Artist Statement

While the power of sonic messages shall not be underestimated, our interaction with the world is dominantly visual. However, the noise of sonic advertising invades and occupies the individual differently than the visual ad. While our attention is demanded by visual means by a myriad of advertising forms, vision is restricted to a single angle of the open eyes.

A sea of visual noise can quickly be broken down to individual messages much easier than an equal sea of sonic noise. This principle allows for the great density of visual noise within the public realm. A majority of corporate businesses program various versions of Muzak, which are openly designed to influence customers, additionally including variations of jingles and slogans in broadcast and closed-circuit audio systems. In the advertising industry a good campaign is a ‘sticky’ one; a message that bounces around in the mind in loops. All of these tactics have been applied to the fullest in recent US Presidential campaigns. Obama even won the Advertising Age's marketer of the year for his 2008 campaign.

This could be a motive for an increased amount of headphone usage in public spaces, increasingly from the emerging generation. It’s easy and convenient to drown out predatory noise with personally chosen self-programming.

In a world filled with the feverish, fantasy imagery of advertising demanding our attention on television, in print, online, on clothing and on any product imaginable, any relative quietness can be unsettling. When predatory advertising can fill our every waking moment, we may find it comforting to juxtapose our visual reality with the sounds of our choice. When the physical world is reportedly seen as boring, trivial or unpleasant, we can easily retreat to the Network at any time, almost anywhere with computers smaller than a deck of cards. Physical and virtual realities have merged, and their integration will continue to escalate. The result is an increasingly virtual relationship to reality and communication between individuals. We are demanded to participate in a hyper-reality if we choose to remain connected. What parts of modern life are free from media messages? This is a differing view from the official hypothesis of advancements in technology equating to human progress.

The result is an increasingly virtual relationship to reality and communication between individuals. We are demanded to participate in a hyper-reality if we choose to remain connected to current events. What parts of modern life are free from media messages?
             Largely, the reclusive world of Noise counterculture has been an effort to reject and escape mass culture. It can be a method to choose one’s own delirium. To use the powerful tools of media to create one’s own altered state of reality. The lack of rhythm, melody, and apparent or traditional structure can create an experience outside the customary movement of time. The sensory overload of frenzied strobe psychedelia can clear the mind of the boundaries of established language and linear cause-and-effect. It can become clear that flickering images on a screen representing the human experience is merely an artifice that can never be fully trusted regardless of its origin. It is similar to peaceful protestors using corporate products to videotape and document their own subjugation and trauma delivered by the same corporate authorities that sold them said products. It is the use of mass-produced cheap slave-labor products in ways they were never designed to operate. It is reverse-engineering a device of mass manipulation into a hallucination that reveals our daily modern reality as what it has been since the birth of modern media: a deception.

Ironically, the greater the density of the sensory overload the more the electronic signal can come to resemble the organic sonic realms of nature. The more powerful the entropy of audio/visual static, the more we can discover hidden within the signal; or within our own consciousness. The thicker the digital mirage, the deeper we can fall into our own minds and break from the influence or agenda of others.

An antivenom is derived from the original toxin. It is not developed independently. But viewer beware, most artists have their own agendas.

Things I commented yesterday:

In response to (paraphrasing) the status: Reality TV is OK. It's part of the natural evolution of scripted narrative, and those who disagree are mostly in denial.

OR they see the scripted cycles of 'normal behavior' of sitcoms of which Reality is a descendent.

Reality TV is the fulfillment of decades of programming in repetition of stock-situations and their subsequent canned responses and their predetermined resolutions.

Klosterman innocently analyzed this phenomena in Sex Drugs & Coco Puffs in his Saved By The Bell chapter when he observed, 'it's as if the viewers wrote the script.' To paraphrase another of his points: nothing was learned or truthfully discussed in any episode. Only what had been predetermined as acceptable narrative parameters within the history of sitcoms was presented.

People behaving badly has become an entertainment standard. Look at the evolution from Homer Simpson, Seinfeld, South Park, Family Guy, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, etc. Reality TV (The Real World, Survivor, American Idol, Punk'd, The Simple Life, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Jersey Shore, etc) further established sociopathy as a social norm and a vital prerequisite for fame.

But you're ignoring the escapist nature of entertainment. No one really wants to watch shows about ordinary people. Reality TV allows people to imagine living in their own TV show.  You can argue that it's proletariat, but you cannot delegitimize it's entertainment value. Art and Entertainment unfortunately are very different,  often but not always removed from each other.

I'm not ignoring the entertainment factor, for the majority of the shows I listed I have clearly viewed beyond 'research' motives.

The problem is that Reality becomes an Orwellian inversion. Those who study Documentary are quickly confronted with the conflict between truth/reality and artifice of the cinematic form. All of the 'fathers of documentary' staged their narratives. There are vast untruths rampant in the archives of Documentary and equally in News Media since its origin. It's becoming increasingly difficult to determine 'the real' amongst the ocean of media that claims to be presenting 'truth'.

I'm the last one to bury the nature of escapist entertainment. Entertainment is the most effective means of manipulation. To play even further with the line of fiction and reality as Reality TV does by its doublespeak namesake is very dangerous because the sad fact is that the overwhelming majority of viewers are not media-literate. They don't see the edits, don't hear the overdubbing, the construction of 'events' from multiple days/months/YEARS worth of footage. All documentarians do some form of this, as do all News media.

The nature of the products that you are entertained by is immensely important, because it's what's filling your brain when you 'turn your brain off'.

Narratives are very different from reality, but narratives are the tool in which we shape our reality. Narratives are one of the most powerful weapons in all of recorded history.

I've always argued that Reality TV is equally as fake as fiction. If viewers were interested in watching 'real people', broadcast television is one of the worst places to look. So is the abyss of Entertainment media.