Drums of War

Interactive Art

2003

Created during the US invasion into Iraq to gives viewers an auditory display of the popular media’s war coverage. Drums of War (DOW) logged newswire stories during that period of time, parsing them for mentions of war, conflict, and strife in numerous regions of the world. From this data DOW has generated a “war-likelihood” index for each day. Viewers were invited to plug small drums into a large map of the world. If the war-likelihood in that region was high, the connected drum beat quickly; if it was low, the drum beat more slowly. Plugging in a number of drums allowed viewers to compare the perceived chance of conflict in various parts of the world. A simple knob was used to dial back in time, enabling viewers to hear the ebb and flow of reporting over a few months. Setting the dial to “today” fetched realtime data directly from the web.