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National Debt Project

I began the National Debt Project on August 31, 2009.  Since then, I have sent the change that I have found during previous day Certified Mail through the United States Postal Service to the Bureau of the Public Debt to help fund the National Deficit.  If I do not find any change, then I send a penny of my own.  I copy President Barack Obama on all of my letters and I post all correspondence online at: http://www.nationaldebtproject.com

Significance:

I believe in the idea of things beyond what they are.  Culturally, the National Debt is a crucial designator of a despondent cycle. Our capitalist system keeps us dependent to the idea of debt.  It keeps us fearful of that which we do not have and it is looming over our heads too large to conceive of, intangible, and contrived without our direct hand.

How can we be responsible for an idea painted in our inadequacies when we do not understand exactly how we were inadequate?  How can we be responsible for an idea so large that we couldn’t imagine it, let alone imagine it once there and now missing? It is no wonder that American’s lack a sense of the scope for our scale in relation to the National Deficit. We have never touched a piece of it, removed it or put it back in place.

Proposal and its Impact:

I do not view the National Debt Project as a complete work of art yet. I consider its intentions and naissance artful, but not a complete artwork as it has not transformed into anything other than a feat of artistic endurance.

I believe that an idea has the possibility to insight social change. I plan to launch the National Debt Project into another phase of itself.  No longer will the project revolve around the artist’s plight, but it will instead challenge the idea of the National Debt by replacing it with action.  Using the right mixture of press and social media, I aim to launch a campaign to encourage American’s to gradually begin to physically, cent by cent, take back their portion of the National Deficit.

I plan to begin a dialogue with the Bureau of the Public Debt around the ways in which the public can become more involved with the National Deficit. This will all be part of a culminating performance to go hand and hand with the letters that I will continue to send to the President and to the Bureau of the Public Debt. I also plan to convene with marketing and advertising specialists to use social media and the press to disseminate the idea of the project and garner a public response.

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