Over the last couple of weeks internetters have been fascinated with a video that clearly showed ufos over Haiti. We'll forego all the talk of ETs and life in the universe and instead concentrate on the video itself. On this blog we've been explaining how our culture has changed through programming and lenses. In fact we've probably tired you all out from the blather. But we believe that it is pertinent to this time. Something has clearly changed in the way we understand reality. And this video is a good way to begin our discussion.
When I first watched the video it was after I had read a blurb that offered this as proof of real UFOs. And that first few seconds it had me. Woah! Look at that. Then the critical mind kicks in. But what became interesting was the way the video had used the tropes of media understanding in order to pass this off a "real." The first question that came to mind was how do we come to understand what we do in the electronic world?
First was the offhand way the camera works - hand-held, a little jerky. Then the way the lens is trying to focus on the objects as they move. Then the way the light works on the objects themselves - glinting in places, shadows in others. Finally that muffled sound of someone trying to work the camera. All fairly convincing in a way that helps convince that what your are seeing is "real." We have become accustomed to understanding what we "see" through the lens. Hockney in his book Secret Knowledge says - "we thought we saw the 20th Century, but in reality the camera saw it." Our news, our information, our libraries, our conversations, our businesses are now all electronic and conform to the ways that programming has been set up. Our basic understanding, from learning to research to communication, is now electronic. It has created certain expectations in our minds and it has created a gap between how we reason in the world today and how we reasoned in the world say 20 years ago.
Is it easy to be fooled by electronic programming? The best answer to that question is found in the aftermath of 9/11. I stood on the roof of my apartment building and watched the buildings go down. Overhead sheets of paper began raining down over lower Manhattan. The acrid smell of burned rubber coated the air. Across the building tops on Ludlow there were hundreds of us yelling and crying and feeling useless and horrible. What we all experienced was physical and real it was from there that we began to unravel and understand the events at hand.
Stunned I walked back downstairs to my studio and watched the event on TV.
Over and over the images were pummeled into our heads. A different type of understanding of the events was beginning to take hold and it had nothing to do with what most of us experienced that day. The video of the second plane is the one that sticks in my head. It looked like a scene right out of a Hollywood summer spectacle, and it has become the iconic video of the first decade of this Century. When we actually saw this event happen there was a palpable sense of fear, and I remember the sick feeling in my stomach. On the video it seemed contrived and false - but we knew it to be real - one coloured the other. Truthfully this video became the touchstone for all the reality videos that followed. There is a bit of this physical unreality in the UFO video as well. It follows the rules of electronic reality.
Since 9/11 watching the news has become a different experience. As we know there was an across the board support by all the media for the war in Iraq. Reporting was replaced by electronic media. Interviews of "experts" - neocons and Iraqi expatriots (some of who hadn't been in their country for years) - blogs that rehashed news stories adding their opinions became the new news - not to mention the faking and confirming of evidence from one media outlet to another without actually finding true confirmation - all were in play and part of the programming. The UFO video preformed a similar function. The artist involved released it with some false info that was corroborated by other false info. One lie corroborating another and then passing it off as a truth. Reality is determined through the media programming and the confirmation by that very same media as to its veracity.
Wikipedia is a prime example of the fight over how we define reality online. There was a recent article in the Times detailing the fact that corporations are editing the unflattering information off their Wiki entries. Programming is part of this process. Identity is determined electronically. We scan it and understand through the information that is programmed in. But what is the source of the information - where does it come from - who is imparting it? These questions should be part of the real investigation into culture, but this deeper questioning of sources has been lost - in fact it is frowned upon. As more and more media is bought up through M&A activity by fewer and larger corporations there will be less access to real facts, and more information created and imparted to us through electronic programming. Advanced culture with its implications of deeper investigation is being lost. And part of the drive into the shallower end of the culture pool is the lens. It scans material in - it projects images - pictures drive our interest in the things we see and it defines our visual input into the blind world of zeroes and ones. As we have become more dependent on determining reality through televised lens based images we have less understanding of physical reality - the physical realities and understanding of our existence.
Which brings us to entertainment. What is entertainment? In the dictionary its defined as a diversion. And it is the diversionary aspect of entertainment that runs throughout every program in the electronic world. Diversion. It has come to define how we interact, how we understand and - especially for artists and the art world - how we create and present our work.

more to come...