Alyssa Wright

Cherry Blossoms gives witness to the tragedy of war. The project starts in a backpack outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location, to the center of the city, are superimposed onto a map of Boston. If the wearer walks into a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates. A compressed cloud of confetti engulfs the scene, looking like a mixture between smoke, shrapnel and the white blossoms of a cherry tree. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death. With Cherry Blossoms human loss resonates beyond the boundary of conflict.