AN AMERICAN DREAM
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An American Dream is a piece created in response to a piece of writing given to me by Jeremy Mende in my Experimentation class in the Spring of 2014. I have not yet been able to find the author of the piece, but the text of the poem is below:
Salute the flag.
Pray for God's blessing.
Say "United We Stand!"
Watch CNN.
Fear Anthrax...
Through rain, through snow, through sleet, etc.
Surf for war news on the net.
Listen to the President's radio address.
Recite Corso:
"...blessed be the Revolutionaries of the Spirit."
Book a trip to Disneyland.
Laugh at Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Watch Hockey Night.
Drink Miller High Life
the Champagne of Beers.
Fill up on gas for less than a dollar at the neighborhood Taco Bell Conoco.
Deconstruct "collateral damage."
Weep.
Mourn.
Worry.
Listen to the President's radio address.
Recite Corso:
"...blessed be the Revolutionaries of the Spirit."
Book a trip to Disneyland.
Laugh at Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Watch Hockey Night.
Drink Miller High Life
the Champagne of Beers.
Fill up on gas for less than a dollar at the neighborhood Taco Bell Conoco.
Deconstruct "collateral damage."
Weep.
Mourn.
Worry.
Every student was given a piece of poetry, and we were tasked with creating something in response to the writing assigned. We were given the writing without any line breaks, and after a long analysis process decoding the writing and deciding where line breaks should be placed, we began to write out hypothetical “experiments” we could conduct with an estimation of what the result would be. The idea was to approach the design of this project from the perspective of the scientific method. All of my proposed experiments dealt with the idea of the degradation of denial through repetition.
The writing tells of a feeling felt by the entire nation in the post-9/11 world. In order to reflect the size of this emotion the size of the piece needed to be as big as possible.
Initially I planned to make 500 photocopies from start to finish of an American flag. The thought being that the slow and eventual degradation of an image repeatedly passed through a Xerox machine would end up looking fairly degraded after 500 iterations. I set out on my first test and realized that after only 10 copies, 2% of 500, the image had already undergone major distortion to the point that it was almost completely illegible.
This made it pretty obvious that I needed to look at restructuring the piece. This is when I decided that instead of creating 700 sequential xeroxes it would be smarter to make a larger piece out of fewer copies, like so:
This would allow me to create a piece that was the size I desired with only 32 individual photocopies; that way the imagery would be intact long enough for the meaning of the piece to still exist. An added benefit of this pattern was that it would ultimately turn the entire composition itself into an American flag.
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