A Preponderance of Evidence is a multimedia reflection on the subject of climate change. Urban images of people, traffic, and dwellings are juxtaposed with rising seas and melting glacial ice. An animated graph from NASA displays the impact of greenhouse gases (mostly from the energy industry), compared to innocuous, natural phenomena — e.g., orbital changes and volcanic activity. Highlighting the relationship between humanity and the natural world, a lorry confronts an elephant, and a solitary girl stands against a backdrop of vast prairie. We hear sounds from modern life; text from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, translated into multiple languages; and a melody, sung by one of the few remaining right whales in the North Atlantic, accompanied by a chamber choir.
Operation Deep Pockets contemplates the decisionmaking of a curiously loud, arrogant President of the United States. In August of 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson made a series of phone calls to direct airstrikes in Vietnam, and to order trousers. In Operation Deep Pockets, we hear audio derived from those phone calls, while wartime images punctuate the president’s dialogue with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
On November 29, 1864, when the sun came up over a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp at Sand Creek (in present-day southeastern Colorado), most of the men were away for a hunt. United States Army Colonel John Chivington ordered five battalions — with more than six hundred soldiers — to attack the camp. Over two hundred victims were slaughtered as they desperately sought cover in the vegetation near the creek. Most were women and children.
Captain Silas Soule ordered his men not to fire. Soule later contributed eyewitness testimony to the subsequent Army investigation, which led to Chivington’s resignation. Five months after the Sand Creek Massacre, Soule was assassinated in Denver.
In November 2014, on the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper issued a formal apology to the victims’ descendants.
A recurrent dream while driving west near Sand Creek juxtaposes images from the massacre site with scenes from modern Denver. The sounds are derived from Sand Creek wildlife; a rifle from the period of the massacre; Governor Hickenlooper’s apology; Chippewa teenager Matene Strikes First reading “from Sand Creek,” by Pueblo Acoma poet and ASU professor Simon Ortiz; and California College of the Arts Professor Caroline Goodwin reading “i will not say,” her poem about the role of her great-great-grandfather, John Evans (Colorado’s governor at the time of the massacre).
email: chris [at] chrismalloy [dot] ca