Notes
Rhetoric at Arms
Sophia Collender
Medium: video.
Public Domain artwork referenced in this piece:
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.
Artist Statement
Rhetoric at Arms presents an audio/visual manifestation of an excerpt of text from page 165 of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Union Square & Co., 2025). Blunt, clinical, and mechanical footage of concrete being smashed at various speeds under a hammer is recorded at both conventional and microscopic scales. The repetitive nature of the action and its disorganized relationship to distance render the larger whole of what is being smashed largely indiscernible and irrelevant. The only discernible quality is the fact of the violent act itself.
Hemingway’s text is remixed, and overlaid as caption and audio. It articulates how the rhetoric of wartime becomes irrelevant to those living it, and how the ideals and the virtues used to justify and fuel violence are reduced to monotonous, hollow, and effectively nonsensical combinations of sound. The experiences and aims of the individual become drowned out by the respective missions and goals of the larger powers involved, even as those larger goals may become increasingly incomprehensible and irrelevant to the individual.
About the Artist: Sophia Collender
Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) Graduate Student, Tisch School of the Arts
Sophia Collender is a New York-based artist and researcher focused on investigating the complexity of the systems that underpin daily life. Through microscopic and time-bending film, web development, sculpture, and writing – Sophia explores the relationships between humans, technology, and their environments with the aim of reimagining visions of progress, and exploring the various scales of activity at work in our world. Sophia is receiving an M.P.S. terminal degree from NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications program, and has been awarded funding from the Interledger Foundation and from the NYU Prototyping Fund, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
Footnote
To view a digitized version of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway:
Citation:
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms / by Ernest Hemingway. New York (State): Collier Books, 1986, c1929. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39076002425580