Information InFiltration. Pronounced: "Discordia r us."
[- How can you tell it's a commercial?
By amy, Section question corner Posted on Mon Jul 12th, 2004 at 11:12:03 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
Aileen's story, "How can you tell it's art?" made me think of an installation I saw last month at the Sonar Festival in Barcelona. If you can't tell from the photo, in the picture frames is live, black and white ASCII video of the people standing in front of the displays. The text on the right says, "Motorola - Intelligence Everywhere." On the pink stand to the left are mobile phones, apparently the product being marketed here. (I guess the connection is camera phones? Seems a bit oblique to me... ) Anyway, mediaartists have been creating lo-tech ASCII video projects for years as a means to subvert the hi-tech aesthetics of commercial media. Is this simply a case of the cliche "The mainstream appropriates the avant-garde?" ...
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Or, in an age of "reality TV", where the mainstream ostensibly distributes "power to the people" through a myriad of lo-tech consumer devices (such as camera phones), are the dichotomoies of hi-tech vs. lo-tech, corporate monopoly vs. indy media getting more complicated?