More for You

(Installation)

DESCRIPTION

A site-specific multi-channel video installation created for the In(n) and Out of Nowhere exhibition. It includes five separate video representations of a banal site-specific “reality” (a telephone, lamp, toilet, general view of the room/bathroom and CNN) intermittently overlaid with the text “MORE FOR YOU.”

STATEMENT

In his 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America, theorist Daniel Boorstin proposed that the average American regards the media’s simulation or representation of an event as more “real” then the event itself:

“Until recently we have been justified in believing Abraham Lincoln’s familiar maxim: ‘You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.’ This has been the foundation-belief of American democracy. Lincoln’s appealing slogan rests on two elementary assumptions. First, that there is a clear and visible distinction between sham and reality, between the lies a demagogue would have us believe and the truths which are there all the time. Second, that the people tend to prefer reality to sham, that if offered a choice between a simple truth and a contrived image, they will prefer the truth.

Neither of these any longer fits the facts. Not because people are less intelligent or more dishonest. Rather because great unforeseen changes–the great forward strides of American civilization–have blurred the edges of reality. The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images–however planned, contrived, or sorted–more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.”