Blight at the End of the Funnel

Edward Colver’s exhibition and book titled, Blight at the End of the Funnel, are epic explorations. The 200-page book and the exhibition examine the artist’s creative life from his many years documenting the punk music scene in Southern California, to his edgy, witty, poignant assemblages. The exhibition will feature 20 selected photographs and 15 assemblage works in the Grand Central Main Gallery and, in the Grand Central Project Room, Colver will assemble an original installation. The 200-page book, co-published by Last Gasp Press (San Francisco) and Grand Central Press (Santa Ana), will be printed in both hard and soft cover editions and feature more than 300 black-and-white and color images. Mick Farren, Mat Gleason, Larry Reid, and Jocko Weyland contributed essays for the book.

Planning a Iraq war sim in Second Life

I recently attended a meeting to plan a 3-D art exhibit about the Iraq war. No one drove their car to the meeting, we all sat our avatars down together in the virtual world of Second Life, a massive multi-player online world simulation created by it's participants. It is a multi-media playground for artists, with streaming music and movies. People can create entire fantasy islands here...and they do...you name it. There are community standards though, and people get suspended or expelled for being hateful. There is a police blotter.

So here I am going to brainstorm some ideas that I think might make some interesting performance art pieces for a virtual world.

1. Visit Iraq
Visitors are queued up to go on a tour of a small Iraqi town. They all must register and recieve passports, with RFID tags spewing their personal infos. They must also put on traditional Iraqi costumes. Guards will not let them past a checkpoint into the sim until they have reviewed their passport. Inside the sim the visitors are given instructions from an Officer, about what to expect, and there is cynical humor and implied danger, but may be told that if they are killed they will be teleported back to the queueing area. The Officer also introduces the seargeant and privates who will accompany the visitors, giving some background info on each, to build empathy, get the visitors to laugh at them for their humanity. The visitors are asked to board a military transport vehicle to ride to the village. Their passports are collected as they climb aboard the bus. It's a rough ride and then a roadside bomb goes off. Many are killed, and all the soldiers are killed except for the soldier who just arrived yesterday from Nebraska. The visitors can take cover behind the overturned vehicle, while the one soldier returns sniper fire. After a short while, the near paniced soldier ties a brave charge at the snipers, but he is also wounded and lies dying nearby and tells the visitors to hang tight until another bus comes, and that he has called in air cover. RPGs explode on the opposite side of the overturned bus. The visitors must decide what to do. In a short while a helicopter battles the snipers, and may tell the visitors to proceed to the village, down the road. The road is mined and there are more roadside bombs. Alternately they can wait for another bus.

When they arrive in town (it might take a few tries) they are unloaded from the bus. It is windy and dusty. An extremely officious officer reprimands them for even wanting to be there and lays the resposibility for the death of the other soldiers on their meddling desire to investigate matters which are better left to professional soldiers. SOme passports are returned. Behind the officer a old Iraqi man has been shuffling up the street. He explodes and the officer and his bodyguards take off down another street where they say it is safe. Here there are a few bodies lying in the street. The officer takes off in his helicopter, the soldiers hold the rear, returning sniper fire.

The visitors are then left to their own devices to wander among scenes of wanton murder of civilians. Eventually another military patrol arrives and surrounds and corrals the visitors.
The visitors must all lie on the ground quickly or they are shot. They are asked for their passports, but only some have recovered them. Those people with passports are separated from the rest. The others are taken to Abu Ghraib. There they are put into cells with imprisoned Iraqis who talk to them(maybe notecards) about why they are there and what their feelings about the war are. One of the visitors, maybe a plant, is horribly loudly tortured in front of all the cells. Relief guards come in, and after the other shift leaves, they lecture everyone about how much they hate Iraq and how many of their friends have been killed, then they machine gun everyone. Restart for these visitors. The other group of visitors, who had recovered their passports, is taken thru a checkpoint into an upper class enclave, which is completely beautiful safe zone and there they can meet and listen to Iraqi politicians, diplomats, carpetbaggers, religious spokespeople, Haliburton Office, US Embassy. It could be possible for people to recover passports for their friends who were taken to Abu Ghirab, and to go back and get them out of prison. Visitors can leave thru a checkpoint which leads to a village dedicated to the beauty and history of Iraqi culture, including a completely respectful Mosque dedicated to Moslem culture. This historical area can be entered without going thru the bus ride
if you have a passport.

2.Meet an Iraqi - a nightclub of modern middle eastern pop music where real young Iraqis are available for people to come meet and talk to. They may need protected identities.
A balance of viewpoints may be strived for.

3. Scales of Injustice - various scales piled with dead bodies, money, arms, starving children, a showcase for shocking and gruesome 3-D statistical display techniques.

4. Virtual Sex for Real Peace - that's right, lets get all those virtual sexworkers of all persuasion together for a pay for a peace orgy. Proceeds to moveon.org? or....?