“Moguls
glory in amalgamation.” – William
Safire
WASHINGTON, DC - The US Department of Art & Technology
is today announcing its plans to release the Media Deconstruction
Kit (MDK) in response to an ideologically fractured Federal
Communications Commission vote to eliminate media ownership
rules.
“We will confront corporate control
of mass media, Secretary Randall M. Packer stated outside
his office in Washington, DC, “so
that a new century is spared new horrors of CNN - the issue
Americans
should care most about. We will appropriate with magisterial
fearlessness, transforming CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News into
magical images, and bring about the systematic reordering
of the senses through the deconstruction of live, broadcast
media.”
Secretary Packer has called on US DAT artists
to inspire other artists into action by undergoing aesthetic
operation
as a form of magic designed as a mediation between our
strange hostile world and the human spirit. FCC Chairman Michael K.
Powell, son of Colin, joined fellow Republican commissioners
yesterday in approving the changes.
The vote has engendered widespread public opposition by lawmakers,
consumer and advocacy groups and most American citizens,
who fear that further media consolidation will allow the “big
guys to get bigger and the little guys to decide whether
they want to exist any longer,” according to Tom Wolzien,
a senior media analyst at Sanford C. Bernsetin & Co.
New York Times Co., which owns 19 newspapers, eight TV stations
and two radio stations, declined to comment on potential
acquisitions or divestitures.
For better or worse, the proposed
regulations are to be known as the Powell Media Doctrine
(PMD). "I have had to make
peace with myself, to know with every fiber of my being and
intellect that this is the right answer, at least in the
short term," Powell said. "since it will greatly
benefit supporters of the Republican Party, thus insuring
President Bush’s re-election in 2004."
Abe Golam,
Presidential Candidate of the Experimental Party responded, “what
comes after the welfare state so many of our corporations
depend on is something we are only beginning
to understand in a political, economic, and social context.
For what comes next is Empire… We need not practice
what we preach,” avatar-candidate Golam cynically exclaimed, “we
need only preach what we want the television to transmit
to our robotic brethren. For it is our nation of robot worshippers
that reigns supreme.” The US Department of Art & Technology,
responding to the gravity of the situation, is collaborating
with artists
and engineers, including Under Secretary for Radical Militancy
Wesley Smith, to discover new tactics which stand at the
cradle of art and science. As Secretary Packer stated in
a recent Washington speech at Johns Hopkins University, “we
must achieve the total deconstruction of media in order to
build new formations, and we will advance this transformation
we’ve created for purposes of propaganda.”
US
DAT intends to distribute the Media Deconstruction Kit among
performance artists throughout the nation, who will
manipulate media coverage of the national election beginning
with the Washington primary in January of 2004. By providing
instantaneous access to live, broadcast media - and the ability
to act upon it - the Media Deconstruction Kit transforms
the one-way paradigm of broadcast media into many-to-many
forms of interaction by leveling the playing field between
medium and viewer.
The MDK will enable artists to remix live
news stories, TV plays, stock market quotations, manifestos,
advertising,
scramble fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts and
put the altered matter out on the Net as a revolutionary
weapon. The Department believes these techniques could swamp
the mass media with total illusion in 2004.
Trace Reddel, Under Secretary
for the Bureau of Pharmakogeographical Surveying, advocates
systems of varied media ambiences “diverting
[mass media] from its current roadmap to manufactured similitude
through an hallucinatory recycling of composted media content.”
US
DAT is now rallying the nation’s experimental artists,
including newly appointed Under Secretary for the Bureau
of the Aesthetic Hyperculture DJ Spooky, to prepare for the
virtualization of medial space. In the words of Jon Henry,
Chairman of the Experimental Party USA Exqusite Corpse, “True
Freedom comes from within and is manifested through one's
own struggle to be free… The situation is yours to
command, the space is yours to sculpt.”
Media
Deconstruction Kit Preview
(requires Quicktime plug-in and broadband connection)
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Recent Headlines
• August 22, 2003 - TEL-SPAN
Begins Live 24/7 Broadcasting
•
June 3, 2003 - MDK
Confronts Corporate Control of Media
• May 1, 2003 - Abe
Golam Enters the 2004 Presidential Race
• April 1, 2003 - We
the Blog
• January 21, 2003 - 10,000
Acts of Artistic Mediation
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