"Collateral Assets," an interactive documentary web project by Deb King

Deb King is a dedicated online artist and publisher, with a background in dance and performance art, that works out of Detroit, Michigan. She is one of the few who successfully develops online publishing as a community-building practice, and not just as an attribute of new technologies.

"Collateral Assets" started in the wake of the World Trade Centre disaster and bespeaks the possible effectiveness of internet art to communicate where other forms cannot. This work is high-concept and low-tech, utilizing email, digital photography, audio, and text to speak volumes about the political makeup of political identity. Moreover, it is a message about war, geography, and power.

The text begins: "These two past weeks have been a horror. Our vulnerability--the frailty of every life of all species on this planet--looms before us once again. Media bows to and embraces constant syntactic mutations, transforming human tragedy into nationalistic spectacle. We bow our heads. If this proposal offends or insults, my apologies ahead of time. I merely want to present a basic fact demonstrated so horrifically by the present world situation."

In a basic grid of sixteen images that blink on and off to the subtle rhythm of haunting, contemplative music, the interface greets you with a systematized portrait of dozens of ordinary people, each holding or standing near a handwritten sign of their own making, which reads "collateral assets" --a military term "used to indicate specific civilian populations," according to the project text.

The holding of descriptive text by individuals, photographed largely as snapshot portraits, evokes the many hopeful images of the missing people hung on fences and walls in lower Manhattan during 9/11. Yet, such semi-official or official-looking practical photography could be those used for police lineups or in the evening news, especially of the criminal or the victim, commonly
broadcast as the blurry faces of Middle-Eastern-looking terrorists or missing children.

Intermingled with these portraits of "collateral assets" are images from 9/11; images of the rubble, corpses, and war and its ever-present horror. Which war-induced disaster? Does it matter? They are photographs in living color. They are recent and we recognize them as such. We know so well the media; what war looks like; and whom it affects. The photo-grid beats like a heart to the audio. In a sidebar, you can read how to participate in seven languages and click on the links to find out how to add your own photo to the mix. When you proceed to this step, all sound abruptly stops. The audio and the pictured life form the piece in silence.

Web-based art can be audio-visually powerful. Yet that's simply the manner in which this project is constructed -- a collection of images of people from all over the world (in their loss? in their pain?) he images are unified in a grid, collected by exchanging emails with the artist or uploading ready-made signs and images. This is the creative process; and by itself it speaks about global community, not as the hackneyed ideal-types of "cyberspace" but of a multicultural, mixed racial and multinational population.

The power of this piece is its accumulation across borders and boundaries. It is the power of internet communication to the work itself: The seeing of the normally unseen, yet the surprising strength of its "talked about" populations in cyber-arts culture. It demonstrates their absence in the discourse, while giving them a presence on screen. It's as if the all-too-white and anonymous signifiers of the net screen has opened upon another world entirely.

Is the message of the work, then, a contemplation on war? On war with its absence of human face? Its absence of certain populations, usually women, blacks, old, civilian from decision-making and from safety? From the destruction? Repetition of the phrase "collateral asset" reminds us of the phrase "collateral damage" that was used during the Persian Gulf War to refer to accidental civilian damage. As aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster and affiliations to previous battles, each with their own loss, their own history, "Collateral Assets"? has power as a statement of documentary art; one with purpose and critical life-force.


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