Michael Takeo Magruder

Documentation of Michael Takeo Magruder’s installation can be viewed on his website

http://www.takeo.org/nspace/2010-(in)remembrance_11m/

 

¿The rest is history? Informing without information in real time.

Information is a commodity. Institutions of power have always sought to control its flow, selectively directing, manipulating and overseeing its distribution to the masses. In the 21^st century – the Information Age – the issues are the same, but now they are in real-time.

The rise of globalised networks has made the world ‘smaller’ and more connected than any other period in our history. Great media corporations act as the gatekeepers of society’s information, using this treasured (and supposedly public) resource to achieve their own ends, often without regard for the ethical implications of their conduct.

Given this context, how can we as individuals in an increasingly global society maintain (or in some instances reclaim) the power to express our thoughts and create spaces for critical reflection, especially when our views exist in direct opposition to the powers in control?

We read our daily newspapers and watch the endless streams of live news reports, but in this age of media saturation many of us have become desensitised to the reported strife and horrors of our time. Conventional news often commodifies events into packages of tragic spectacle in which the goal is commercial sales and ratings, not the contextual understanding and critical debating of the event itself. Within this situation, how can we consider alternative views of these events, derive our own opinions and emotions from them and reclaim the stories and lessons they contain?

Magruder will undertake a process of research investigating into a specific regional history. He will build an archive of information from sources generated by members of the public, that exist freely within the public domain on media repositories (like YouTube and Flickr), social networking sites (like Facebook and MySpace), blogs, wikis, etc.

A series of visual compositions reflecting upon the event in question will be presented in La Opinon over a succession of days. Their purpose is to stimulate the viewer to consider the sequence as a whole, questioning the (re)emergence of the event’s history, and perhaps even to reflect on the overarching processes of media generation and public consumption in today’s society.