Political is Personal
As NPR today has a show exploring how the art world and artistic expression are dealing with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I need to report that I’m already ahead of the curve there. Not in anything I’ve published in real life, but in an art installation in the virtual world of Second Life.
I’m already well acquainted with Second Life, as I co-write Second Seeker, a blog that reviews PG-to-R-rated places and activities in Second Life, and also co-authored chapter three of Wiley’s new book, the Official Guide to Second Life. But when my co-author, who is an artist in Second Life, approached me about collaborating on a project there, I was indecisive.
I’m used to having a lot of control in my writing. By its very nature, writing is linear: one reads from front to back, top to bottom, and the author is thus able to control how his or her words appear to the reader. What Paul was asking me to do was allow my words to float in the air as others walked through the installation — including walking through the words themselves! What that meant was that I could group pieces of the words together, but know that some people will start reading in one spot, some in another, and that all will walk through the installation in different ways.
It was one incredible challenge. Yet I was ready to do something. I’d become first tired of and then angry with people telling me to not take politics so personally — the political is always personal. So I wrote something that expressed my pain … and could be read with different starting-points.
And the political is always
personal.
And God bless America
isn’t anywhere in
the Bible.
Paul — or PleaseWakeMeUp Idler, as he is known in Second Life — created an incredible build with my words as a starting-point. In one space, visitors are walking through films of red, causing one reviewer to call them a “fog of blood.” In another, faces of Iraquis follow the visitor along with the plaintive words — “Why am I dying?” Yet another space speaks of and illustrates conspicuous consumption, the energy that drives acquisition and aggression. One illustration shows Americans clutching Bibles and guns; on the flip side is an Iraqui clutching the Koran and a gun. Finally, one section of the installation requires one to confront the names of American military dead — and the names of Iraqui civilians dead.
As one reviewer notes,
I didn’t know what to expect, but the wall of text that greeted me - names, ranks, ages, dates, places of death, sickened me. I could have known these people. Some were so young. Some of the notes left me ill. “body found near…”, “Baghdad?”, “checkpoint on outskirts of…”, “road between…”, “throat slit”, “Mother of”, “Son of”, “Sister of”, “Father of”.
What are these children, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers doing now? Now that their loved ones have been taken for nothing more than senseless greed?
The installation — called Political is Personal — will be available for viewing in Second Life until the end of March. Come make yourself an avatar in Second Life and visit it. It’s so far beyond the elements of style that I’m not even going to use that catchphrase here today.
Posted in Process Matters, Doing the Right Thing, Words on February 6th, 2008