jk70-arin

A Plaintiff Speaks ” is an autobiographical reflection on the influences of mid 20 th century racial attitudes in the formation of the author’s own creative vision. The story is transports the reader back to Washington DC at a time when the nation is struggling with rectifying a national injustice rooted in Plessy v. Ferguson , and dramatically altered by Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka . To Americans living in the era of the Obama Presidency the Washington DC of 1955-1956 must seem like an alien land. Washington DC has always been a city fixed on the border between north and south, a pawn in the struggle of national ideas. Now a predominantly African American city, it had entered the Civil War a city full of slaves. On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, months before the Emancipation Proclamation issued on January 1, 1863. Not a state, but a Federal District, even today the people of DC are denied the benefits of s...

In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man , Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "The media is the message." One sixth the way through the 20th century, it was beginning to be apparent that content was affected by form. Form and media affect the formality and strength of words. Ephemeral medias only have lasting significant when captured or embedded in other media. The words I wrote in the frost on a wooden crate in the desert of Kuwait faded with the morning sun, but the image of the letters captured and replicated, digitally transform the ephemeral event. The letters written in frost can now be replicated and transmitted globally. As a series of ones and zeros, their image can be moved beneath oceans, bounced off satellite and transmitted from access points. The words, digitally encoded and transmitted globally, are still ephemeral, though reproduced and displayed on CRTs, LEDs, and plasma displays, their brief appearance is beholding to the whim of the vie...