Over one billion dollars in US foreign aid is earmarked for Egypt
every year in the President's Discretionary Budget. ( See:
www.deathandtaxesposter.com ) As tax paying US Citizens, we paid for
the armor, the sticks and overtime hours of the "Egyptian Zucotti
Redux Extreme" spectacle that ended 2011. These are frames taken from
videos that reached the outside world via smart phones. The frames are
stylized using a process known as tilt-shifting. The depth of field
and aerial diffusion of light is simulated to mimic photographs taken
of scale-models of the original subjects.

Reaching for a "toy-soldier" metaphor, the effect is meant to communicate the eerily detached sense of responsibility some feel
regarding the human cost our foreign aid may have carried. While aid
money outfitted the military/police force with shields and clubs and
armor, it also sped the proliferation of internet access through the
country and brought the social media within reach of the citizens of
Egypt. We are intertwined such that a direct causal relationship to
the violence we witnessed cannot be isolated, nor can a direct
relationship to the protests be easily drawn, but the feeling that we
are responsible in part for this lost revolution, can be felt in some
of us. I don't think anyone claims we are not related somehow to the
turn of events.

Those with the awareness and the consciousness required to see the
tragedy that the rampant, unchecked fear of others has wrought upon
the earth, over and over again, witness now that same fear of others,
driving its roots into a nation, before elections, before democracy,
the people's will to self-brutalize. To do whatever is necessary to
maintain power over others, pursuing the myth of security that lives
with the will for violence.