Publics and Counterpublics

Analyze an existing artwork/project/piece of media (TV show, game, etc) and the systems within which it operates. Try to identify: Who created it? For whom? With what materials and metaphors? With what intention? What impact? On whom? How? Did the artist identify a public or create a counterpublic?

Poster:

I chose to do the “We Can Do It” art poster that was made during World War II. This was a time where men where shipped off to fight the war against Germany and their allies. While the men fought, women took on “male” jobs (ie; defense industries, the civilian service, armed forces). Even after the war, the men returned and wanted their jobs back. Women wanted to work, and continue to work even after the men returned. The poster was created by J. Howard Miller in 1943. It symbolizes that women can work any job without losing their femininity, which the poster shows as a metaphor. The target audience would have been young women that were able to hard labor.

The art piece I chose to analyze is Reynold Reynolds’ piece, Burn. Burn is a short video piece created in 2001, which depicts an ordinary looking middle-aged couple who are casually sitting in their living room while it is on fire. The couple looks to be oblivious or unaware of the fact they are in a burning room.

This piece seems to be created for the average American citizen, based on the fact that Reynolds spent most of his life in America, and the decision to chose middle-aged actors for the piece. The living room that is on fire in the video also looks like a traditional American home in the 1980s.

Reynolds uses the actors, the setting, and the fire to create the metaphor about the obliviousness of Americans to the world around them and also possibly their own country. It could also be a metaphor for the oblivion towards how climate change is affecting the earth itself.

The artist is very clear about identifying the public as all American citizens, and is sending a clear message to them that awareness is required to save ourselves from a burning fire.

“I Still Believe in Our City” art by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya created in partnership with the NYC Commission on Human Rights. In 2020, as COVID-19 flared through New York City and NYC hospitals saw a spike of nearly 200,000 patients, Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs) faced an added threat: blame, racism, and xenophobia. The works featured in “I Still Believe in Our City” couple striking visuals with statistics about discrimination API New Yorkers have faced amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The panels include words and phrases uttered in hate, juxtaposed with bright colors, symbolic imagery, and portraits of defiant and proud API New Yorkers standing their ground. Nestling the ugly language in beautiful symbolism is intentional:  API artist Phingbodhipakkiya shows that despite what API New Yorkers have faced, they remain undeterred and steadfast members of New York City’s communities. More than an anti-hate campaign, this public awareness initiative is a testament to the beauty and resilience of API communities. It recognizes everything people lived through in 2020 but also speaks to decades-old anti-Asian biases.

I think the public will be every New Yorker and anti-hate campaign.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/cchr/media/pair-believe.page

Analyze an existing artwork/project/piece of media (TV show, game, etc) and the systems within which it operates. Try to identify: Who created it? For whom? With what materials and metaphors? With what intention? What impact? On whom? How? Did the artist identify a public or create a counterpublic?

Project: Solitary Gardens

• https://creative-capital.org/projects/the-prisoners-apothecary
• https://solitarygardens.org

Solitary Gardens is a project lead by jackie sumell in collaboration with incarcerated people in solitary confinement, and host organizations. sumell works with the hosts, and matches them with a person who is in solitary confinement – the video linked above briefly follows a student group at Xavier University and an incarcerated man named Dennis. The Xavier students and sumell work to build a garden plot that is about the size and blueprint of a solitary confinement cell. They correspond with Dennis to bring his garden vision to life in the garden bed, and work to maintain the plants through two growing seasons.

The garden bed itself incorporates byproducts of several plants (sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and indigo) in the concrete mixture that were often grown and harvested by enslaved people in the United States to “illustrate the evolution of chattel slavery into mass incarceration”, and sumell says.

This project came out of a previous project that sumell worked on called Herman’s House where she and Herman Wallace who was also incarcerated and in solitary confinement collaborated to design a dream home for Wallace if he were ever freed. He was released from prison, but died shortly after. One of the first things that Wallace identified that he wanted in his dream house was gardens. A big part of this project feels like it is for Wallace and to honor his memory.

