Summary
Monitoring the cable news channel before and after Sept. 11, 2001, the young Berlin-based Israeli-American chopped talking-head footage into single-word snippets, then wrote his own script. So here's Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, Robert Novak, Judy Woodruff -- and perhaps two dozen more -- voicing an 18-minute cycle of messages peevish, anxious, accusatory: "You love to complain about me in public, but guess who you run to at the first sign of trouble?" Apology ("Perhaps I talk too much") and pleas ("I need to know that I'm being understood") follow and, eventually, confession and insight ("We can't handle the quiet"). The effect is funny, then chilling; the CN-entities themselves remain frozen in their feigned concern, their fake savvy and costume gravitas. Only their smugness is genuine.
"CNN Concatenated" is much more than media criticism that suggests we ultimately "might not even notice the difference" between a terrorist attack and a weather report. Fast achieves something extraordinary: With its public voices, its pixel puppets forced to speak of private doubts (theirs and ours), his piece breaches the wall between the impersonal way media is produced and the intimate way it's consumed. Curator Elizabeth Thomas accents the point by screening "CNN" on a living-room-style video monitor, rather than "Global Groove"'s wall-sized projection.See the full content of this document
Extract
Tell a Vision
TELEVISION BECAME A commercially available technology in 1948. Quickly and perhaps alarmingly, much as with film and radio decades earlier and the Internet a half-century later, it grew impossible to imagine lif...
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