remote control
interactive real-time graphics internet based installation 
by shane cooper 
artist's statement
written for experimenta, australia, 2003


A regular television occupies a furnished white room.  On the television is what appears to be a normal news broadcast in progress.  The news broadcast is in fact entirely computer generated.  All graphics, the character, the voice, and all images are all generated in real-time.  The news text itself is continually accessed from internet news sources.  The news broadcast is a live, continuously self updating television program. 

A remote control unit near the sofa has only two buttons: TRUTH1 and TRUTH2.  These allow the user to choose between just two channels.  On one channel, the anchorman reverses the truth of the news, and on the other channel supports it. The effect is two news channels reporting the same information, but opposite in truth relative to each other. (An underlying linguistic manipulation program makes this possible.) 

There are several views of the media. Many are traditionally accepted ideals regarding it as Thomas Jefferson once described: a "counter-weight" to authority. This is the preferred notion, that the media is "on our side", that it behaves as a perturbing, beleaguering pest that keeps those possible sources of oppression in check, and it has to be tolerated by those authority structures such that the rights of people to recover truth and make informed decisions are preserved. This is optimistic, empowers people, and is naturally the preferred definition. But it may in fact be little more than a functional illusion. A more realistic view would be simply that the media, whatever it is, serves to promote those concepts that defend economic, social, and political ideas of those who own it. In this framework, much meaningful debate would be prevented, particularly when the large financial bodies that own media are also involved in events under scrutiny, as they often are. 


The concept of interactivity available in Remote Control is almost non-existent, and severely curtailed to almost laughable extremes. It can be argued, though, that in the context of television, this is as much interaction as the viewer is conditioned to expect. A similar type of interactivity, in terms of the quality of debate, occurs in the media when discussing substantive issues. Essentially, a limiting framework for debate is inherited from sources themselves. Debate generally lies in some restricted domain that is acceptable to those institutions that own media. And, taking opposite extremes of opinion within this framework does not release one from the framework. 


A debate within set limits strengthens much of the underlying assumptions of the framework. The framework itself is accepted de facto, whatever it is, in order to construct solid ground for a seemingly free ranging debate in a safer space. More volatile issues forming the foundation of the debate, such as exposing those private interests and sources of commercial investment, remain unmentioned or at best are tacitly accepted, as often these same interests are active in both the media and the topic. Debate occurring on this accepted foundation makes the foundation acceptable, in that the debate is demonstrated as occurring away from it. 


Noam Chomsky points out that effective propaganda will actually allow such critical debate as long as it occurs on a platform that accepts certain assumptions. This is what the name Remote Control really speaks to here. The low level of interactivity is in a sense what people are allowed within the accepted limits, and occurs by providing the two extremes along a simple line. In the case of Remote Control, the extremes are taken to their logical conclusions, basically exploring the validity of the envelope the news has been delivered to us in, and whether we can break out of it by altering the information we have been given. 


This work starts with the information from those 'agenda setting' sources that determine widely accepted beliefs and opinions. Noam Chomsky, again, describes agenda setting sources as those larger sources that have real access to resources, such as better access to correspondents on a global or national scale. Smaller papers or television stations do not have the same resources, and so information moves from the larger, better funded structures. It is in this way that they determine agenda. 


These are very large corporations, linked to even larger conglomerates that are most often involved in influential world affairs. They are not democratic in any sense of the word, and their power moves from top down. Like any corporation, they are moving products, buying, and selling. In this case, the product is audiences and the market is advertisers. So readers and viewers are sold to other businesses. So the media is formed largely by commercial, non democratic, self protecting organisms which act entirely in their self interest to survive. They are not moral creatures. They function to protect the power which emanates from within them, which keeps them alive. These are financial interests, interests of monetary investment. 

Given this, to what level of malleability can the provided information (here, the news) be taken to to arrive at truth? Or is it inherently flawed already? Can any information from these sources be altered at all, even when taken to the extremes, to arrive at truth? Or do we inherit something fundamentally flawed, a framework too limiting? 

-Shane Cooper 2003