In a similar vein, this project is for the gardeners, so they can tell their stories and get to create a garden through their volunteer proxies.

This project is for the volunteer and hosts to connect with and learn the stories of their gardeners, to learn more about solitary confinement, and to understand as summell mentions in the video, “the evolution of chattel slavery into mass incarceration”.

This project is also for any public who views the gardens themselves, which are designed to look like solitary prison cells, and for anyone who views the video. I believe that the intention is for these publics to also gain a better understanding of mass incarceration, solitary confinement and to get to know the humans that are subjected to solitary confinement.

I am having trouble finding the exact words I’m looking for to describe the metaphor itself, but there is an idea of a proxy or an avatar that allows Dennis to be a gardener from inside his cell, through the hands of Xavier students. The plants are also only able to be planted where the is not concrete in the garden bed – the concrete represents the furniture and toilet in Dennis’ cell. This constraint ensure that the plants can only be placed where Dennis himself is able to walk around in the cell that he’s in. As the growing season goes on, the plants are free to rewild the cell: “proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.”

A couple of quotes from the website and the video that stuck with me:

• “This project directly and metaphorically asks us to imagine a landscape without prisons.”
• “Central to this project is a call to end the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement, simultaneously inspiring compassion necessary to dismantle systems of punishment and control.”
• “[Louisiana] incarcerates more people per capita than any other state or country on the entire planet”

Game Title: Undertale

Platform: Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux

Genre: 2D role-playing

Developer: Toby Fox

Game Writer/Creative Director/Narrative Designer: Toby Fox

Undertale is a role-playing game with a simple background: a long time ago, Humans and Monsters had a war. After the Humans win, they send the Monsters underground. Many years later, one human came to climb a mountain that no one had ever come back from. As a result, the human fell into the underground and needed to find a way out.

The game has three different Route; Neutral Route (the player kills at least one but not all the monsters), Genocide Route (the player kills all the monsters in the game), and True Pacifist Route (the play doesn’t kill any monster, a Neutral Route has been completed and a Genocide Route has not been completed). Each Route has its own storyline. Though these stories are independent, these three endings can be combined into a complete world outlook.

I want to point out Sans. He is one of the only two characters that use typefaces as their names and have different typefaces in the dialogues. However, he is more unique than this. Developer plants many seeds on him. Sans knows the player has the power of SAVE. He knows how much EXP the player gains. He has the ability to teleport. All these facts make Sans a mysterious character. His presence makes the player want to keep playing the game and even play more than once to discover the truth.

The most decisive Element of Undertale is the relation between the three storylines. On the one hand, unlike other multiple-ending games whose endings are independent, Undertale’s endings support each other. Only when the player finishes all the Routes, they can get the final, true story of the Underground. Each end is still a single story though it will leave some clues about the truth.  On the other hand, the endings can influence each other. This is unusual for a game but is very reasonable in reality. Once the player finishes the Genocide Route and awakes Chara, they cannot reach the True Pacifist Route because Chara has already been awake and will keep trying to destroy the human world. This point makes the game close to the real world and distinguishes Undertale from other multiple-ending role-playing games.

One key element showing up from the game is that the monsters’ said that although the monsters may have muscular bodies, their souls are weak and easily broken; however, the Human has “Determination” in their heart, so the main character can use the SAVE function in the game to restart everything.

Fox said he had no intended target audience for this game, just gamers. This may explain the non-binary nature of the player character, an androgynous figure who can be named at the player’s discretion. According to the Undertale Wikia site, naming your character certain monikers will trigger custom responses from the game and, in one case, even raise the difficulty level. One interesting fact is that Undertale has a unique community, although it is a short indie game. The game creat a public with the world it builds. Although the game ended with the “Determination” mentioned in the game, all the players tried to continue the story outside of the game.