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Radical Prints Up Close and In-Depth

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Berkeley # 43 Title: This is a People Sniffer Description: 58 x 74 cm ; red on white Image: helicopter with a probe directed at people - encapsulated -- slide

This poster is a place of intersection for many of the themes common in the UBC Berkeley collection: humanism, anti-corporatism, and a mistrust of technology.

General Electric manufactured a wide variety of armaments and equipment for the US Forces in Vietnam; this print imaginatively extends this train of thought to its logical conclusion, producing a nightmarish machine that is attuned to organic matter, capable of sniffing out flesh like a demonic ant-eater.

Juxtaposed with the monstrous creation is an almost saccharine row of young children holding hands, like a pattern cut from folded paper. However, the contrast between the sentimental and the horrific allows the print to make its chilling point. The 'people-sniffer' — and by extension the war it represents — is invasive and violating, fundamentally at odds with the human nature surrounding it. It is a highly advanced piece of technology and yet deeply deficient and morally blind in its inability to discriminate soldiers from children. Analogically, the poster makes this same claim for the company that makes the technology and the government that deploys it.