The new poster for Poster Offensive has been printed and delivered. Poster Offensive is an independent, non-partisan poster show, which utilizes the politically potent medium of the poster to showcase contemporary interpretations and critiques of political and social issues. There have been four Poster Offensives, the last of which coincided with the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

For previous Poster Offensive shows, I’ve examined datasets involving genocide, for this one I decided to examine the state of conflict minerals in Africa and our dependence on them for high-tech gadgets, computers and other detritus of daily life. Cassiterite, which is the mineral I write about in this poster, is actually being touted as a green solution to tin and other more harmful minerals. I was having trouble envisioning data for this piece, so instead looked at interweaving two narratives which is a technique I’ve used in a couple pieces – most recently Neighbors. The narratives here show two perspectives of artisinal mining through the eyes of a pro-mining marketing piece, and those of a mine porter. The poster was screen printed using silver and dark red representing the mineral and the blood shed in the pursuit of said mineral. The poster is then printed with a varnish coat overlaying a re-interpretation of the Congolese coat-of-arms. The poster is printed on a heavy cover stock from French papers. Much love out to Lucas Richards for the printing.

Here’s a nice shot of the poster plus a detail shot.

Most of these are for sale at the Complete website.

Here are some of the posters done for past shows.

Title: Can You Hear Me Know?
Print method: 3-color screen print, 19″ x 25″
Quantity: 50
With the ever increasing preponderance of high-tech gadgets, our reliance on scare minerals has become more apparent. Many of these minerals,  cassiterite, coltan and tungsten, are found in regions of the world torn apart by violence. Much of the mining is done by those caught in the middle of these conflicts, and often at gun point. In our truly global economy, mining endeavors are not carried out by one government or corporation, but by multi-national conglomerates. This poster looks at the two sides of the situation in war-torn Congo, an epicenter for conflict minerals, at a government hungry for foreign investment in order to rebuild its lagging infrastructure, and a simple miner struggling to survive.

According to the organization Genocide Watch, the crime is currently occurring in over three dozen countries.

The Genocide Project is a multi-part artistic exploration of modern violence begun in 2005. Several pieces have been completed including an installation (Neighbors), two photographic series (Loss and Weapons), a poster edition (Never Again) and a dual-channel video (Neighbors). Pieces under development include examinations of confession under duress, specific examinations of genocidal regimes including Cambodia and Darfur, and several new photographic exhibitions.

The installation Neighbors from the Genocide Project contains two videos. View the 6 minute combined video in Flash format.To view the video, simply click on the image above to start playing. If the video doesn’t start playing when you click, you’ll need to download the latest free player.

Neighbors is the first in a series of works I have been developing that examine genocide. While the conflict in Kosovo provided the initial inspiration for the piece, the characters represent archetypes in any genocidal conflict – aggressor and victim, soldier and citizen, majority and minority. By removing all sense of time and place the piece presents the face of genocide as universal and timeless.

Genocide doesn’t happen here. Throughout history, every country and every people has repeated this to itself.

Genocide and genocidal regimes are always described in black and white – questions of good and evil easily explained, as there is always an apparent victim and a complicit people. The truth is never so easy and there exists a multiplicity of grays. With the piece Neighbors, I hope to reveal some of these subtleties.

I have included on this site several items from the current exhibition including photos, video stills and press materials. I will continue to add photos and documentary video to the site as I gather it over the next few weeks.

The installation contains two videos. View the 6 minute combined video in Flash format.To view the video, simply click on the image above to start playing. If the video doesn’t start playing when you click, you’ll need to download the latest free player.

Several items are available for download including the exhibition resume (doc, pdf), the exhibition postcard (pdf). High resolution are available for the press by contacting me with a request. A DVD containing the videos found in the piece and a brief documentary are also available. If you are interested in other showing this piece or in learning about other works in the genocide series, please contact me.

We see ourselves as individuals, yet in the end we are categorized, niched and reduced to our basic demographic makeup.

Market segmentation conveniently breaks us up into groups, clusters, lifestyles and niches. Am I Patrick Maun, artist, or simply one of the VALS 2 Systems’ Actualizers (a healthy 8% of the U.S. population), which also pegs me as an APT High-Brow Puritan, psychographically speaking (a healthy 8.1%). All the while living in the #10 PRIZMS cluster, aptly called Bohemian Mix Neighborhood, much like the 1% of my demographically similar fellow Americans.

For the past ten years, I have worked in both advertising and design. During this time, I have come to both admire and fear marketing. I have utilized targeted demographics to sell everything from luxury cars to cat litter. I have sat on the other side of the glass in countless focus groups, reviewed numerous systems of segmentation, and designed to “enhance brand equity”.

The eight videos were combined into a brief single-channel video. To view the video, simply click on the image above to start playing. If the video doesn’t start playing when you click, you’ll need to download the latest free player.

Documentation plays an important role in the piece. A large frame hung on the wall and contains computer generated wireframe and rendered images, while text illuminates the idea of the creation process as ‘virtual’, that is, existing only as thoughts and ideas until they are manifested in physical space.

In 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell’s voice successfully reached Watson in another room, subjectivity itself was in effect altered — an alteration that is now so commonplace that we take little notice of it. When the first photographic portraits were made in the mid-nineteenth century, the results were often so startling that many of the images were ordered destroyed by the sitters. We also know that when Europeans took their cameras to other lands, they encountered people who felt the making of such an image of the self was tantamount to stealing a soul.

Maun’s The Safety of Damocles explores the acceleration of this vulnerability and malleability of identity in the present digital age. The piece presents three video monitors, one large and two small, suspended together from the ceiling. The large monitor displays body parts commonly and scientifically used in identification — teeth, eyes, hands and fingerprints. Superimposed over this image is text and visual data, such as graphs and statistics, that offer another form of identification.

The small LCD monitors, shielded by hand-crafted wooden casements, allow only one viewer to look at their images at a given moment. Upon looking in at one of these monitors, the viewer confronts an image of him/herself peering into the wooden shadow box. This image is produced by a surveillance camera mounted above the monitor. The second small monitor continuously, and confusingly, plays taped images of others looking into the first monitor. In the space, the viewer is surrounded by ambient sounds of technology, including modems connecting, low drones and clickings, and telephones dialing. This array of images, sounds, and experiences reveals the matrix that is identity in our age at once configured by so-called “original” experience, information, and technological reproduction.

This array of images, sounds, and experiences reveals the matrix that is identity in our age at once configured by so-called “original” experience, information, and technological reproduction.

Ultimately this work asks questions about the possibility of retaining a notion of authenticity in the face of such routine shifts in identity. The title, The Safety of Damocles, refers to an ancient contemplation of the precariousness of power and happiness — two elements certainly tied to identity. Damocles, a courtier of Dionysius the Elder (c. 430-367 BC) of Syracuse, Sicily, once remarked to his sovereign about the grandeur and happiness of rulers. Later, Dionysius placed Damocles beneath a sword suspended by a single horsehair, thus demonstrating the vulnerability of all identities and destinies.

For Maun, the question of the safety of our identities is neither new nor intrinsically connected to technologies. Rather, the new technologies he examines revivify stories like that of Damocles for us, highlighting, as Dionysius did, the need for heightened self consciousness about the very nature of our identities and the ever present instability of them.

The Safety of Damocles was made possible by a grant from Intermedia Arts and the Jerome Foundation. The piece was presented as part of Art in Space XI in 1997/98. Also featured in this exhibition were new works by Stephen Mohring and Ana Lois-Borzi.