Between the relentless spread of consumerism and rapid advancement of technology, we find ourselves exposed to ever-greater amounts of visual stimuli. From television, movies, and the internet, to and endless sea of magazines, billboards, and print media, a steady stream of highly mediated imagery assails us. In the escalating battle for viewer attention, more and more of our information, regardless of its content, arrives in the form of elaborately manipulated visual sequences formally and structurally indistinguishable from mass entertainment. This results in a gradual poisoning of our experience, a profound level of alienation produced as our own internal narratives are colonized by the logic of the spectacle.

As a visual artist complicit in the production and consumption of images, I find this situation both fascinating and deeply problematic. I’m particularly concerned with a a kind of violence which underlies our overexposure to mediated images-- a violence not necessarily linked to content, but rather to the dissociative effects produced by the quantity, speed, and disparity of content of the imagery we consume. My work attempts to expose this violence while acknowledging its seductive force.

I work mainly with material appropriated from commercial film and television. Using re-recording, compression, and signal degradation to break down the original information, I’ve tried to collapse this breaking down these media images, I’m trying to uncover layers of meaning not apparent in the original context. At the same time, I want to problematize the act of viewing itself, in the hopes of revitalizing our relationship to the visual.

Director:   Anthony Discenza  (their other films)
Producer:	Genre:  Experimental
Country:  USA	Copyright Year:  2001
Original Format:  Video	Color Type:  Color
Sound Type:  Magnetic Stereo	Length:  00:09:02
Original Language:	Subtitle Language:
Label:   Aspect Magazine
Other Info: Audio Commentary by Marisa S. Olson: Marisa S. Olson is an artist, critic, and curator. Her site-specific installations have been seen in various North American and European cities, and her essays on contemporary art and visual culture have appeared in Flash Art, Art on Paper, Afterimage, Wired, Mute, Artweek, Surface, Planet, Rhizome, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. As Associate Director of SF Camerawork, Marisa curates exhibitions and edits Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts. She is also adjunct curator for Zero:One and has previously worked on programs at the ICA, London; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Walker Art Center; the American Film Institute (AFI); the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in San Diego; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and SFMOMA, where she serves on the media arts advisory board, and is co-founder/editor in chief of the zine, SMAC!. Marisa has been a visiting scholar or artist in residence at the University of London/Goldsmiths College, the Smithsonian Institute, Northwestern University, the New School, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Technical University-Dresden.

This film has never been screened

Microcinema Interview/Article:

Compilations containing this film
	Commercial DVD Aspect - The Chronicle of New Media, Volume II (MC-192) Artists of the West Coast	2002	Available from the Microcinema DVD Store