Murder post-mortem

When considering firing as an ash dispersal method I came across Holy Smoke, a company based in Alabama, USA who offer a service to put cremated ash into bullets.

Committing murder after your gone

The idea of shooting ash into the air has it’s Roman Signer-style appeal. Though all my work in this area has focussed on the slow distribution of ash as a way to bypass the pressure of the ‘event’, I can see the allure of the exact opposite effect: the fleeting spectacle, the whimsical and going out with a bang.

Alarmingly Holy Smoke say that the bullets offer a way to ‘continue to protect your home and family even after you are gone’, ‘by turning ashes into fully-functioning bullets’. As DNA is destroyed with high temperature there would be no chance of the ashes being traced back to your deceased name, except for the engraving of your initials on each bullet shell of course.

Primarily though Holy Smoke market their bullets to the ‘outdoorsperson’. So your grieving family can take their grief hunting. Something resonates here with how grief is juxtaposed with killing at S21 and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. When I visited the site in 2000 evidence of the death toll was palpable, not in the air but in the blood stains that adorned the prison floors, the bones emergent on the surface of the soil and the dents on the tree trunk that was used for killing children rather than ‘wasting bullets’. Cambodians quietly sobbed whilst Westerners looked on and took holiday snaps. The whole experience was packaged up with the opportunity to contemplate the trip with an AK47 and a cow. It was disturbing and disorientating, like I’d walked into a zoo of human tragedy. How are people able to suspend their feelings about the dying of one thing and the killing of another?

Placeholders of potential

A number of years ago, I developed a project in the final year of my degree that explored alternate ways of treating and distributing the ash of the deceased. Each option made use of the natural or mechanical degradation of material to slow down the release of the ash. Scattering the ash can be cathartic, offering closure or a release. It can also be painful, unduly pressurised, it can go wrong (everyone has heard the carry-on accounts of the ash blowing back into griever’s faces). These objects were designed to prolong the process of ash distribution to give those grieving time to grieve. No forced ceremony, no having to make a decision about the most significant time and place, no symbolic burial, no explosive release of ash-via-firework into the stratosphere. Just a slow, quiet release.

The objects I produced were physical proposals, they were real, viable design objects that you could hold in your hand, that offered another way of doing things. I continued in this vein for some time after graduating, developing a more commercially viable iteration of this work. As a collection, they got a fair amount of exposure, they toured museums and galleries, they were published, they generated discussion; they became international placeholders of potential for the material culture of death.

I have folders in my inbox full of willing customers; people who were enquiring for a loved one and people enquiring for themselves; some whom were terminal and wanting to exercise their last will. Though not all responses were supportive, in Milan I was met with expressions of revulsion when I explained that the coloured powder from my shakers was meant to represent human cremains (I could hardly use the genuine article in the gallery of a Paul Smith store). On-line I was compared to Nazis by one commenter, who likened my proposal to turn people into pencils after they die with the soap production from the body fat of concentration camp victims.

Nothing could prepare me for the reactions to my work, probably because I didn’t design their release into the world. It just happened. And so their journey has been an organic one, appearing and disappearing from my consciousness for some months or even years at a time. Until Tuesday.

This is my official declaration that I am revisiting this project with the aim to put something back out into the world in a more refined and thoughtful way.

Humane Porn Filters

A set of design proposals for filters to make pornography more humane.

HUMANE FILTER 1

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This program illuminates a radius around the cursor – causing the viewer to only be able to get a peepshow view into the adult content. Parts of the body become more difficult to identify – a shoulder has the potential to become as erotic as a bottom. The viewer is forced to consider their relationship with the film as an active participant rather than just as a spectator.

HUMANE FILTER 2

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This filter tries to emulate the more humane conditions of sexual practice. Turning the brightness down on the video creates a more intimate, more human and more censored atmosphere (you may need to increase the brightness view this proposal).

HUMANE FILTER 3

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This filter puts a heavy lens blur over the streaming content, making the imagery look more like a moving Jenny Saville painting. As the transactions are blurred the viewer is forced to use their imagination to fill in the detail.

HUMANE FILTER 4

HUMANE FILTER 5 - MEGAZOOM

Pornographic movie production uses zoom to show explicit imagery. Humane Filter 4 uses the same function to distort the image and add intrigue. The image is cropped at a 10th of the original aspect ratio in the centre, showing an enlarged pixel view of the content.

HUMANE FILTER 5

HUMANE FILTER 6 - MATERIAL CULTURE

This filter reveals pornographic material culture by using a flesh detector to remove all the flesh from streamed adult movies.

HUMANE FILTER 6

Humane filter 7 uses facial recognition software to locate and highlight the faces of adult video only. By spotlighting just the these areas we are given a new perspective on pornographic transactions through the facial expressions of the participants.

Woman 2.0

Woman 2.0 is a series of posts motivated by my ongoing curiosity and concern for the way in which the Internet is both representing and being used by women.

PART 1 – Is blogging a new feminism?

Over recent years, I have noticed a boom in the amount of female-authored lifestyle blogs. There are worlds being made possible by the Internet where the women are showing who’s who – places where the women rule OK (!). It seems like slowly, the Internet is becoming more female, as it is being reclaimed by Woman 2.0.

BT commissioned a survey in 2012 to examine the habits of Internet users and the results showed (somewhat depressingly) that women are more likely to use the Internet for shopping and social media while men use it for professional progression. The blogosphere represents a sector which is shifting away from this – Woman 2.0 is finding a way of making value (cultural / social / economic) from marketing their social lives. Woman 2.0 is a more tightly curated identity than is represented in social media. It is no longer seen to be regressive or undesirable to be a stay-at-home mother or housewife in the blogosphere. Slick photography depicting superhuman women going about their lives as the perfect mother / cook / gardener / crafter / environmentalist / friend with their magazine-worthy interiors just-about-visible in the background through the heavy lens blur, present an alluring reality. These blogs have a powerful marketing effect in promoting life as a non-working or part-time working woman or mother. Woman 2.0 proudly proclaim that they are feminist stay-at-home mothers because they have a choice – that it is no longer an enforced role. With rising childcare prices I believe that for many it is still a necessity and not a choice. Feminism in this sense is a middle-class privilege; for the women who can have their cake and blog about it.

Of course not all Women 2.0 are blogging. Something close to the 90-9-1 rule most likely applies, 1% are probably authors (the bloggers), 9% are contributing (commenting on posts) and 90% are lurking (the readership). I made light of it in the previous paragraph but these blogs are not to be underestimated as ‘just’ lifestyle blogs. Behind the domestic veil there is something else going on, a kind of cyber-revolution. Not only are the women pitchin’ up on the Internet not content with the male-orientated material of the web but they are forming supergroups. These networks exist in the physical world in friendships, Blognics and Blogcademies, but in the digital they are recommendations and hyperlinks. They are stronger for being in it together; if you read one of them you are likely to read them all.

The bloggers are doing something interesting here, they are doing what women have always done – been good mentors and support to each other, but this time they have a much wider reach. Like a comforting hug with a global arm span.

In sum, I think the femme-blogolution is a good thing, but I do have a niggle, I am concerned that it stems from a need to be seen to be productive. The feminisation of labour has meant society can no longer see the value in the work that that is done at home, and so publishing it gives it a value, it makes it visible.