[HN Gopher] Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)
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Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)
Author : samirillian
Score : 119 points
Date : 2021-07-11 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rugsofwar.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rugsofwar.wordpress.com)
| [deleted]
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| The way in which the design reverts to the norm is so profound in
| a way, even though it's the product of "mistakes". Entropy,
| evolution, and economies follow parallel patterns.
| beervirus wrote:
| It's like watching an image being compressed back and forth
| between two different lossy formats.
| malkia wrote:
| Content-aware fill
| t12 wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/UC1EX1V
| systemvoltage wrote:
| This is absolutely amazing, thanks for sharing.
| tyingq wrote:
| There's a comment on the bottom that links to various psy-ops
| leaflets the US dropped around Afghanistan that's also pretty
| interesting: http://www.psywarrior.com/Herbafghan02.html
|
| Edit: Also, more war rug photos:
| https://warrug.com/warrugs/styles.php?ids=37
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| The second example is almost haunting in its abstractness. While
| I understand the "copies of copies" nature of its existence, it
| nevertheless could be easily interpreted as a reflection of the
| "lost" nature of the retaliatory war effort, and the way the
| original attacks had been weaponized into ways that caused
| America and its values to erode and turn on itself.
| varjag wrote:
| It's like GANN output but without the "artificial" part.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| This is utterly fascinating.
|
| This game of telephone took 10 years and used a medium that can
| be copied with high accuracy. Makes me wonder how much of the
| original is still left in older literature which was told by word
| of mouth.
| 1ris wrote:
| (2011)
| jaredandrews wrote:
| These sort of artifacts are fascinating. It reminds me of a
| t-shirt I saw a man wearing in Thailand in 2012. I was in rural
| Isan and spotted a Thai man wearing a t-shirt with an image of
| the falling towers, above the towers were portraits of Bush and
| Bin Laden with text like "Bush VS Bin Laden".
|
| I never saw a copy of this shirt again in Thailand (which was
| strange because Bangkok has many, many t-shirt stalls filled with
| shirts that would be controversial in the west). I googled it and
| discovered that there were actually many variations on this
| shirt[0], but I never saw the same design as the one the man was
| wearing.
|
| Weirdly, this mystery was sorta solved for me this year. A Rudy
| Giuliani parody account I follow on Instagram posted an image of
| this controversial handheld game:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laden_VS_USA
|
| The image featured on the game is the exact same one I saw on the
| shirt. And yes, several people on YouTube have acquired and
| played copies of this game:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XNJM_Kamyg&t=142s
|
| [0]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=bin+laden+vs+bush+shirt&tbm=...
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| > controversial handheld game
|
| Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, an unlicensed Game Boy Color
| game called "Terrifying 9/11" uses the attack as a central plot
| point, despite the game essentially being a port of Metal Slug.
| The quality of the port is actually quite good which leads some
| to speculate that it's based on an unreleased port by SNK.
|
| It actually has perhaps one of the most impressive examples of
| video (or something close to it) I've ever seen on the Game
| Boy. I get the feeling that the game creators didn't mean to
| cause offense but simply wanted to use the attacks to add
| context or "plot" in other words.
|
| More info: https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/Terrifying_911
|
| Full gameplay (Chinese version):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq7Vlk2r-eo
| kumarsw wrote:
| I'd thought that these were related to the 9/11 quilts (though
| reading the article they turned out to be quite unrelated), at
| least one of which is still on display at the Pentagon. I've
| never found a good explanation of the quilt phenomenon - unlike
| the Afghan carpets which were driven by a mixture of anti-Taliban
| sentiment and good-old-fashioned commercialism, the 9/11 quilts
| seemed to motivated by a return to traditional values in the
| aftermath of tragedy.
| ferdowsi wrote:
| Quilting is a very Americana mode of remembrance. The African
| American community has a rich history of story quilting. Also
| see the AIDS quilt.
| ummwhat wrote:
| Given the history of quilts and infectious disease in the
| Americas (re: smallpox blankets), I always felt aids quilts
| were accidentally tasteless and, due to the sincerity of the
| good intentions behind them, kind of hilarious in a subtle
| dark humour way.
| azernik wrote:
| 1. The only documented case of blankets being intentionally
| used to spread smallpox was recorded simply as "blankets";
| there is no indication they were specifically quilts.
|
| 2. Quilting as a tradition in WASP culture is so long and
| dense that any association with smallpox is far from the
| first; quilts with squares commemorating deaths are very
| very common.
| jacobolus wrote:
| It's also unclear whether the gifting of smallpox
| blankets had any practical effect. Cf. https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt#Biological_...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| These were being exhibited at the Penn Museum around the time of
| the blogpost. I have a photo of one with some nicely rendered
| B-52s dropping bombs.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| There are many varieties of these carpets available for purchase
| on Etsy [1] including the design in this article [2]
|
| They're quite fascinating but I can't picture myself displaying
| it in my home, not sure who's the target market
|
| [1] https://www.etsy.com/search?q=afghan+war+rug
|
| [2] https://www.etsy.com/listing/1040160135/303-beautifully-
| hand...
| tokai wrote:
| I'm planning to buy one. Afghanistan and the war has been a
| constant element in my life since I was a child. They are
| interesting artefacts connected to the war, but not from the
| viewpoint of the west. A good reminder of the cruelty and folly
| of imperialism.
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(page generated 2021-07-11 23:00 UTC)