We Are Romantic is an interactive video installation addressing the issue of global peace. Each viewer is invited to navigate a story through the interface, which is a bundle of flowers embedded with a pressure sensor.
The sentence ‘Hold onto the flowers as long as you can.’ implies keeping peace in your mind as long as you can. If the viewer holds the flowers as the sentence indicates, a video of an Iraqi girl drawing the same flowers appears on the wall. While she is painting the flowers, an air raid siren suddenly sounds outside, and she stops painting. Then the viewer sees the girl’s flower painting fade
and become surrounded by the rubble of a collapsed building where the girl once lived. Finally, it gives the viewer a moment to think about war and peace through watching a real-time video of her/himself overlapped with the well-known image of the air invasion of Baghdad.
The first letters of each of the words in the title, “We Are Romantic”, create the word “WAR”. I think we are romantic enough in our own communities, but we are able to choose peace only when we remove the superficial distinctions that we create between our lives and those of the “other”. Through this interactive work, I give viewers a chance to think about how, as individuals, we choose war or
peace in every moment.
(c) copyright 1996-2006 Byeong Sam Jeon. All rights reserved.
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