viz.

Although this story has been in the news a while, I thought it was worth comment because of the recent visual response that has been generated on the internet.

First, a reminder of what happened (thanks to Wikipedia for the information): on Jan. 31, 2007, some members of the the Boston police force interpreted some electronic, guerrilla marketing devices for the movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters as bombs. The city closed down bridges and shut down the river to boat traffic. In the ensuing fallout, video artists Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested and the president of Adult Swim resigned over the incident.

Most reporting has followed the lead of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who called the incident “outrageous” and attributed it to “corporate greed.” In the Wall Street Journal, Kelly O'Keefe, director of executive education at the Virginia Commonwealth University Adcenter, called the campaign “irrational,” “inexcusable,” and a “significant blunder.” But not many in the mainstream news have pointed out that the real problem was that officials in Boston couldn’t tell the difference between a bomb and a Lite Brite. I’m not saying we should disparage the good people of Boston—they had a strong motivation to cover their asses in this case—but attributing the problem to the makers of the devices seems a tad ridiculous.

Although there is much that could be said about Berdovsky and Stevens’s news conference where they failed to take the situation seriously, I would like to focus to online reactions to the way the incident was reported. An overwhelming number of flickr photos tagged aquateenhungerforce fall into three major categories: images of jokes associating the show or its characters with bombs (the eponymous example is the “ATHF is the bomb” t-shirt), images that show people posing with the devices, images that show the details of the devices’ design, and images that show the devices in public spaces.

While the first two types are examples of individuals snubbing their noses at the authorities who dubbed these devices “bombs,” the effect of the latter two types—those that show the design or depict them hanging in public—is to mock the notion that they could ever have been interpreted as bombs in the first place. Looking at the photos shows that they are clearly not dangerous, nor are they placed like bombs (they are not hidden). The emergence of this argument is even more striking when you realize that the purpose for posting most of the photos was often to either show that the individual who took the photo “found” a device (after the media uproar, they were selling on eBay in the low four-figures) or to merely illustrate how the devices work. The lesson: images make unintended arguments.