Cherry Blossoms
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Alyssa Wright, from the Computing Culture group at MIT, has created a fantastic performance/project called Cherry Blossoms.
The idea is raise our awareness of the civilian war deaths in Baghdad. Inspired by Paula Levine's Shadows From Another Place: Baghdad <> San Francisco project which imagines the effects upon San Francisco, had the bombs which fell on Baghdad been destined for the American city. Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that’s correlated to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates, releasing a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti has the name of a civilian who died in a war based on lies.
Via edgy_product. Related stories: Interview with Mushon Zer-Aviv, Baghdad in Brooklyn, What I Did Last Summer, and Vantage, a game about war causalities. |
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Very nice concept. Although the problem with these kinds of projects is as always their lack of self-explanatory imagery. The installation misses part of its impact like that. (I must say I have no direct viable alternative for that problem though.)
Still, a very good way to 'bring the war to the people', so to say.
LOL
Some people have a lot of time on their hands.
This is amazing. Breathtaking, beautiful, and a nice use of modern technology all wrapped up in one fantastic package.
Excellent and beautiful idea. However, of all the cities to use, was Boston the smartest city to use?