Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed (March 1st)

Paul Chambers the 27 year old UK Accountant awaits the outcome of a High Court appeal against his infamous ‘Twitter Joke Trial’ for which he was initially convicted and fined. Chambers was ordered to pay a £1000 in fines and costs resulting from an incident concerning England’s Robin Hood Airport. During early January 2010, cold weather had resulted in disruption across northern England. Robin Hood Airport was one of many airports forced to cancel flights. Chambers intending to catch a flight posted a message on Twitter: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” Chambers was arrested by anti-terror police for making a bomb threat, after an off-duty manager at the airport found the message. Chambers had his mobile phone, laptop and desktop hard drive confiscated during a search of his house. He was later charged with “sending a public electronic message that was grossly menacing”. The conviction has been widely condemned as unfair, and referred to as a miscarriage of justice. The comedian and television presenter Stephen Fry has offered to pay Chambers’ legal bill.

Inspired by the Telegraph http://ow.ly/9drgr image source Carrentals http://ow.ly/9dqWj

Didn't immediately confirm the credibility of the threat (August 17th)

Officials with the Notre Dame de Lourdes, confirmed many thousands of Roman Catholic worshippers were evacuated from Lourdes in southwest France after a bomb threat. Benjamin Foussier, spokesman for the shrine stated the people calmly evacuated the site.  A Police bomb squad searched the area, but didn’t confirm the credibility of the threat, nor whether it found anything.

Popular Culture 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.