What is The Cluster Project?
The Cluster Project is an online artwork that explores the thriving
universe of cluster bombs, drones, nukes, and other indiscriminate
weapons of terror. After its inaugural launch, the project will release
12 distinct works in four weekly installments, with more to come in
succeeding months. These videos, animations, illustrations, performances, interventions, and dataflow programming works, together
with a wry and inventive blog, will inspect our culture’s enduring
embrace and simultaneous disinterest with weapons and war.
In an age of incessant entertainment and distraction, powerful forces
easily conceal the true aims and impact of military campaigns, while
innocent victims of conflict go utterly unnoticed. Few know or want
to know the human cost of war. It is this combination of ignorance
and complicity that The Cluster Project seeks to confront, tilting at
the widespread alienation pervading an American nation that has
been engaged in war, with little pause, for more than 70 years.
The Cluster Project contains an array of potent works that straddle
the line between comic and tragic, surreal and concrete. Many are
designed to draw in and entangle users not typically inclined toward
online art or political sites. The project has been created with no
funding or institutional backing — just through the collaborative
efforts of diverse artists offering their talents and time to make socially
relevant art.
Bob Paris · Director · The Cluster Project · theclusterproject.com · parisikov@theclusterproject.com
The project launches in four installments with 12 diverse works.
Several more are planned and in production.
THE GIFT THAT
KEEPS ON GIVING
This hand-drawn animated introduction to
cluster weapons, from battlefield to boardroom, describes the physics of their explosions
and the harrowing legacy they leave behind.
CELEBRITY-CLUSTER INDEX
The ongoing gap between the reality of war
and the triviality of entertainment culture is
revealed using dataflow analysis. For public
safety, a daily warning alerts users to dangerous
levels of collective psychosis.
THE HUMAN KIND
Based on interviews with cluster bomb survivors, these animated portraits evoke their
unique stories and dreams.
O LEONARDO
How wondrous that history's most brilliant
and imaginative human being designed weapons of war and extermination. A hymn to
Leonardo da Vinci.
THE GOOD BOMB
Designers, artists, and students submit to this
gallery an everchanging array of Good Bombs
— wry, surreal, ingenious, and poetic —
ultimately presented in book form to the
embassies of nations holding cluster weapons.
ATK’S STATEMENT
OF ENVIRONMENTAL
STEWARDSHIP
This short and sacred video opera pays homage
to one of the world’s greatest arms producers
for its profound statement of “environmental
stewardship.”
THEY HAD NAMES
Amid a ballet of falling bombs, a litany of the
dead arises. This animated memorial to those
slain by cluster munitions is part of an ongoing
project to recover their lost names.
THE CHILDREN EXPERIMENT
In this revealing ethnography, hidden cameras
record the reactions of American children
when they encounter cluster bomb replicas in
their playgrounds.
TITANS
Who are the noble giants who run our top
weapons-producing companies, and what
gives them their sacred motivation?
INFILTRATION
Massively popular videos from YouTube are
infiltrated with unwelcome transmissions
from the world of weapons, war, and civilians
casualties in this ongoing gallery of disquieting
juxtapositions.
OUR PRECIOUS BOMBS
This short, patriotic film urges viewers to give
bombs the care, respect, and tender affection
they so richly deserve.
SALMA
A haunting animation tells the tale of a girl
living in a land recovering from war. After her
father dies in a cluster bomb accident, she finds
herself lost in a strange world.
theclusterproject.com