In
contrast to the prehistoric discovery of fire as a tool for the creation of
leisure time and the opportunity to build culture, contemporary television
turns the tables by adapting us to someone else’s idea of what culture is
supposed to be. Franklin Street Works’ latest media exhibit, Your Content Will
Return Shortly, dissects this seductive and ubiquitous tie between viewer and
TV from the perspectives of commerce, technological perception and development,
as well as the overall psychological sculpting of society.
“This show was inspired by a desire to connect my own research on historic video exhibitions and readings in media theory—including texts by David Joselit and Marshall McLuhan,” explains Terri C. Smith, the exhibition’s curator, “with observations of our own contemporary relationships with ‘television,’ which for many is streamed at will via a laptop, bypassing the TV set altogether.”
Preceding
the 5:30-7 pm artists’ tour and café discussion this evening with Siebren Versteeg
and Jeff
Ostergrem (both of Brooklyn) and New Haven-based Catherine Ross, Franklin
Street Works has arranged with the University of Connecticut to present its
second ekphrastic poetry reading beginning at noon, courtesy of Pamela Brown
and students from her UConn writing class, whom, as post-VHS/CRT-era adopters of the latest iteration of technology,
like live streaming video, iphones and Blueray DVDs, will offer generation-specific
interpretations of the works on display.
Catherine
Ross, IFO, 2006, video still,
courtesy the artist
|
Among
the eleven artists participating in Your Content, Jeff Ostergren contributed
Stimulus, a timely two-channel video
display that uses the details of pharmaceutical ads to demonstrate how, with sirenic
finesse, TV delivers viewers to advertisers as a captive audience, while
pretending to primarily serve their entertainment and information needs. Sports
coverage and sitcoms aside, “commercials ARE the content,” Jeff reminds, as “the
programming they surround are sublimated by the lurking capital that funds them,
that relates to the content that is geared towards a… focus group-determined
viewer.”
Made
possible in part through the support of the Community Arts Partnership Program
awarded to Franklin Street Works by the City of Stamford and a two-year grant
from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Your Content Will Return Shortly
opened on January 24 and is on display through Sunday, March 24. In addition to
Jeff Ostergren’s and Emily Roz’s pieces, the program features the work of Christopher
DeLaurenti, Eric Gottesman, Jonathan Horowitz, Sophy Naess, Lucy Raven, Martha
Rosler, Catherine Ross, Carmelle Safdie, and Siebren Versteeg.
When:
Thursday,
March 14, 2013
Noon-1:15
PM, UConn Poetry Reading
5:30-7
PM, Artists’ Walk-Through & Café Discussion
Where:
41
Franklin Street
Stamford,
CT 06901
Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211
203-595-5211
___
Additional
Information:
Douglas
Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, Atlas (2010)
David
Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, The MIT Press (2010)
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore & Shepard Fairey, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Gingko Press (2005)
Marshall
McLuhan & Lewis P. Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, The
MIT Press (1994)
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