A month ago I had the pleasure of meeting the artist Shane Carroll at an opening at TART gallery. TART organiser, Anne Colvin, introduced me to him, and he told me about Panic In Detroit http://www.tartsf.com/PANIC/ , his upcoming online show for the gallery. I was thrilled to hear about the show, a mix of real-time data mining and xml driven flash animations. And I was equally thrilled when Anne asked me to write about the show for Shotgun, because Panic In Detroit is a wonderful example of how the technologies driving web 2.0 can be used by artists.

The strongest work in the show is Home Front http://www.tartsf.com/PANIC/states.html . Tallying US casualties (updated daily from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count), Home Front initially presents the viewer with a pale blue map of the United States and its territories. State by state, the image is punctured by white crosses representing that state’s dead, each of which leaves behind a gaping, raw, red wound. This graphic violence slowly engulfs the nation.

The overall effect is chilling, as the otherwise abstract numbers of the dead (a tally of this figure runs in the top left hand corner of Carroll’s piece) become visceral information akin to the data mapping we’ve all grown to read by second nature from the web.

However you may feel about the Iraq war and its sister, the war on terror, there is no way to watch this animation without a sickness growing in your belly and a sense of horror. It is the most touching, yet simple, comment on the war I have seen in the three years we have been in Iraq.

Another interpolation of the same data is run in March ’03 http://www.tartsf.com/PANIC/months.html which uses a similar format of data tally in the top right and crosses appearing and disappearing to represent American casualties in the war. This time the data is temporal rather than spatial. As the tally runs up the dead month by month since March ’03, the crosses disappear in puffs of smoke, leaving behind red, white and blue squares which slowly resolve into the American flag. Perhaps because it is more pointed and far less brutal than Home Front, this imaging of the data does not carry the same poignant power to hold a viewer in thrall.

There are two additional works in Carroll’s online show using real time data feeds to animate his criticism of the Iraq war. But rather than read my descriptions of them, follow the links http://www.tartsf.com/PANIC/iran.html & http://www.tartsf.com/PANIC/import.html to explore them yourself. Even if you are skeptical of politics in art, as I consider myself to be, you will find the ideas driving these works and the way they utilize technology well worth the visit.