The Philosophy Behind the VT-Y Image
As I googled for background info and images in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, I was amazed at how many people had already produced images (tributes, parodies, etc.) Some of the parodies I found disturbing, frankly: Cho as the Terminator, Dirty Harry, etc. merely re-inscribed Hollywood's juvenile fascination with the well-armed loner. My decision to address the VT slayings through visual rhetoric emerged out of the discussions on Gregory Ulmer's online discussion forum, Invent-L. Those discussions pondered how such an event could be "imaged" as concept, or what Gregory Ulmer describes in Internet Invention as an "image of wide scope."
What most resonated with me in following these discussions (and many others in mainstream and alternative media) was the obscene availability of handguns in the US and how this condition, coupled with the glamour that American pop culture associates with handgun use, contributed to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. I produced VT-Y specifically as my "post" to that thread on invent-L. I wanted to use visual rhetoric to grapple with the issues raised on the list because those issues were largely "image-driven" and because an important objective of the list itself is "imaging/imagining"--thinking with images.
The "Y" in the image, of course, refers to the "Why?," but also to the shape of the "Y" as a switch or relay that instantly connects two disparate but related things, as Greg has articulated in his work, and as Will Pappenheimer, for instance, illustrated wonderfully in his "Wishing Y" project near Ground Zero. When my colleagues on the list began invoking the "Y," my memory flashed to a video image of Cho with his arms raised in the suggestion of a "Y." That connection ultimately drove the composition of my piece. The pile of guns (Walthers, reportedly of the same type used by Cho) at the base of the "Y" is my rather ham-handed way of making the gun-control argument. The pictures screened within the "Y" are obviously of the victims of the shootings. I worked in Photoshop, using images available on the Internet. The piece was conceived, researched, and composed within a matter of a few hours.
~ Stephanie Tripp, 23 May 2007