Flag for States of Damage
Above: Flag for States of Damage, Deshler, Ohio, US. Click to view larger images.
Flag for States of Damage is a live mixed reality work that merges a 3D flag with a video stream of the town of Deshler, Ohio in the US. Employing sentiment analysis, a process of computationally identifying and categorising opinions expressed in text, the flag is a visualisation of the most recent twenty-four hours of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. The analysis, however, is calculated with an awareness of President Trump’s interpretation of truth and lies, and how these are expressed in positive and negative statements. As such, the calculation is inverted on the premise that what is defined as good by the president may not be for the greater good.
Depending on the analysis results the flag blows left or right and correspondingly changes colour along a spectrum from green through yellow to red. In addition, the flag employs terminology from the Fujita–Pearson scale for tornados that state the potential damage statements by the president may have. The flag therefore is a form of scale, gauge or even warning system of the head of state’s current state of mind. Placed at the railway junction in Deshler, a form of ‘crossroads’ that run north, south, east and west, across the US, the work emphases the continually changing direction of the head of state’s statements and the cross-purposes he is frequently engaged in.
Above: A screen recording of Flag for States of Damage, Deshler, Ohio, US.