Tactical Information Bomb. 2004.
SUBMITTED TO EXIT ART'S TERRORVISION EXHIBITION January, 2004.
contact: jason at varonearts dot org

The image of terror is delivered via satellite, the ultimate tool of modern warfare. My television shows me in-depth descriptions of how my city will be attacked, creating fear in me as the viewer, which in itself is the desired result of terrorism. Tactical Information Bomb illustrates a world that reflects our obsession with this tele-experience of a hypothetical realty.

The phenomenon of telecommunications carries with it this ability to exaggerate whatever it comes in contact with. The speed in which it swallows the landscape and its immediate effect on millions of people simultaneously are deadly weapons. Everyone is armed with these weapons it seems, and the media at large have unprecedented access to world’s events as they occur. As a result, representations of terrorism seem like dramatic re-enactments of the events themselves. It is because entertainment is the most widely accepted language that our world begins to resemble “reality television”. People and events become cartoons of themselves onscreen; consequently our world begins to resemble these cartoons.

The ether, an all-pervasive ever-elastic medium, carries with it this fictitious dimension as it absorbs every last inch on Earth. It extends into our everyday lives (far beyond the geographic location of any terrorist event) with repeated warnings and detailed nightmare scenarios, infiltrating the collective psyche with a fictitious fear. My installation represents the result of this siege. I want to create an image of disruption, which is in itself the very essence of telecommunications. My installation consists of a painted cartoon explosion (the obliteration of the landscape - exaggeration itself). A video projection is jettisoned from the top of the blast, revealing the world’s horror and bombast transmitted, altered (the video is projected askew) - because this is not terror, only the images of terror. The video image itself is composed of abstracted appropriations from many different types of mass media, creating absurd juxtapositions that highlight the public’s pornographic obsession with the transmitted image: violence, entertainment, politics, sex. Layered on top of this media montage are fluid, gestural descriptions of the ether itself. The painted image has no alternative but to absorb the light from the video projection; the video is terrorizing the painting on the wall, distorting it against its will. The resulting combination is a representation of the place in which we live, a place where we experience the explosions as they occur on the screen. The world is committing suicide on CNN, and we are glued to the television.