19 people would put this sign in their yard.
Sign description:
The winner-take-all labeling of "red" and "blue" states exaggerates the political polarization of the United States. We're all purple state voters.
9 people would put this sign in their yard.
Sign description:
THE EXPONENT: SPRAWL (2008)
Installed in various yards on yard signs in Bloomington, Indiana. Sponsored by Your Art Here as part of Artsweek 2008
Speed was long considered beneficial, as was the idea of acquisition; both part of the dead mythology of progress, the modern promise of the industrial revolution known in the U.S. as the "American Dream." As this dream fades, we begin to calculate the liability within the human project; the lost lives, communities and cultures impacted, the extinction of species, as well as expanded environmental destruction. We find we historicize how the wealth and power of the U.S. was built through the appropriation of land and the extraction of resources and labor from others. If the driving force of speed is determinate of human change, as Paul Virilio suggests, then the entity of force defining a new global dominance is an acceleration, an expanding and consolidating system, a crystallizing, mobile and overriding force. This agency is the "exponent" that surfs waves of appropriation, growing in magnitude. The exponent is comprised of (infinite) desiring systems that compress the (finite) work of bodies and materials into virtual/abstract concentrations (power, wealth) in a global trajectory.
Corporate parties function under the dictum of exponential growth, forever reaching for more means of profitability. Debts accrue interest, “stimulation packages†abound, fat cells engorge, wars are mongered, populations increase and horizontal cities sprawl outward. The exponent culminates as a state where its limitations are set only by the terminus of the sustaining sources, perhaps the death of the system.
Time is compressed in the exponent and space is expanded. The process in suburban sprawl is a radical land use transformation of materiality. Whole areas are bulldozed and reshaped to support large-scale housing developments. The landscape is modified to support these structures and their use needs. Indigenous waterways are converted to cement glad drainage systems, or simple erased. Indigenous vegetation is replaced with plants that have different soil and water needs, leading to vast, unsustainable tracts that impact relational systems, particularly those of developing nations or nations that are being developed upon, harvested for their complex species-environments.
The contemporary manifestation of the new horizontal city embodies exponential appropriation and accumulation. The automobile lifestyle and the suburban growth are both exponential symptoms. Big box shopping, strip malls and SUVs in horizontal cities like Phoenix and Houston link together in the appropriation of organic systems of difference. The goals that we enact upon the environments we inhabit are vastly different than the subtle systems that have evolved relationally over time. Time is compressed in the suburban sprawl’s radical transformation of the environment. The landscape is reshaped to support these structures and their use needs.
Do we interpret these sprawling techniques as systems of the exponent, self-organizing, independent entities or agents that acquire vast amounts of human subjects and environmental resources?
32 people would put this sign in their yard.
Sign description:
"The earth is our playground, our mission is to preserve it"-Missionplayground.com