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I don't know about you, but I
am 9/11'ed out. I watched enough hours of mediocre TV last week to convince me
that I knew far too much about the melting point of structural steel, the
pounds of gear carried by your average NYC firefighter, and the other odd
facts. This isn't to diminish the pain and anguish that I (and probably you
too) still feel about the events on that day. I still am hurting about the
friends and others that were lost that day. Just that I have had enough, for
now.
One of the shows I caught was
a project by a filmmaker and a middle school student that was simplicity at
best. The two carried around a world map and asked people in I think the New
York area to circle where in the world was Afghanistan and to name the
terrorist organization responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answers were
filmed and edited for the TV show. A surprising number of people, even whom I
thought would be well-educated people (such as elementary school teachers and
other professionals) missed one or both questions. And missed them by several continents (such as circling
France, Brazil, and Australia -- yes, Australia! How can you confuse
Afghanistan and Australia?) Maybe not so surprising, given how geographically
challenged most Americans are.
To me, that show just drove
home how insular we are. This is more than "Carmen Sandiego" parlor
tricks -- most of us aren't interested in anything beyond our border, and
probably beyond a 50-mile radius of where we live. It is pretty pathetic that
most of us can't even figure out what country is what on a world map, and a
pretty big one at that. Granted, I would have trouble distinguishing all the
various bits and pieces of the former Soviet republics, or those sub-Saharan
countries that have changed their names a few times since I learned where they
were in fifth grade (or whenever that was). But I would have thought
Afghanistan and al-Qaeda would have been an easy question.
There is some help, in the
form of an art project that Golan Levin has put together, largely on the
inspiration of our president's speech about an "evil axis." Go to this URL:
http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/codedoc/Levin/axis.html
Click on any three countries
(that is the accepted definition of what constitutes an axis, such as the WWII
Axis powers of Japan, Italy and Germany) and you'll see what they have in
common. This could be almost as much fun as Pictionary. When I clicked on Niger,
Honduras and Angola I got the only thing they had in common: they were all
heavily in debt and poor countries.
Behind this relatively simple
world map is a lot of code: in fact, as part of the Whitney Museum's
Artport/CodeDoc series, you can actually download the code that was used to
assemble this project. True to the spirit of open source, combined with the
freshness of an artist's perspective, with a soupcon of geopolitics mixed in.
How much more new millennium can you get?
I am not saying that Levin's
map is going to cure this insularity. But it might stimulate some interesting
discussions among you. And I am glad that the Whitney is taking the lead once
again on web-based art projects, combining the spirit of open source to boot.
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David Strom
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