Yeah, we do, and we need more information than just these photos.

Thomas Energy, Environment

UNDER THE PLUME OF PERMITTING

Thomas East Chicago, Environment, Information Graphics, Ways of Seeing

Sometimes it takes a disaster like the Earth Day Disaster to realize our hometowns and our future have been colonized.

Thomas East Chicago Portrait Series, Economics, Energy, Environment, Infrastructure, Politics

via [ Information is Beautiful ]

Thomas Information Graphics

[ Skafish ]

Another by-product of East Chicago.

Thomas The Air I Breath, Ways of Seeing

via facebook. A chilling expression of what the Arizona Immigration Bill means.

Thomas Visual Culture

Bloody Oil from Felix Gonzales on Vimeo.

Thomas Energy, Environment, Tar Sands

[ www.ourwaterlife.com ]

A great flash site http://waterlife.nfb.ca/

Thomas The Water I Drink

via [ NPR ] “Oil Rig Explosion Could Cause Ecological Disaster” By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gerald Herbert/AP

Gerald Herbert/AP

NASA image of oil slick

uru

This Disaster Brought to You by BP

Thomas Visual Culture

There are other East Chicagoans locating East Chicago through map making.

More work.

Thomas Information Graphics

THE MONEY IS FLOWING AGAIN IN E.C. POLITICS

Yesterday, I produced some campaign literature for our precinct committeewoman.

Hopefully, I’ve been successful in communicating how contentious politics can get here. This year’s off-cycle election is especially interesting. Besides a few important county wide offices, this election will be remembered for the East Chicago committee person races. Everyone is expecting our Mayor, the Honorable George Pabey, to be found guilty sometime this summer, which would mean that the precinct committee people will appoint the next Mayor. So everyone is either getting into a race or trying to stack the races. Pabey is trying to stack the precincts with people loyal to him as is Hammond Mayor John McDermott and Mayoral hopefuls John Aguilera and Anthony Copeland.

<Interesting fact>

The Federal Prosecutors Office has had a central roll in initiating the last three changes in power here in East Chicago. Why such intense interest at the Federal level? Could the largest inland oil refinery and steel mills in the country have anything to do with that?

I wonder if this is how Oil and Steel get to vote in local politics?

- Just Asking

</Interesting fact>

Thomas East Chicago, Local

<buffer>

The art making practice of many artists keeps them squarely in the realm of “Art.” In-so-doing, they continue to function in society as the Artist with that identity intact, but for me that has not always been the case. With every foray that I’ve made into other disciplines I’ve found myself landing smack dab in the middle of the edge of that culture. The confidence that allowed me to make this foray very quickly dissipates into fear when I realize the commitment necessary to gain awareness threatens my ability to find my way back to the studio. It doesn’t matter whether I am studying philosophy, traveling, developing online learning communities, working in urban planning, advocating for my fenseline industrial community, raising children, or trying to maintain a relationship with my wife, at a certain point I’ve shifted my thinking so significantly that I threaten someone else’s identity of the artist and the reason for my foray. To be effective, the challenge is to find my way back through the narratives that control their perceptions of my identity. Ouch! or I can just keep doing what I do without the capitalization to do it.

Although I don’t know this to be really the case, each time I attempt to re-enter the art world I feel a little more distant and a little less accepted by it. I feel like the cameraperson or reporter who put down the camera or microphone and just started helping-out with whatever means necessary at that particular moment. Usually that has meant that I relied on some other aspect of our visual culture, but sometimes that has meant that I write a post in my blog, a position paper, a plan, or engaged in politics. And because I can’t remain steady or I wobble too much for those observing me from some distant art world, I must not be really contributing. I know, I know I have to market myself in manner that the art world recognizes. all I have to do is read Joanne Mattera’s Marketing Monday blog posts to understand that.

It is much easier to receive a thumping on the chest than to be ignored.

</buffer>

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” By Walter Benjamin (1936)

Preface

When Marx undertook his critique of the capitalistic mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx directed his efforts in such a way as to give them prognostic value. He went back to the basic conditions underlying capitalistic production and through his presentation showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself.

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken. Certain prognostic requirements should be met by these statements. However, theses about the art of the proletariat after its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would have less bearing on these demands than theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery – concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.

Read more…

Thomas Ways of Seeing

This is one way I wrap my mind around Tax season - and a way of seeing. Two days ago, April 13, one of the largest solar prominences in years erupted from the sun. The expanding cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth’s magnetic field around today, Tax Day, April 15th.

Thomas Energy, The Space I Occupy

Thomas Visual Culture

Thomas The Land I Use

Thomas Information Graphics, What I am Looking at

Last weekend I visited Vinton County to help my brother in-law run for county commissioner. The trip gave me a little education into this region of the country. - Phone Photos

Information on Vinton County via [ Wikipedia ]

Thomas Case Studies, What I am Looking at