Sometimes I make little weird music video experiments and post them on my second channel on Youtube. This is one of those times.

To the extent that our view of the world is shaped by the media, such a belief is, of course, an effect of the expanded virtual environment manufactured by media industries. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a simulation (in the sense in which Jean Baudrillard argued that “the Gulf War did not take place”), must we not also assume that the conversion and interchangeability of all images of war, projected onto “Sarajevo” or anywhere else, now constitute the very conditions of our technologized commodity culture, in which distinctions between sign and referent, nature and culture, human and machine, truth and falsehood, real and representation appear to be collapsing? Must we abandon our claims to know or experience existence and consciousness of life in the same manner in which we cannot presume that there is a “real world” that somehow precedes or exists outside of representation?

– Johannes H. Birringer, Media and Performance: Along the Border (pp. 4)

One of the inspirations for my site-spec piece last year was the work of JG Ballard, in particular his collection of short-stories called The Atrocity Exhibition, elements of which would become the novel Crash. The short stories act as vignettes into the mindset of a professor experiencing a mental breakdown, and his attempts to make sense of reality by creating re-enactments and restagings of specific events which he considers significant, using students and patients as actors. Below is a link to an experimental student film based on The Atrocity Exhibition and David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash; be warned, however – both are NSFW and definitely not for the faint of heart or stomach.

http://putlocker.is/watch-the-atrocity-exhibition-online-free-putlocker.html

Looking through Sarah Bay-Cheng’s notions of temporality, what seemed to most resonate with me were her notions of time in performance and the Steinian/Bergsonian notion. Essentially it means, time is not a linear progression, but rather a stack, that can occur simultaneously or independently. This also brought up the issue of how technology can rewrite history, in a way like never before. By manipulating the media a state can effectively create a fake history, that is accepted and believed because the society doesn’t know anything else. For example, in North Korea they believe they won the world cup. This is because all of their media coverage supported this claim, and as all media is state controlled the majority of the population never have any evidence to disprove this.

Multimedia plays a massive part in modern day culture, dictating what information one can access, through a variety of mediums. Yet it is all filtered down. The search engine you use lets you view what it deems suitable, the news you watch is carefully selected, deciding what is important enough to cover, the news you read is the same. All the information you know about the world could be a lie. Obviously this is pretty extreme as people travel abroad ect, but it does make you question what is real? Or what is truth? Before we start some Matrix related conspiracy I’ll bring it back to the performance.

What if we used multimedia to rewrite history? A major moment perhaps caught on camera? Digital editing and live bodies can be used to change an event, and explore the aftermath.

Our discussions re. the mediated image and intermedial states made me think of a couple of different things that use the concept in interesting ways.

Consider, for a moment, the band Gorillaz – a virtual band with artificial backstories created by an artist and a songwriter, in collaboration with rotating session/touring members… that plays live shows.