About the Cover
August 15, 2008 - Bangor, Maine

On September 12, 2001, I was working as a television salesman.
My relationship with television has always been a reluctant one. Selling them in a thankless work environment only made me bitter towards the medium. Having to sell them the day after the first American tragedy of the 21st century was infuriating.
Television was washed over with remembrances, interviews with families looking for missing people. Some people hadn't been able to leave or enter Manhattan yet. There was still smoke in the air. I don't think I had yet heard the phrase "al-Qaeda," or the name of Osama Bin Laden.
United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center, for me, approximately 126 times every seven minutes that day, news networks repeating the footage as I waited for people to buy televisions. (By the way, they did. One customer asked where everybody was, as if it was merely another slow business day. Most of the people in the store wore American flags. At the time, that gesture was still a show of community, only later would it evolve into a symbol of aggressive patriotism.
About a year later, haunted by that bombardment of imagery, I decided to throw myself into a dedicated act of remembering. The result is, in partial form, presented in the cover art of the book you're holding: Text blocks of the names of the Sept. 11 dead, colored to reflect the sequence of events which ended their lives.
It feels self-indulgent to say the process was harrowing. All I did was format a list of names into an image converter; I didn't worry if my girlfriend was stuck in the building or if a grandparent would be able to leave a nearby apartment. I just read and formatted every name that I could fit. An initial version of the project had names which served as links to Google search results. That process, designed to make these names human again instead of reducing them to television moments, was overwhelming.
When I put the piece online, I was reluctant. It was covered by The New York Times not based on any press release or promotional effort on my behalf, but by a posting to a mailing list asking people if this was OK or not. I was still uncertain when the paper interviewed me, in what ended up being the dubious highlight of press attention in my artistic career.
This, in itself, is problematic. Art about Sept. 11 is beyond any artist's ability to control. I was charged with being lazy and opportunistic, praised and criticized for capturing a patriotic zeitgeist. I've taken the piece offline and put it back up multiple times since the launch of the Iraq war. To me, those images are, on the one hand, a simple attempt to connect to this tragedy on a human level ˆ the names layer ˆ but they are also, inevitably, the image that launched the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, and the politics of fear. As such, I have a bipolar reaction to what the piece revealed, in the face of my own artistic and political naiveté: Humanizing the event doesn't stop us from politicizing it.
In fact, it contributes to the power of the images themselves as a tool of fear. It plays with the emotions of survivors, even those who merely survived watching it on television. It intensifies the images to a saddening extent, triggers a flight-or-flight response, swoops in with giant military might and gathers our will into wars. This statement, itself, is another side of the hypocrisy of humanization: I'm using it for political purposes, too.
This brings us to the flip book. I am drawn to the flipbook because it is not political. It simply says what has needed to be said: This is what happened. There is the smooth satisfaction of undoing the event by flipping backward, but always the temptation to make it happen again, in the way books inevitably turn forward. I am sure this book will provoke some angry reactions. It ought to. Some people don't need to be told that this event simply happened: it has hit them personally, and they have a right to whatever reaction they want.
The rest of us, however, need to move out of a collective haze. Most of us have. The end of the Bush Administration brings the end of the Sept. 11 decade. The flipbook comes just in time: Put it in your pocket. Leave it there, like car keys. But stop forcing it to mean anything outside of what it was: a senseless day of violence that we have more than made up for abroad.
There was a kind of beauty to that day, a reminder of the limited scope and fragility of our mortality, made almost comfortable by our collective confrontation. I don't think we lived up to the aftermath of that confrontation, and wallowing in Sept. 11 nostalgia ˆ which we have turned into two wars and long airport queues ˆ is not going to help anyone.

Eryk Salvaggio