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With this poem, Bigelow’s flair for satirical humor is aimed at the world of presidential politics. Our speaker is a president who transformed the world through a series of measures in the areas of international relations, economics, health care, information science, language, race, government, and more. The measures and their outcomes were simultaneously idealistic, absurd, funny, critical, and surprisingly achievable.
As a multimedia work of e-poetry this is richly layered: photographic images of federal office buildings representing different parts of the United States government serve as meaningful backgrounds for words appearing on the screen, one at a time (in a style popularized by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries). Two more layers enhance the experience: hip music that helps shape the tone, and using large words as windows to a layer of iconic cinematic animations.
The though-provoking finale deepens the irony by several orders of magnitude and drives the message home with its very last word.
Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show
