seen.

stopped by the pulse art fair on sunday. a bunch of art galleries from around the world showcased some of their artists, trying to sell off a few pieces to people with money. since i'm not one of those people, i got in for a discounted price and just looked around.

i caught a few interesting pieces, including some work by my perennial faves travis millard and mel kadel. i also found a gallery from the philippines - one of their artists actually did a kind of kitchy, off-the-wall photo series of former first lady and shoe-hoarder-extraordinaire imelda marcos.

one piece i found particularly intriguing was "hindsight is always 20/20" by r. luke dubois. i didn't actually pay too much attention to them at first - they were lining part of the soccer field at pier 40, where the fair was being held, and i only glanced at them on my way in.

as i was leaving, i took a closer look at them and i later looked them up online. info can be found here and here's the basic premise behind them:

HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20 takes the State of the Union addresses from each presidency and sorts them according to word frequency, generating a Snellen eye chart for each president, with the more frequent words in larger typeface at the top of the chart and the less frequent words towards the bottom. The 66-member word lists for each presidency are designed to draw out the most unique and contemporary vocabulary used by the president in his speeches; words that appear in the majority of speeches (e.g. "united", "states", "the", "his", "her", "am") are cancelled out; words that appear in a few Presidents' speeches are given to the President who uses the word the most. As a result, the list contains words that are not only important in a given presidency but also au courant in terms of lexicon and contemporary context.

i thought it was pretty awesome idea. the pieces were also on view at dnc last year.

here are a few:

franklin delano roosevelt


george w. bush

i couldnt find an image of the mckinley one - which had philippines as one of its biggest words (the top one being puerto - but not rico), but if you have a chance to ever see hindsight, i think you should.

anyways, i think looking at the different pieces and sorta of just taking in all the words together, since it's not in any kind of coherent, logical order, is pretty thought-provoking. makes you think about that particular's president's term(s) in office and how the u.s. was positioned in the world at that time. too bad my history isn't as good as it used to be - i need like a pocket timeline or something to fully comprehend it all.