In our ultra-mediated societies today, constructed behaviours and actions from popular culture are increasingly reflected in day to day reality, like a powerful feedback loop between the synthetic, processed or constructed world and that of the analogue, human or ‘real’ world. The medium may be the message, but the question is what happens when you hold up a giant mirror to this signal.
This paper is concerned with the politics of imitation, real-world mash-ups and other accidents of ultra mediation in contemporary society. It is less about Elvis impersonators or people who act out scenes from Star Wars in their back gardens, and more about how these imitations and coded behaviours have began to invade the mechanisms of state.
These invasions are where the primary accident of ultra-mediation is located. An identifying symptom of this accident is the proliferation of imitation and repetition. More and more events and situations in the real world, and in the mechanisms of state, are similar to each other and to those from popular culture. This paper will identify examples of these reflections and point to their origins in the world of popular-culture.
Following this it will explore the politics of imitation and try to contextualise it both at the level of the individual, and South African society today. It will conclude by looking at how identifying these feedback systems is a productive creative strategy in the context of relational artworks by exploring contemporary South African artistic practice that reflects these concerns.
No comments:
Post a Comment