Brian Bizier-Looking Outwards-03

I’ll be honest, I’m not really what you’d call a “visual artist,” or whatever. I’m a writer who wanted to take a computer science class. In that sense, a lot of the work I’ve encountered because of this course has been a little over my head, both in terms of content and technique. That’s why I was happy to find this project: Grand Old Party. This fellow, Matthew Epler, the artist, took Gallup poll data for Republican candidates from the 2012 election. He visualized it as a simple line graph, and turned that line graph into the outline for butt plugs. Now, that’s a move that appealed to me on a number of levels. First, I understood how he did what he did. Second, given the traditional Judeo-Christian set of beliefs that defined (for some) the Republican party of 2012, and the fact that that particular set of beliefs doesn’t really incorporate butt plugs, I thought that this project had the perfect balance of humor, irony, and anti-authoritarian-punk-rock-fuck-you-icity.