Sunday, May 4, 2008

Media Burn

After watching Ant Farm's Media Burn, I couldn't help but see the film as not only being satirical for when it was made, but critical of contemporary media culture. The "President" character, which was an obvious cartoonish impersonation of John F Kennedy, also seemed to ridicule how our current president has odd relations with media and attending public events.

Similarly, when the car drove the the mountain of televisions, it reminded me of watching America's Funniest home video's, when a group of people videotape themselves doing something stupid. After watching the film, I wondered how difficult it would be to stage my own television demolition. If I did create my own demolition display, instead of playfully acting as if it would be shown on TV, my video of the destruction could be displayed on youtube, possibly even inciting more acts of media "burning."

Media Burn of course allowed its audience to look at "media," specifically television, in quite an odd way. But after viewing their performance, I was unsure what they were prompting their audience to view, and felt that their performance was visually amusing, but not as thought-provoking as they might have hoped. However, their intervention was one of the most entertaining I've had the pleasure of viewing, since the visual destruction of a flaming television pyramid is almost impossible to turn away from.

No comments: