EXAMINING POST-TRUTH CULTURE

Exercises in post-truth: a thorough examination of the fake news racket shows that the post-truth is a manifestation of degradation, distortion, and projection on a spectrum. At what point does something (the truth) become so distorted that it is no longer that thing? Is anything ever completely this (true) or completely that (false)? How far removed can a copy be from the original to still be passable? Visually applying these post-truth actions to everyday objects creates simple graphic representations of fairly complex ideas - the drawings / objects are not so much about the things themselves as much as what was done to them. 

APPLYING POST-TRUTH LOGIC

The Diomede Islands, which straddle both the International Date Line and the US/Russia border, are both here and there, then and now. They are the perfect location for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's next research mission. As an agency dedicated to creating the most accurate maps in the world, they are fully aware that any map is a projection based on a chosen set of data. Manipulate the data and you manipulate the visual map. Our world is assumed to be a perfect Ellipsoid of Revolution, represented by Mean Sea Level and used to calculate almost all maps and GPS coordinates; however, none of these things are completely accurate representations of the world we physically experience. Satellite Imagery, even, is a composite of false-color images collected over a span of years. Here, the NGA recognizes the slippages between their data sets and seeks to correct them by setting afloat a vessel inhabited by a single researcher. This researcher seeks to mitigate the slippages between our virtual model of the world and the reality of the physical Earth. Set afloat around the Diomede Islands, the researcher’s vessel disintegrates as the impossibility of his task becomes apparent.