A video about the Iraq War, Maya Lin, love songs, the politics of escalation, and the logic of withdrawal.

BOOMERANG (digital video, 23:23 min, 2006) is a meditation on the paradox of memorial design in a historical moment characterized by the rapid proliferation of images of war and terror across the Internet. The video employs found footage of amateur video produced by American soldiers and Iraqi insurgents, clips from Middle-Eastern news sources, and excerpts from Freida Lee Mock’s award-winning 1995 documentary, “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision.” BOOMERANG also addresses the re-contextualization of popular music in service of the home-edited video montage format through an American soldier’s interpretation of Eminem’s “Soldier” (2002) and the artist’s appropriation of Aretha Franklin’s “The House That Jack Built” (1968). Anchored by segments of first-person text, the video constructs a space where Aristotelian Poetics, historical spectatorship, political identity construction, the failures of war, and digital media commingle.

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