N.A. follows Rickard’s critically acclaimed A New American Picture, which depicted street
scenes that were found using Google Street View to virtually access forgotten and
economically devastated locales of America. For N.A., Rickard looked to YouTube as a
resource to extract a chorus of American voices, ‘cultural music’ in a way that is detailed and
revelatory but often fragmented. Over a three-year period he culled through countless amateur
videos found at first by using American city names as keywords, he later shifted into more
specific terms, opening up silos of visual data from which to explore the American cultural
landscape. As Rickard became immersed in the platform and sparked by the sometimes
predatory and often vicious nature of social media, his exploration turned darker. Moving on to
keywords such as “Hood Fight”, “Crackheads Gone Wild”, “Passed Out White Girl”,
“Gangstalking”, “Sideshow”, “Racial Profiling”, “Illegal Search” or “Police Brutality” yielded
tens of thousands of videos that painted a picture of American violence, anger, frustration and
rage, targeted at economic isolation that is pervasive.