event
Supported by National Endowment for the Arts
event re-presents 31 news items, compelling the user to “reflect upon the minute isolated occurrences of which history in an empirical sense is composed.” As with his earlier works, Magruder is concerned with media saturation and its subsequent devaluation of information; copyright — who actually owns the information, the event that triggered it, the history it becomes?; is it the ‘truth?
This Flash work has been emulated with Conifer by the Electronic Literature Lab in June 2021. To view this emulation click here.
TAXONOMY
Audio/Visual | Data | Media | News | Perception | Reality | Text | Web Art
REQUIREMENTS
Flash Player. Sound on.
MEDIA & ACHIEVEMENTS
Stormy Weather
by Elizabeth Bard
Net Art News, Rhizome.org
You’ve heard of ‘sex haze’ this is ‘media haze’, a kind of fog created by the constant barrage of sound, image, and text that surrounds and defines current events. For his new project, event, American artist Michael Takeo Magruder has parsed recent BBC broadcasts and layered the audio, video and text related to each news item. Multiple perspectives should provide clarity – instead they obscure, producing a cloud of media static. We pick up only the most basic buzz words, the outlines of shadowy forms. Magruder’s project is not fun to look at; he excels at creating just that feeling of helplessness in the face of too much information. This feels more like a primitive IQ test than a new media project – if so, we are all failing miserably.
Michael Takeo Magruder’s event | Jo-Anne Green | Turbulence.org