The Atomic Age and the Cold War will forever be associated with duck and cover drills in schools. Students were instructed to crouch down and protect themselves from impending danger- collapsed roofs, flying debris, the inevitable results of an explosion. Luckily for American school children, their rehearsals were all in vain. The Cold War ended without ever becoming warm.
There is a war on American soil today. Mass gun violence has sparked a need for children to prepare, once again, for the worst.
My partner and I created these images to draw comparison between the Cold War era drills and the modern day lockdowns. It is absolutely unacceptable to us to think that our nation’s children face the daily threat of violence and death, as they have in times of foreign wars.
These images were created using Photoshop and Google Drawings. Our process began by searching for historical and more recent images using a Google Image search. Images were added to a shared Google folder. Historical images were selected in order to draw the comparison between nuclear war and mass gun violence. These images were copied and modified in Photoshop using the live tracing tool. Text was drafted in a shared Google document. Ultimately, my partner and I decided to annotate the original text that had captioned these images. We believed this would strengthen the comparison and represent the urgency of adopting lockdown procedures in schools while at the same time, revealing with a sense of irony that the more circumstances change, the more they stay the same.
By recycling, manipulating and annotating existing digital media from a bygone era, we attempt to reveal the seemingly contradictory ideas that these drills are both necessary to perform and, at the same time, altogether futile. The use of red marker over stark, Banksy-esque stencil motifs adds to the narrative of “updating” Bert the Turtle for more “modern” times by attempting to show a “work-in-progress” approach to the images. They remain unfinished and merely sketches of what could be, not what is.
Duck and cover is a metaphor for how our society has confronted mass gun violence. Rather than reform policy, we double down on how we will respond to the incident itself. As we practice intruder drills with our students in schools, we are assuring them that gun violence will continue. The only preemptive measures our policy makers are willing to take are to mandate rehearsals without adequately confronting the source of this violence.
Bert the Turtle, while seemingly a relic of the Cold War, has never been more timely. This project is an act of civic engagement and protest through digital authorship.
Resources
Rizzo, A. (Director), & Mauer, R. J. (Writer). (2009, July 11). Duck and Cover [Video file].
Retrieved February 27, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60
There is a war on American soil today. Mass gun violence has sparked a need for children to prepare, once again, for the worst.
My partner and I created these images to draw comparison between the Cold War era drills and the modern day lockdowns. It is absolutely unacceptable to us to think that our nation’s children face the daily threat of violence and death, as they have in times of foreign wars.
These images were created using Photoshop and Google Drawings. Our process began by searching for historical and more recent images using a Google Image search. Images were added to a shared Google folder. Historical images were selected in order to draw the comparison between nuclear war and mass gun violence. These images were copied and modified in Photoshop using the live tracing tool. Text was drafted in a shared Google document. Ultimately, my partner and I decided to annotate the original text that had captioned these images. We believed this would strengthen the comparison and represent the urgency of adopting lockdown procedures in schools while at the same time, revealing with a sense of irony that the more circumstances change, the more they stay the same.
By recycling, manipulating and annotating existing digital media from a bygone era, we attempt to reveal the seemingly contradictory ideas that these drills are both necessary to perform and, at the same time, altogether futile. The use of red marker over stark, Banksy-esque stencil motifs adds to the narrative of “updating” Bert the Turtle for more “modern” times by attempting to show a “work-in-progress” approach to the images. They remain unfinished and merely sketches of what could be, not what is.
Duck and cover is a metaphor for how our society has confronted mass gun violence. Rather than reform policy, we double down on how we will respond to the incident itself. As we practice intruder drills with our students in schools, we are assuring them that gun violence will continue. The only preemptive measures our policy makers are willing to take are to mandate rehearsals without adequately confronting the source of this violence.
Bert the Turtle, while seemingly a relic of the Cold War, has never been more timely. This project is an act of civic engagement and protest through digital authorship.
Resources
Rizzo, A. (Director), & Mauer, R. J. (Writer). (2009, July 11). Duck and Cover [Video file].
Retrieved February 27, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqXu-5jw60