FACELESS
2016
Beeswax, wood, electrical components.
Installed: Tribeca Film Festival 2016, Alongside "the bomb" world premier; RISD Industrial Design Triennial, "We Start from Making," October 2016, RISD Industrial Design Gallery, "Nuclear Disarmament" January 2016.
The presence and behavior of the audience activates the lights. The heat from these lights melts the beeswax faces. The audience is complicit in the destruction of the piece.
ROLE:
Collaborated on: concept development, research and life-cast mold making. Fabrication, installation and copy writing.
Sole responsibility: Interviewed 9 nuclear disarmament experts; Lead materials and melt testing; All hardware and code for electronics and interactivity (built on Arduino platform); video (direct, shoot, edit), 3D modeling, welding assembly.
N Square – with backing from Ploughshares Fund, Carnegie, Hewlett Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Skoll – challenged a group of RISD graduate students to participate in their mission of reinvigorating the conversation around nuclear disarmament.
"FACELESS" is the result of McCurdy, Allison Davis and Erica Efstratoudakis taking up that challenge.
After WWII, The Marshall Islands had been entrusted to the U.S. by the United Nations as a “trust territory” for its protection. Instead, the United States used the territory as a nuclear test site, and detonated the equivalent explosive power of 1.6 Hiroshima-sized blasts, every day, for twelve years between 1946 and 1958. The people from the test atolls, Bikini and Enewetak, and the fallout atolls, Ronelap and Utirik, are still affected. Entire communities were indefinitely displaced from their homes, and birth mutations caused by radiation are still a prominent problem today. The nuclear testing occurrence on the Marshall Islands is just one example of the uncontrollable destructive proclivity of nuclear weapons. Their possession creates an unfair imbalance in power that places greater value on one life over another.
