The juxtaposed images don't immediately render themselves legible as "toxic" or "ruined," but I think this is part of the point. The accompanying text give the deeper history behind the two images and what the renovated Union Station has replaced. The clean architectural lines and bright colors of the new building hide the more sordid history of displacment and disposession behind the urban renewal project. These juxtaposed images thus ask the view to question what kinds of political and social maneuvers needed to happen Chinatown to transition into a different kind of space.
The juxtaposed images don't immediately render themselves legible as "toxic" or "ruined," but I think this is part of the point. The accompanying text give the deeper history behind the two images and what the renovated Union Station has replaced. The clean architectural lines and bright colors of the new building hide the more sordid history of displacment and disposession behind the urban renewal project. These juxtaposed images thus ask the view to question what kinds of political and social maneuvers needed to happen Chinatown to transition into a different kind of space.
The juxtaposed images don't immediately render themselves legible as "toxic" or "ruined," but I think this is part of the point. The accompanying text give the deeper history behind the two images and what the renovated Union Station has replaced. The clean architectural lines and bright colors of the new building hide the more sordid history of displacment and disposession behind the urban renewal project. These juxtaposed images thus ask the view to question what kinds of political and social maneuvers needed to happen Chinatown to transition into a different kind of space.
The now infamous photo of President Trump "dropping toxicity" is certainly held in stark comparison from the destruction of the photo on the left. The photo of the crushed car feels quite settled, concrete, immovable, while the photo of Trump implies movement. What does the juxtaposition of fixed and moving objects tell us about how toxicity functions?
The juxtaposition of the man on the bicycle and the truck conveys the sense that toxics are ubiquitous--both interrupting and incorporated into the quotidian flows of everyday life. Exposure often provokes waiting. From the ways industrial activity slows flows of movement--air, transport, etc.--to the ways in which bodily exposure is complicated by an element of latency.
This image is interesting in how it captures a moment--a moment in a larger film, a moment in the chaos of what seems to be a busy street. Quite evocative of the toxicological sciences, in which the sampling of toxic substances represents a very particular moment in a very particular place, this image manages to convey quite a lot through this slice. Like toxics, the image will move, shift, and take on other forms and meanings as time passes. Camila's narration of the movement of lead points to the technological and structural barriers so many other toxic-laden communities face in making exposure visible. What is it that Camila holds in her hand? Is it a microphone for the film or some type of handheld monitor? Either way, both work to make exposure legible.
This image is interesting in how it captures a moment--a moment in a larger film, a moment in the chaos of what seems to be a busy street. Quite evocative of the toxicological sciences, in which the sampling of toxic substances represents a very particular moment in a very particular place, this image manages to convey quite a lot through this slice. Like toxics, the image will move, shift, and take on other forms and meanings as time passes. Camila's narration of the movement of lead points to the technological and structural barriers so many other toxic-laden communities face in making exposure visible. What is it that Camila holds in her hand? Is it a microphone for the film or some type of handheld monitor? Either way, both work to make exposure legible.
as i started to say in another response tot his artifact, for me this image conveys something about "text as toxic" since the framing really doesn't connect it to other forms or action of toxicity, although I think it was meant to say something about toxic racism. If you simply read a transcript of the words you wouldn't get the same feeling (at least not so immediately) you (I) do reading it this way: ill at ease, queasy, unsettled and uncertain. So: "citizens" here transmits a kind of toxic effect, a poisoning of discourse through cleaning up this reference to people in a lynch mob! Is the nameless author serious? Following a convention? I can read also read it as if Mark Twain wrote it: "citizens" with a satiric edge from "a pen warmed up in hell," as he once described his own writing. But I think a more reportorial, straight reading was the one intended - but still, you canlt help gertting a sense that these terms and the system of law and justice they supposedly reference have in fact been terribly poisoned by a racism they can't name...
I see toxic policing. Again, I believe the author should mention toxicity in the design statement.
I see a racist toxicity in the policing practices of the LASPD and the attempted masking of this toxicity. However, I would appreciate the author building their own conception of toxicity.