Artifact: TSA-Inspired Art

Nick Gillespie from the January 2008 issue

In the last year, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the widely reviled agency responsible for snagging verboten lotion bottles and other contraband from air travelers, confiscated some 8 million items, including guns, knives, soda cans, nonbutane lighters (and many butane models too), and much more.

When it comes to knives and scissors, items with blades shorter than four inches are supposed to be allowed, but individual agents have wide discretion to ban anything they feel might present a safety threat. As a result, there are thousands of ostensibly OK scissors that end up in the TSA equivalent of Gitmo.

The D.C.-based artist Christopher Locke buys confiscated scissors that belong in the “grey area between what should be allowed on the plane, and what wasn’t allowed” and re­fashions them into strangely disquieting spiders and bugs, viewable online at heartlessmachine.com.

They look ready to attack, their animus piqued no doubt by their arbitrary fate in a post-9/11 world striving for moral and political clarity. Had another agent handled them, those scissors might have already landed in Hawaii.

Comments

|12.27.07 @ 10:19AM|#

I was expecting something more along the lines of a Kabuki chicken. But those work.

Elemenope|12.27.07 @ 10:23AM|#

That's some pretty wild stuff. Nightmarish, you know, like the evening news. But made of scissors and fashioned into bugs.

Josiah|12.27.07 @ 11:07AM|#

If only this had ran before Christmas I could have used them as stocking stuffers.

greenish|12.27.07 @ 11:59AM|#

They would be $100 stocking stuffers, unfortunately

|12.27.07 @ 12:36PM|#

I, for one, welcome our mechanical, razor-sharp, octoped overlords.

Episiarch|12.27.07 @ 12:36PM|#

They would be more like stocking punji sticks, actually.

|12.27.07 @ 5:57PM|#

These look suspiciously like the robotic arachnids used to track down Tom Cruise in "Minority Report." I assume TSA will soon make use of them.

Chris Locke|12.30.07 @ 8:40PM|#

You could buy them now, and have your holiday shopping done WAY early for next year. You know, in case your family is really into punji sticks.