something

From Rhizome Artbase
2001
Description

A flash based project, "something" deals with racism, the death penalty, and imperialism, intertwining them through an understanding that these together help make up a larger issue: a contemporary culture of punishment.

Ken Marchionno
16 October 2001

"something" is a reaction to the complacency of American middle-class liberalism. The challenge is for the viewer to do something, as in this case the author has. "something" deals with racism, the death penalty, and imperialism, intertwining them through an understanding that these together help make up a larger issue: a contemporary culture of punishment. These are issues that cannot be separated, and the interface--the bleeding of sounds from one node to another--reinforces this.
Taken from popular culture--TV, film, periodicals, the internet--the work recontextualizes more-or-less recognizable sounds and images to question our expectation of what we see, what we hear.
The interface presumes a desire to dig deep. Based on a gaming paradigm, with the understanding that you have to work to learn anything, it is imperative that the audience make every effort--search for clues--in order to get the true depth of what's being said, of how complicated cultural indices add up.

Ken Marchionno
16 October 2001
Legacy descriptive tags
Ken Marchionno, Beruit, Bagdad
Attribution: Ken Marchionno
Documentary, Conceptual, allegory, War, Third World, responsibility, resistance, media activism, death, colonialism, Animation, Flash
Attribution: Rhizome staff
Metadata
Variant History
outside link
static files
16 October 2001
cloning
Rhizome staff