Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Daniel Ellsberg the 79 year old former US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post about the top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, has along with other demonstrators been arrested at a demonstration in support of currently detained whistleblower Bradley Manning outside the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico. Hundreds of protestors assembled outside the base where Bradley Manning is being held on dozens of charges relating to his leak of classified diplomatic cables and video to Wikileaks. The protestors primary concern relates to allegations of torture and punitive treatments being applied to Manning by his military jailors.

Inspired by Ben Nuckols ow.ly/4kwBn image source Jacob Appelbaum ow.ly/4kwEm

We don't discuss our techniques and tactics (December 24th)

Bradley Manning the 23 year old United States Army soldier who was charged with the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is held in solitary confinement at the Marine Corps Brig, having only one hour outside his cell a day, no access to news and is on a suicide watch. Manning had access to down load material from SIPRNet including the video of the “Collateral Murder” a July 2007 helicopter airstrike in Baghdad, and the 260,000 US government diplomatic cables that had been passed onto WikiLeaks. The United Nations’ office of the special rapporteur on torture based in Geneva, is investigating visitors reports that his mental and physical health was deteriorating as fears grow the US will apply a range of methods, including coercive pressure to extract a confession from Manning that Assange set him up as his agent of supply.

Inspired by Kellie Tranter and Bruce Haigh at @abcnews http://ow.ly/3uBJx

Political Arts | Ian Bunn Visual Artist

My digital art work is essentially politics and art. It’s about iconic people, places and events of our day.  Recorded visually through daily compilations of manipulated digital images, posted online and disseminated via online media and social networks. The works are diaristic in nature that metaphorically record a spectator’s experience of the contemporary digital age.  The resulting work intentionally has a painterly aesthetic acknowledging my historical painting practice.

Adapting Pop Art’s notion of mass media imagery into a context of the contemporary digital age, the work draws on a myriad points of reference. Utilizing fractured images to provide an allusion to the digital noise pounding away daily into our sub consciousness.  The work is essentially popular culture arts, diverging from the traditional Pop Art notion of a pronounced repetition of a consumer icon, instead this work focuses on the deluge of contemporary digital content. The compilation of the fragmented imagery is vividly distractive, not unlike cable surfing or a jaunt through Times Square.

This digital photo manipulation art work is premised on the basis that Pop art in its beginnings, freeze-framed what consumers of popular culture experienced into iconic visual abstractions. With the advent of the techno age, visual information circulates in such quantities, so rapidly and exponentially, that to comprehend a fraction of it all becomes a kind of production process in itself.  Hence this work considers fragmented elements of Popular Culture through an artistic and conceptual exploration of specific people and events of the day.

www.ianbunn.com