The “Debt Reducer" invites participants to contemplate personal and collective implications of debt in a culture of over-consumption. It solicits them to text message their personal debt to a mechanical corset aggregator that, after a humorous visual response, juxtaposes visitors’ accumulated debt data with various projected real-time debt statistics.

Globalization has spread patterns of consumption, and Americans are the physical and financial extremes of it. We are physically and fiscally glutinous with many obese citizens and incredible spending habits. Personal consumption defines our economy. As of 2008, the U.S. national debt is over 9 trillion dollars. Startlingly, $353 billion was spent on interest alone in 2005 as opposed to $61 billion on education. 43% of Americans spend more than they earn: $1.22 for every $1. The average savings rate was negative in 2005 for the first time since the dust-bowl depression era.

Calling attention to this culturally invisible backdrop, my answer is the “Debt Reducer". A motorized corset and interactive video installation responds to individual debt levels. A wall-sized video projection overlaying the corset shows numerical data and gives a bodily sense of information through video variations. Debt is suffocating, so this "belt-tightening" torture device conveys a graphic, bodily sense of debt through its mechanism and video. It encourages people to text message their debt from their cell phone. For anyone with debt, the device squeezes a bloated dress-dummy torso through an elaborate pulley and winch system and plays video of cascading gold foiled chocolate coins that accumulate according to amounts of text messaged debt. Absent of viewer input, it randomly selects debt related data, including the U.S. national debt, average American debt, average student loan debt, typical mortgage debt, etc. It also incorporates all submissions and finds the median of gallery viewer debt as one of its statistics.

Corset Fabrication: Michelle Wacker
Electronics & Mechanical Design: Alexander Reben
Metal and Mechanical Fabrication: Joe Esser
Programming Assistance: Raed Atoui

Funded in part by an FAHSS Interdisciplinary Initiatives Grant, Stony Brook, NY.