Re: <documenta X><blast> visual commodity
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Wed, 09 Jul 1997 16:06:16 -0400
think of the nether-world of making television shows, selling airtime to
advertizers, and then inducing the public to watch them...
perhaps with the rare exception of the "pure motive" moments on
television, the shows themselves are designed for the amount of advertizing
they can generate; there is a deep collusion between the producer of the
show, who will tune the lifestyle/feeling tone of the work as closely as
possible to an audience with money to spend and the desire to spend it, and
the advertizer who will pay big money to have his product or service
"inserted" into that particular lifestyle trance... there is a massive
human effort at balancing the qualitative expression of a pseudo-reality
like Baywatch, with an exact per second calculation of what the collective
attention, delivered in a highly receptive state of mind (sexiness and red
colors cause certain hormones to be release in the brain which cause it,
the brain, to lose a great deal of its critical faculties), will be worth...
The viewer, in turn, "pays" for the privilege of having small amounts of
endorphins released in his brain with his attention span. The wore and less
sexy the show, the less advertising can be sold, because the viewer is only
willing to pay with a lessened degree of attention.
Although payment with money between the makers of background
programming (the ostensible "show" itself) and foreground programming (the
ad, the real reason for the show's existence) can be calculated down to the
penny, the transaction between the viewer and the broadcast is slightly
more elusive, so techniques for determining what people are "really
thinking" have to be developed. Only when this hard to define number, based
on wiewer reactions and purchasing habits, etc. is gathered and studied,
can the shows be further developed and pricing, both in money and in
attention span-time be developed.
However, the human mind is ever fertile, and we now have the phenomenon
where the two have collapsed into infomercial reality, where the foreground
and the background become the same thing, and an enthusiastic, bought and
paid pseudo-audience applauds wildly for the latest tire inflator like
romans at the circus. So a new space of fake-authenticity is created, where
you can then pay for the participation mystique of the brain improvement
tape set directly.