performance
Untitled Performance featuring Robot Helmet
Notes
I am interested in the relationship between human and television, specifically, how people process a steady stream of information from advertisements while watching television. This work disconnects television messages from their original state of coherent broadcasting, and rearranges them to present a montage of ridiculous programming that I, as a participant, would connect with, using both machine and the mind.
In this work, I edit fragments of television clips to create a presentation of remixed television reality. By using an agent of mechanical means with wires and cords that physically connect my machine-head to the television, the work then becomes a sculptural performance that includes video media. This combination provides a literal connotation towards the possibility that a human can become influenced by media messages, transforming one into a potentially useful technology of the message itself. This explores, therefore, the human and machine relationship.
In my own experience of television viewing, I observed that there is an overwhelming mass amount of commercial messages that fill up broadcasting space. I became fascinated with the nature of the "quick message" and its target audience. While studying and meditating on advertisements and general television broadcasting during the development of this project, I found myself making a transition to feeling annoyed with the constant bombardment of nonsense messaging I was exposed to, and accepting them as analytical sources of inspiration of understanding television as an influence and technological companion. As ridiculous as some of the logic of the public viewing may be (which my project focuses on), such programming has the power to make strong social statements about our current society, and whatever the intention of the message may be, there will always be a follow up message.
I wanted to depict a human/machine relationship in which the human accepts the machine’s information and processes it by what appears to be an elaborate mechanical means. I took into consideration that many of the issues that television advertisements targets are often about subjects like glamour, fashion, and the standard of modern aesthetics. I wanted to challenge these ideas by creating visually menacing and disruptive connections to the machine itself. At the same time, I am maintaining a willingness to sit down and engage with the presence it releases. This visual reference to the man and machine relationship ironically encompasses the very system of advertising, and the infamous "punch line" as a property of appeal. Because I am using literal and somewhat clever tactics to express my own ideas, much like a commercial does, I become a product of the system in which advertising works. This irony helped me understand further the nature of attracting the public to a recognizable form, and procure the viewer’s attention. In this strange paradigm of self-awareness and self-expression, I found my project to be successful in displaying a literal man and machine relationship, but I adopted the very system in which successful punch lines and messaging works.
I would not consider this work as a protest of commercial messages, but rather an investigation into the speed and space in which television messages become a part of us, settle into our collective consciousness, therefore creating a man/machine relationship.