Friday Night -- 04.25.03 -- Video Forum -- "Media & the War"

Contents:
1. Basic Info
2. Description

________________________________
1. Basic Info

What: Forum
When: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 5th Floor
Who: All are Welcome

Participants: Ayreen Anastas, François Bucher, Paul Chan, Jim Costanzo,
Rene Gabri, Lasse Lau, Yates McKee, John Menick, Ulrike Muller

Format: An invited group of participants are asked to bring in 1-5
minutes of video or audio material relating directly or indirectly with
the media?s covergage of the war on Iraq. Each participant will be
asked to give a brief introduction or statement about the material and
why it was selected. After the artists are all finished a discussion
and q&a will ensue with all attending parties.

________________________________
2. Description

Forum: Artists Respond to the Media Coverage of War in Iraq, Elsewhere

It was reported that on Thursday March 20th 2003, one day after the war
offically started on Iraq, and more notably one day before the much
advertised "Shock and Awe" bombing campaign had begun, the highest rated
program in the US was a rerun of the popular sitcom "Friends".

If television is often the place for people's escapism and pleasure,
then one simple conclusion is that the news portraying the war must also
compete on this level, of entertainment, fantasy, spectacle, etc..

Clearly this is a more straightforward analysis of one relation of
"culture" or "cultural production" to the war against Iraq or the "war
on terror" or "war" One that relates to spectacle, entertainment, shock
and awe, the sublime.

If the first Gulf War signalled the dawn of what Paul Virilio has
referred to as the Fourth Front, the orbital front, what can be said of
this war? What aspects of this Fourth Front were more formulated, more
menacing, more dangerous, more violent? What new questions were raised
and what older questions remain?

And so it is with questions that we enter this evening's forum, part
discussion, part presentation, part event.