I went to an excellent talk by Kathy Rae Huffman, last Wednesday at the CCA in Glasgow. Her talk was in conjunction with the Test Transmissions exhibition that explores the relationship that video artists have with television. She spoke about the early days of video art and showed some works. One of the works that she showed during her talk that I quite liked was “Chris Burden Promo” by Chris Burden.
The piece is very simple: Burden purchased some airtime on a few television stations, and then aired this piece, which is a series of titles that list famous artists in a sequence that begins with Leonardo da Vinci and ends with Chris Burden. A cheeky and humourous piece, it seems to describe with gorgeous economy the technique that most people employ when trying to advance their station in life – affiliate yourself with the A-listers.
In the leadup to the piece on the tape, Chris Burden is heard in voiceover describing how the experience of seeing these pieces on his reel can’t be matched by actually watching it on TV. He says: “… real TV has an energy that can’t be duplicated in an art gallery or a museum.” I liked that Burden pointed out the site-specificity of this piece: your living room!
Another tidbit salvaged from my scribbly notes is a bit about Kathy also speaking about how the Live Aid concert’s broadcast changed perceptions. She described how it was unlike anything that had happened before, and how remarkable this sense of literally millions of people around the world tuning in to the same thing at the same time was. The global broadcast of the concert and its widespread appeal permitted a sense of shared experience and unity on a massive scale. It led me to thinking how this might manifest itself today. Will the next “first” moment of this sort occur in Second Life or World of Warcraft, where “everyone” is watching or taking part in a particular event online? (Has it happened already and I was just asleep at the switch?) I’m sure that there will be many pivotal moments (like serendipitously catching a Chris Burden commercial on your home television, and tuning in to Live Aid) in these online worlds as well.
One reply on “Real TV”
Youwere mentioning if such an event could have already
happened on WoW. I would say technically yes – except it wasn’t experienced simultaneously, so perhaps that disqualifies it. However, it got enough press coverage from various sources that it’s become quite “famous,” – I couldn’t guess how many people have seen it overall. Not millions, definitely the 50,000 or so that have looked at the link.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the youtube link (another phenomenon that is worthy of study…):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gti6TClHx0w&search=WoW%20funeral
The backstory is that some asshat died IRL, so a bunch of his buddies hacked into his WoW account and put his character by a lake so they could have a WoW funeral for him as a sendoff. There was a line up a “mile” long of mourners all chatting and viewing the body and such. Touching.
However, said asshat had numerous in-game enemies, who banded together to crash the funeral. Some guy video-captured the whole thing, and slapped it together with nice musical accompaniment and such. It’s priceless.