Informing Minds One View at a Time

By Ben Meade

It is easy to be indifferent about things a world away when they don’t affect us personally. One Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts professor is trying to change that.

Bob Paris, an associate professor of kinetic imaging, has developed a website featuring experimental video to raise awareness of a global issue that affects thousands of lives every year.

“The Cluster Project” is an online collaborative artwork that surveys the universe of cluster bombs, drones and nuclear weapons and confronts what he and other contributors see as the casual acceptance of civilian casualties around the world.

The site features animated survivor accounts, documentary and propaganda films, commentary and articles from around the world.

“It’s about the idea that there are weapons that are really threatening innocent people around the world, and that we should start becoming disengaged from that process,” Paris said. “It’s something significant but invisible, the normalization of the targeting of innocent human beings.

"It just doesn’t occur to us in day-to-day life. I think that we need to be aware of this deep, immoral process we’re complicit with.”

Combining interviews with innocent civilian victims from Serbia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Croatia told over striking animation, the videos in the “The Human Kind” segment show how cluster bombs have affected their lives and communities.

“It’s not about traditional, stereotypical images that push people away,” Paris said. "Hopefully it’s more subtle. It tries to strike a common chord. We’ll start identifying with these people. That identification is key to any kind of social change.”

Paris also uses documentary filmmaking on “The Cluster Project” with “The Children Experiment,” which uses replicas of cluster shells as props to show how easily unsuspecting children on a playground are drawn to them and mistake them for toys.

The project has been a four-year on-again, off-again labor of love for Paris and collaborators.

“When I started, I said, 'I’m going to show you can do a really interesting online political art project that’s high quality, that’s extremely compelling, and there’s no money and no one involved is getting paid,'” Paris said.

He believes that by using various mediums to engage followers he can raise awareness in a way in which he feels other political artwork falls short.

“It’s really about trying to create a work that brings in a wider, more diverse audience,” Paris said. “That’s something a lot of political artworks don’t do. They do frequently preach to the choir a little bit.”

So far the website has 12 videos completed and available, with another eight in production.

The site has been received well by viewers, and the animated video “The Gift That Keeps on Giving” was viewed 12,000 times in its first 24 hours on Reddit.

Paris hopes that by adding more videos and commentary he’ll be able to keep current viewers involved, while adding new followers.

“This project is an ongoing experiment,” Paris said. “Just because I’ve launched, these works aren’t finished. I’m starting to realize they really haven’t started yet. Our hope is that it can be strong, meaningful and interesting. You can only feel the work is strong enough if it has positive valences and emergences, but it’s a process. It’s a step in how you alter social consciousness even a bit; it’s a shard in effecting people’s attitudes and opinions.”

Paris’ work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Image Forum in Tokyo and the Recontres Internationales in Paris and Berlin.

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