Art

Digital War

Digital War
Digital War, 2010: Police try to help civilians wounded after an explosion in Kabul. Courtesy of Ryan Reynolds.
by Steven Boyd Saum |
Assistant Professor of Art Ryan Reynolds explores what it means to see—versus to truly understand.

"We live in a time when we see things that we don’t really experience,” says Ryan Reynolds—even though, through the media, “we have a sense that we are informed of truth or reality.” That sense of watching (or not) conflict half a world away informs Digital War, one of Reynolds’ recent series. The painting here shows the aftermath of the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2010. But the digital transmission has been fragmented and, on the receiving end, put together in a way that’s broken, incomplete.

Go further: See more images from the series and read more of what Reynolds has to say about it.

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Winter 2013

Table of contents

Features

To catch a thief

A young mathematician at SCU has helped equip police in Santa Cruz and L.A. with an algorithm that predicts where crimes might happen next. Is this the future of policing?

How to avoid a bonfire of the humanities

A veteran chronicler of Silicon Valley looks at why the high-tech industry needs—and wants—folks who know how to tell a story.

The play’s the thing

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Mission Matters

Heart of the matter

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All work and all play

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Got MOOC?

There’s global interest in a Massive Open Online Course in business ethics.