Take a Bullet for This City
walther ppk 9mm, mechanism, raspberry pi, 2014
In the middle ages, townspeople relied on the town crier to provide them with official pronouncements. “Three o’clock and all is well” was the original form of open data available to city-dwellers, marking time and, in the night, assuring them of safety in their streets.
In New Orleans, there have been, as of this time of writing (September, 2014), 2262 calls to 911 reporting a “Discharging Firearm” since January 1st. The bulk of these shootings occur at night, on weekends, and in the wee hours of the morning. In much of this city, this data tells us, though it may be three o’clock, all is not well, and hasn’t been for a very long time.
Take a Bullet for This City is a proof-of-concept for a piece that could serve New Orleans, or any community plagued by gun violence. A simple computer-driven mechanism pulls the trigger of a gun loaded with blanks in response to a shooting in the city, ejecting a spent cartridge into a vitrine that accumulates empty bullets. The noise and flash of the gun provides an alarm that is itself meant to alarm; the vitrine resembles a wishing well, only it represents wishes taken away, not granted. This piece is hard data in both senses of the word: it is based on facts; facts that are, by their very nature, intended to hurt us.
In the iteration created for Guns in The Hands of Artists, Jonathan Ferrara's incredible group show timed to coincide with the third iteration of PROSPECT: New Orleans, a Walther PPK fires on a schedule based on the shootings reported by the public to the NOPD a week and twelve hours ago in time, commemorating, a week later, violence that is so common as to be quickly forgotten as individual occurrences. A visitor to the gallery at 10am on Sunday is hearing the shootings of 10pm the Saturday before. These time-shifted events are intended to alarm, marking time by sudden bursts of violent noise followed by the ever-rising tide of spent cartridges at the sculpture’s base. This piece could listen to any city, and it could run for years, and it belongs, perhaps, out-of-doors. The new town crier, but in reverse; all will be well only when this gun finally falls silent.
