Friday, March 25, 2016

Progress

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 1)

A passage from Tisdale's "Three Years Behind the Guns" (part 2)

Working on patterns as backgrounds for the banners...



Tisdale's book tells about his experiences serving on the Olympia. I've been mining it (and other period writing) for text to encode on the banners...

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Friday, March 18, 2016

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Bullhorn politics

So for some time I've been compiling research on how racist groups communicate their messages in the public sphere. I've spent a lot of time on the SPLC website, on the ADL site, and even a few hate groups I have tracked down. My assumption - valid until this election cycle - was that publicly displaying one's racism was a risk to these people, and that the symbols they used to telegraph their views was an essential adaptation to a world with which they are out of step.

Boy. Am I an idiot.

This has been driven home as candidates on the right have abandoned the dogwhistle for the megaphone. There are a thousand regrettable examples, but I want to just looks at this one for a minute. I don't know journalist Tom Cahill's work at all, or follow usuncut.com, but I appreciate his eye. In a story that ran on March 17, 2016, (picked up by Gawker...I know, I'm still in the depths here, but that's where this stuff happens some times) Cahill pointed out that PBS Newshour ran a story on Trump's popularity in the south on March 15 in which they spoke to (and photographed) a person named Grace Tilly and members of her family. Cahill (and others) observed that Tilly  had some prominent tattoos - one of a Celtic cross and another of the number 88. In certain contexts these signs are associated with white supremacist groups. Tilly, according to PBS, denies any white supremacist or Neo-Nazi allegiances and claims, "are connected to her family’s Celtic religious beliefs".

Is this some form of plausible deniability? I think it's hard to imagine - based on the data in the story - that the Tilly family represents a model for racial tolerance in 21st century America. Another member of the Tilly family interviewed in the piece, Pete, complains about, "all these protesters and all this stuff, and people saying [Trump is] racist" and specifically goes on to mention Black Lives Matter, before performing the signature move of racists everywhere and denying the value of race as a subject. Ms. Tilly's claim about her Celtic ancestry may or may not be true, but it tracks terribly close to the going mantra of 'heritage not hate' behind which hate now tends to hid.

So what we have here is someone who waves the (coded) flag and, when confronted on it, refuses to take responsibility for the message that's being sent. (I have considered the possibility that Ms. Tilly went to get tattoos that would celebrate her cultural identity that she thought had no meaning other than the one she intended. That is a very remote possibility given the popularity of number codes like 88...which, so far as my research has gone, has nothing to do with Celtic myth and are widely known among tattoo artists).

And this is a parent who kept her 11 year old home from school, "so that he can see democracy in action."

Grace, for the love of God, let your kid go to school. Don't do us any more favors. Please.

Saturday, March 05, 2016

Concordance table


"Oh the discrimination of flags and pennant! Some day [...] I will go to the flag locker [...] study them out and write a descriptive poem about them. A flag that means yes at the main truck means no on the after gaff."
L. Tisdale, Three Years Behind the Guns, 205
Abbreviation
Text
1917 Code
BTW
By the way
HAD, HAS, or HAVE (the person indicated) he not...
FUD
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Bandit
IRL
In real life
Cistern
OMG
Oh my God
Handspike
SOL
Shit out of luck
At (the time indicated) we were off
TMI
Too much information
Plates (crockery)
WTF
What the F*ck
By steamer

Friday, March 04, 2016

Maybe we're getting some where...

I still think it needs to be clouds of text...

Wednesday, March 02, 2016

Working...

I started thinking of the composition as one long banner after visiting the Olympia a few weeks ago. My original suggestion for a site wasn't workable, so we are now on a lower deck, near the captain's cabin (and its large guns...)

As I have tried to hone in on a message, I have been increasingly overwhelmed by the range of the codebook. It seems some how not fitting to have a single message...or even a single code. I have been peppering these latest images with Morse.

Here there are texts at various scales and saturations of color...I like the way the gray carries the white of the hull up on the upper decks...
This one is getting a lot of different messages into the mix...I'm not satisfied with the organization of it, and may go back to the units defined by the stanchions of the deck rail.