Last year the new media artist Ramsay Stirling revised Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s seminal “Television Delivers People” video from 1973. In Serra and Schoolman’s six minute piece, scrolling yellow text on a blue screen, accompanied by Muzak, spells out a blunt critique of mass media as a form of social control with such statements as “You are the product of television” and “In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold.” Through “entertainment,” the video declares, television serves the gods of corporations and the status quo.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G64GwcXEitM[/youtube]
In his 2008 net art adaptation, “Internet Delivers People,” Stirling similarly scrolls yellow text on a blue screen set to elevator music. But he replaces key words from the original video and shifts the apparent locus of critique to the internet, now offering up such statements as “The Product of the Internet, the “.COM”-mercial Internet, is the User” and “The Internet delivers people to an advertiser.”
What are the theoretical stakes and results of Stirling’s substitution of “Internet” for “television”? And how might we integrate those answers into the discourse of decentralization and democracy that dominated our recent symposium?
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