In our mass-media culture, news and events are known and disseminated instantaneously as they occur. I am heavily
affected by the images and stories that occur daily around the globe, and are brought to me primarily via the internet. I
mourn for the loss of life and the environmental disaster of Fukushima. My heart races as I learn of the protests of the
people that brought about regime change in Egypt. I am troubled and angry at the regime that holds onto power in Libya,
despite its people’s wishes.
Do my feelings of anxiety and hope stem from a grand ethos? If I look at these situations I can project myself into
them, or conversely, project the situations onto myself. The natural disasters that rend the heart of a place; perhaps I
mourn because that can happen here. Every once in awhile the local papers remind us that Seattle sits on fault lines that
have ruptured before, and will rupture again. Our doom, according to our scientists who speak as prophets, is imminent,
our apocalypse predicted. To read the news is to simply wait out this apocalypse, made immanent in other parts of the
world, beamed to our screens for us to watch. So I watch and see this happen in Japan, and see it happen in my world.
Like a tsunami, I wait and wonder when the apocalypse will reach my corner of the world.
Yet historically, news was carried orally, and news events that occurred overseas would have to be delivered by
herald, and didn’t reach others’ ears until months after the fact of the event. Town criers were employed since most
people couldn’t read. Sometimes I hear that this is a particularly dark era we live in, that natural and man-made
disasters are more prevalent today than they ever have been in known history. Are we in our present moment more afflicted
by disaster and war, or has our spectacle culture just become more efficient at delivering content to us?
The word ‘crier’ can perhaps have a double meaning. One meaning is of the herald, who is the source of information
and orally communicates. Or as literally ‘crying,’ mourning or weeping, lustrating the affects of events that did not
happen to me personally. The making of work by one artist grappling with one’s existence in a global paradigm is perhaps
my way of feeling as though these events are ‘real’ to me.