Friday October 31 at 7pm

President TV

It has been said so many times it has become common sense. If you want a more fulfilling, relaxed and well informed life TURN OFF THE TV. And yet, if you have a phone (a sound device, n'est-ce pas?), it is even equipped with a screen. If you want to become president you must have the most presence on TV ­ and be allowed to have that presence.

Who needs aliens? We have the cathode ray tube experience morphing into every device over the last six decades dictating our desires and fears, creating monsters, and posing consensus to wars. As one radio show host says "there's a war on for your mind" and the tube is winning.

The ritual nature of TV is to host short undeveloped ideas, opening a crater for misleading conclusions. It is well known that attention span has dramatically shortened in the last twenty years. Imagination is dogged by all the supplied visuals. Spontaneity? Turn around, look up and you become part of the media virtual eye dispatched to screens for smaller private audiences. We no longer live in a social society. We live in a media society.

For all that is removed from us as individuals by the TV, in the larger more disquieting picture, it creates our policies on a thin tight rope of information and on the appearance of consensus building. When it is not running our life it is running our world.

The artists in President TV will talk back to this one way vessel, the TV.

THROUGH: November 1 - November 22, 2008

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