IT'S YOUR CHOICE
Monumental video installation, Centre for Contemporary Art DOX, Prague, 2015; 40 min. video cut from various found ideology narratives, taken from commercial, political and religious television speech, projected simultaneously on 50 large-screen TVs.
IT’S YOUR CHOICE
(artist text)
It’s your choice. Choose between 50 identical cinema-size flat-screen Panasonic televisions, serially manufactured to be distributed to your homes for better enjoyment of identical entertainment and “a few words from our sponsors”. Our commercially-entertaining culture is directly composed of seriality in commodities and in images that endow meaning and identity to these commodities. Our central ideological concepts, originality and individuality, are paradoxically serially produced and sold through commodities and images (advertisements) to as many consumers as possible. The whole process is more than about the mere sale of goods, it directly affects the creation of main-stream culture of our society.
This competing for control takes place at the level of abstract relations, primarily in the sphere of categorisation of information and domination of various Environments. Combining the dominant position of visual communication employed by the commercially-entertaining industry and the postmodern shift towards the relativity of meanings, a major change of the status of information occurs – a value shift from content to application. It is not substantial anymore what is said, but for what purpose it is said. The content then is easily adjusted or straight-on completely fabricated (as we see Russia Today do now or as Fox News put it some time ago, truth is all about perception). The value of information lies primarily in its application. It is possible to say anything.
Visual communication is a broad structure inherently capable of ultimate relativisation of meanings. The advertising machinery is a deconstruction laboratory of our commercially-entertaining culture, where anything can be said, anything can be dreamt, anything goes. It is something like a dream-landscape of collective consciousness in which we only wake up into another dream. It is the endless story of overlapping media narratives, talking at the same time, trying to be noticed, to be liked and enjoyed.
The installation It’s Your Choice is an invasive probe into this endless stream of media consciousness. It is a method of sorting and stacking found narratives, overlapping and cutting through them in random incisions to see if other and perhaps new forms of narrations can issue. After all: “The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms. Its potentialities are not yet half explored. Already the most interesting and, in some cases, the only readable part of most American periodicals is the advertisement section.” (Aldous Huxley, 1968) But you don’t have to believe it. It’s your choice.
