…what is our fascination with the pyrotechnic? The fireball combined with the populated street—in our movies, on the news, in our foreign policy, in imagined attacks on our ‘homeland’ and instigated attacks on game platforms—the huge explosion is a significant fetish—an idea made object we carry, run from, propagate and fear. We are complicit in its ubiquitous presence, co conspirators in its celebration of destructive force.
In the Huge Explosion project participants dissolve the separation, collapse the distance and carry a share of culpability–this time we deliver through surrogate into our own lives and neighborhoods this icon of our culture and our exuberance for the explosive.
Huge Explosion: Santa Fe Walks
The textually draped object carried aloft by participating citizens is stuffed with orange turkey feathers which are shed as fragments of itself as it is paraded past our thresholds, driveways and shops
Ohio walks
The entertainment and media market in the United States is expected to be worth over 720.38 billion dollars–On a global scale between 1.72 and 2.14 trillion. Every American household spends 2,202 dollars on industrial produced entertainment annually
The United States is the largest exporter of weapons producing 36 percent of the world’s military exports. The U.S. sold a total of $55.6 billion of weapons worldwide in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Every American household exports 442 dollars worth of military equipment into the world annually
World military spending totaled more than $1.6 trillion in 2015. The U.S. accounted for 37 percent of the total global expenditures on weapons. U.S. military expenditures are roughly the size of the next seven largest military budgets around the world, combined. –Every American household spends 12,714 dollars on arms annually
Our exports and consumption of Arms globally can be seen as defining aspects of this society yet most individuals have little access to agency in this authorship of our collective identity. Concurrently we have a perversely disproportional fear of explosions rupturing our bodies, families and neighborhoods. I as an American resident am unlikely to witness any explosion directly—the same cannot be said of the likelihood of my causing a citizen somewhere-else from experiencing first hand a huge explosion containing my authorship
duane mcdiarmid 