I recently completed a short piece entitled "DROUGHT", for The Destroyer Magazine.I also created a cinemagraph to accompany it.
A cinemagraph is "a still picture in which a minor and repeated motion occurs."
I created it with the Echograph app. after recording the video with a friend's camera.
I then photoshopped the computer screen into the picture.
DROUGHT
For 5 years I have occupied a one-bedroom studio apartment attached to the back of my landlord's home.
My office is in my kitchen, and my kitchen is in my bedroom.
Every morning, groggy and unshowered, I sit down at my computer desk and catch up on the latest news feed. One-click activism. I sign petitions in a blink. I share articles to raise awareness. The problems of the world are conveniently reduced to digestible sound bytes from entertaining celebrity spokesmen so that I can get back to Hulu, Netflix, YouTube.
"The world's a mess. When are people going to wake up?"
Out my window is my landlord's yard, a landscape of unfinished projects and accumulated "now-we'll-have-it-when-we-need-its.”
A sprinkler sits in the center of the patch of dead grass. It lost a fight with the landlord’s dog and doesn't rotate any longer.
But each morning the digital watering timer still goes off, and the sprinkler shoots a weak arc of water into the same patch of dirt. Day after day, the water pools and drowns the lawn. The rest of the yard, a needle bed of dried grass, dies of thirst.
"Terrible. They really need to fix that."
