations of the following events, by display of symbols. The live reports ideally would be supplemented by a maintained web site, perhaps with contributions from a list of qualified correspondents, whose reports would be instantly displayed (I can imagine a screened live person web-wide cooperative information referral as a better alternative) There would be a (Much of the site could be based on Reuters Alertnet. )

A) Bombs
B) Ordinary Murders
C) Civilian Deaths by Miltary Action
D) Military Deaths

Deaths By Injustice.

A) Preventable Disease - subdivided: malaria, dysentry, AIDS, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

And, on the opposite walls:

Births, Marriages

and perhaps

Cultural Events

A) Huge Sporting Events
B) Major Art Openings
C) Major Festivals
D) Holiday Events
E) Dances and Bacchinnals

Ideally, each symbol set would have a color grouping: you might imagine a red dot appearing slowly on into the white world screen, it's size, and color all carrying it's news, and after a while it fades into the area of it's effect, turning a white area a fading pink.

Another element might be to project a display image onto the surface of a pool cut even with black stone, and sunk into the floor, carefully adapting the light cone as part of the architecture.

Some work is yet to be done, such as basic drawings, designing complex software, advanced electronic eqiupment, two or three good stonemasons, building site, building.

Please send out for $489,345.23 to build this piece.