BigShinyThing

Not long after the 911 attacks, the US Government initiated a new research agency — the Information Awareness Office (IAO), to fund projects in advanced surveillance, including what came to be known as Total Information Awareness (TIA), a program so controversial that it was soon quietly scrapped.
Controversial? No-one seemed to anticipate that a secretish government project aimed at ‘total’ surveillance might make US citizens a bit twitchy. Hence, one assumes, no-one thought twice about the spectacularly Masonic identity chosen for the IAO. The logo was finally pulled, with the following explanation taking in its place on their website:

[...]because the IAO logo has become a lightning rod and is needlessly diverting time and attention from the critical tasks of executing that office’s mission effectively and openly, we have decided to discontinue the use of the original logo.

The original logo of course lives on in the hearts and minds of conspiracy theorists everywhere…

In a truly sweet campaign, the history teacher from Mill Hill County School in North London plans to travel on the tube from seven in the morning to seven at night throughout the month of August. He explains that the inspiration for his campaign came from an article in The Guardian about a woman finding it difficult to get back on the tube after the bombings:

On one occasion she completely broke down in the middle of a busy carriage and only one person went to comfort her. I thought it would be beneficial to do something that would make us notice and care about our fellow passengers a little more, the idea being that we make each other feel a little safer … My main aim though is for people to acknowledge fellow passengers, remain alert to unusual packages and incidents and generally take on a sense of ownership for the underground, which many of us depend upon each day. By doing so I feel that we can increase safety on public transport to a degree.

Dominic carries a counter with him to record how many people have waved back – so far 11,000 have done so. He is giving out a handwritten card to every hundredth person with a message thanking them for saying hello and wishing them a good day.

The only publicity he has done so far is with the Teacher Support site and is keen to stress that he is not interested in raising his personal profile. His campaign is testament though – in its small way – to the power of one.

His ideas appear whimsical but pragmatic – a truly human response to the horrors of our times. For instance, in response to 9/11 he proposed that the Twin Towers be rebuilt but with plane-shaped holes at the top enabling future attacks to fly through leaving the building unscathed.

Dedomenici’s proposal explains:

I have formulated a plan to resolve the potential economic conflict of building an Oklahoma-style memorial garden at ground zero – the most expensive piece of real estate on earth.

I propose that the twin towers are recontructed exactly as before – except for two airliner-shaped holes passing through the towers at the original points of impact. Within these spaces would be situated two memorial gardens.

To prevent the possibility of a simliar attack to that of September 11, all US planes would be fitted with tamper-proof technology so that if an aircraft was ever flown dangerously close to the towers again, it would automatically pass through one of the holes.

Dedomenici has also packed himself into a suitcase and been left outside Helsinki Central Railway Station for several minutes without being exploded by the security service.

Most recently, he built a 1980s style nuclear fall out shelter in one of the rooms of the Great Eastern Hotel in London. The luxury bath covered with cling film to prevent contaminated air seeping in is pictured. Dedomenici slept in his bunker for the 14 days of the ‘Stay’ art project, of which it formed a part, and wrote, “The installation toys with the aesthetic of the trashed hotel room, and should be oddly nostalgic, given the current era of asymmetrical warfare.”

Stay ran from 1st and 14th July and featured 14 artists’ interpretations of the hotel space. It coincided with the 7th July terrorist attacks on London.

More details about the artist and his projects are on his website.

From the first reports on LBC to the BBC website, main media providers were initally clueless as to what was going on and reliant on (and imploring for) those on the ground (ie ‘ordinary people’) to report what they saw via email, photophone and digital camera. Within 30 minutes of the tube network lockdown, blog search engine Technorati provided links to people’s personal reports. Bloggers who covered the atrocity saw their web access statistics skyrocket as the public voraciously sought first-hand breaking news.

Even after the rolling news services such as BBC 24 were in play, they needed images such as these to ground their reports. Also, these ‘amateur’ witnesses may yet hold the vital evidence and key images of the attacks that escape CCTV in the most watched city on earth. Flickr already has a dedicated page to the events and Wikipedia the most exhaustive (and accurate) account of what actually happened. Multiple media providers have since analysed how the blogs reported the story first.

Note: shortly after this was posted the UK police started appealing for footage and photos as evidence – the UK public is also providing its own panopticon.

The photo above was taken outside a bus stop in Hackney on 8th July 2005. It reads, in bright pink lipstick, “Do we have to pick sides?”