Aurora, an 8x10" mixed media painting about HAARP
Today I started on a painting from a photo of the mission district. Realizing that I had an ice cube’s chance in hell of getting it finished today, I decided to knock out another mixed media painting for my daily piece. There are a few specific bands I prefer to listen to while I’m making art- Radiohead, Muse, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are my favorites- it’s as if their music somehow attunes my brainwaves to a special frequency that aids the artmaking process.
While listening to Muse today, I thought of their live album & DVD, HAARP. Muse is particularly sociopolitical in many of their songs, and this reference to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Alaska is no exception. So I used that as my jumping-off point while rifling through paper materials.
“Aurora” includes a dictionary page, Nancy Drew page, sewing patterns, atlas snippet of the US/Canada border & Alaska and a table about “discharge through gases” from an old physics book.
What is this HAARP, you ask? You can see what Wikipedia has to say about it here. There’s a lot of opposition to this program because they’re being pretty willy-nilly about messing with our ionosphere. Which is kind of a big deal seeing as how it protects our planet and all. 😉 Curious? You can watch a good documentary called Holes in Heaven, narrated by Martin Sheen.
P.S. Muse- if you ever find this post by some miracle of the universe, thanks for the inspiration. If you happen to need some artwork for an upcoming album, I would love to work with you. 🙂 /end fantasy tangent
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