Paul Rucker: A ‘PROLIFERATION’ Of Imprisoned Lives
By Mohamed Keita
“PROLIFERATION is not a viral video, [but] it could be one day,” says composer, musician, and visual artist Paul Rucker.
The multi-media project is an attempt at deconstructing the abstraction of US prison figures into a meaningful and emotional experience. His conduit is an immersive sound and video installation. In an era of shrinking attention spans, Rucker beckons all our senses for over ten minutes.
Individual frames of “PROLIFERATION” could pass for a satellite image of lights across the United States at night, but this video animation represents a somber spectacle: the sprawling formation of the carceral topography of the continental US. The flashing of small colored dots, representing prisons coming into existence over time, punctuates this spectacle. They gradually line up in patterns that follow the edges of states, the shapes of counties, and the outlines of the geographical boundaries of the country.
In 1900, there were roughly 57,000 people in state and federal prisons in the US. By 2005, the figure was 1.4 million. By now, many of us have repeatedly heard jarring statistics, either in the news, books, and popular culture about the US prison industrial complex. However, how many of us really comprehend the immense scale and meaning that such figures encapsulate?
Rucker would like his audience to think about the significance of each dot, not just as a prison but in terms of the great number of human lives it contains. “Each dot represents many human lives,” he says. “PROLIFERATION” is therefore a cure to the desensitizing effect of information overload. Rucker is hoping to touch his audience’s empathy.
The artist’s activism on mass incarceration, among other social justice issues, is informed by experiences that marked his life on either side of privilege. When he was just 13 years old, he was refused admission into a private home, apparently because of his skin color. The incident, which happened while Rucker was traveling with his school orchestra in his home state of South Carolina, left him in shock. “It took away illusions I had about how I was viewed by certain people. I really felt the world was an equal place where people were treated equally. My perspective changed. It took away my innocence.” Later in college, Rucker lost some of his childhood friends to crime (they were involved in a drug-related murder). It made Rucker ponder whether his life and family circumstances saved him from becoming another statistic of incarceration. Rucker has been the Robert W. Deutsch Artist-in-Residence and Research Fellow at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore since 2013. The stark economic disparity of his surroundings there has also moved him. “I live near the college. Just several blocks over, there is a great deal of extreme poverty. I find that disturbing.”
