Joseph DeLappe's dead-in-iraq project, which I profiled recently for Arthur, continues its slow burn through the chitchatosphere, with a recent article in Salon by Rebecca Claren. An interesting clip:
"At the point when hundreds of thousands of people around the world were protesting and Bush said, 'You're a focus group; I don't have to pay attention to you,' symbolic protest -- where you simply hold up a sign and say, 'This is what I feel' --stopped being useful," says Michael Nagler, a peace scholar and activist who founded the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of California at Berkeley. "People in the peace movement gravitate toward art too quickly and use it too much. It's hard for me to say this, but the time has come for direct action and civil disobedience."
DeLappe listens to Nagler's comments and reflects on them quietly. Finally, he says that online spaces like "America's Army" are a critical place to interact with the world. "I'm going to where these impressionable kids are spending their time," he says. "If you get them where they live, and this causes them to think, even for an instant, then I think it's effective. Art is a limited form for trying to change the world, but it's the tool I have. This is what I do. As a media artist, this feels like my patriotic duty."
Link: Virtually dead in Iraq | Salon Arts & Entertainment.
(Thanks to Tom Moody and the chitchatters at Cinematexas.)
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