MI-TGW: A social media device
Mass Information and the Temporal Graffiti of War:
A social media device, exploring of the ideology of Purple Hearts
A collaboration with Minneapolis Art on Wheels this project was an opportunity to influence society and culture in fantastic ways. Through major exposure to the masses this work sought to send an inspirational and motivational message about peace and understanding, while providing ‘real’ information to society. My experience with architecture, graffiti, computers, 3D modeling, rendering, and mathematics helped to develop social, technical, and artistic uses for advancing technology.
One primary goal was to develop software that searches for anti-war information and displays that information graphically, through projections, onto buildings and environments. Purple hearts were initial subject matter — exploring the secret counting and documentation of those injured and killed in the Iraq war. How is this medal connected to the Presidents, can we give the public an accurate idea of what it means to have a Purple Heart, and in doing so make apparent the realities of war? This software was intended to find a way to represent social questions through temporal, legal graffiti that is generated from real world data collection.
The goal of this project was to inform, educate, and inspire the communities in Minneapolis, MN. Although the images projected were not always analytically understood, their message was expressed with scale and motion. Some questions I asked were: What would the affect of six million beating hearts have, if projected onto a skyscraper near a highly traveled freeway? How could up-to-date, hard-to-find information be obtained and graphically displayed? What kind of time is inherent in this process, and are we capable of representing such information graphically?
