Hawker Hacker Herald addresses issues of labor and aspirations, access to technology, and challenges in communication. Terry Eagleton recognizes that “Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in the labouring ones.” "Hacker, Hawker, Herald" responds to this neglect through a series of digital collages and an installation consisting of three animation video projections.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations dedicated to eradicating rural poverty in developing countries, finds that 75% of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihoods. It is often overlooked that agricultural workers, especially women and children, need suitable tools to save time and energy and increase agricultural productivity. Available tools are often too few and inefficient, especially when they are almost always designed to be used by men. Hawker Hacker Herald is a visual meditation on the gaps between these practical needs and realities and the aspirations of workers in an increasingly globalized economy, illuminated through visual myth making.
Three video projections on adjacent walls include the following:
- The central horizontal image presents a series of female field workers standing on waves and hoeing the ocean. The splashes that their tools make on impact with the water drift upward in slow gentle arabesques. They become stars that cluster and bob along the gallery’s ceiling.
- The right projection features a girl who silently beckons the viewer to buy her wares — common stones. Her wares periodically float away and gather at the top of the wall, mingling with the central stars that spill across the corner of the room.
- On the third left wall is the image of a young boy in a quarry. He subsides by perpetually breaking stone angel wings into small pieces. The adult sledgehammer that the child uses sprays sparks that ascend and migrate to join the horizon of other stars. The stars that have collected along the ceiling of the central image migrate over time into the regions above the lone figure.
- The suite of digital prints evolved from high-resolution images from the video and photography sessions leading to the animation. The images were digitally manipulated for these prints that document and extend the work in static form.
Process
Source imagery was created through low-tech methods and processes. Miniature dioramas, tableaux vivants, shoebox still lifes, and surfaces and textures constructed from cauliflower, pebbles, plastic eagle wings, clay and petroleum jelly were fashioned to create cinematic experiences and images. These images were then digitally manipulated in hundreds of layers in Photoshop. They aspire to the hyper-reality of dramatic 19th century landscapes of the American sublime. Like Frederic Edwin Church, whose landscapes gave pictorial voice to the political, social, and cultural issues of his era, these digital collages speak to urgent contemporary conditions. Print outputs can assume a grandiose mural scale or a more intimate size.
Venues
Global Eyes, SIGGRAPH 2007Art Gallery, San Diego Convention Center, CA, August 5-9, 2007