Saturation Station

The events of 9/11/01 created a panoply of images of mass destruction and made New York City, already one of the most documented and recorded cities in human history, become a global symbol of the American project. In Jean Baudrillard's essay "The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers" (Verso 2002), this sentiment is echoed and amplified by a kind of fugue state - Baudrillard regarded the terror strikes as part of a much larger system of mystification - of the world regarding America an an almost mythic mirror of human aspiration, and of New York in particular as the embodiment of that world condition.

In "Saturation Station" I worked with a multi-media artist collective "One Infinity" (now currently working under the title 47) to understand the kind of trance that the media portrayal of 9/11 created. "Saturation Station" posits that the way that the media has participated in the war effort as a kind of fundamental flaw in the liberal ideal, the achilles heel of the modern liberal democracy. We took images from all over the internet and made a mix from them into a kind of stream of consciousness collage. You could say that "Saturation Station" arose out some of the ways that the bombardment of images that occurred after the terror strikes, and the kind of repetition that the media used to highlight the intensity of the moment. Like the documentary project Here is New York or the German satirical photographer John Heartfield's portrayal of Germany during the early years of the end of the Weimar Republic, "Saturation..." confronts the reality of the terror as a media construct with a kind of exorcism.

Through repetition and by reflecting the way it was mediated and repeated over and over again in the news media of the West "Saturation..." acts as a kind of temporal cipher, reducing the repetition to a short term image overload. "Saturation Station" asks like Baudrillard in his essay "The Despair of Having Everything" - how much history can we take? Where Baudrillard could say "The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges itself upon the values of other cultures," "Saturation Station" investigates the linkages of the media and the representational "world picture" America lives in. Like a cocoon bursting open, like a flower blossom of terrible truth, these images try to evoke the media trance in hopes that, in the hopes that by understanding how the images of terror were beamed around the world, we can look for deeper underlying truths in the repetition. Again, it's a recursive logic at play here - one where by understanding the seamless repetition, one can break it down, and find human empathy with the victims of this terrible tragedy. Sometimes images speak far louder than any written words, and that is what "Saturation Station" portrays - the changing same, the real time flow of a culture living in loops, the circular hungry repetition of a country put in a situation of deep trauma by the events of the last several years, but unaware as to the reasons why there is so much anger leveled at it's policies.

"Saturation Station" is an invocation of hope, that outside of Baudrillard’s analysis where he says "What we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment -- is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of destiny that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to exert). Terrorism's support is not only based on the despair of those who have been humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks and programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity that has gone "global." (After all, isn't the supremacy of the human species over the rest of life on earth the mirror image of the domination of the West over the rest of the world?). This invisible despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless since it is the result of the realization of all our desires" America can find a new sense of purpose beyond the ideology of war and retribution the Bush Administration is pursuing on a global scale - using 9/11. It's a modest proposal for an era of total media.

The sound for the piece is taken from a collaboration I did with the New York based string ensemble "The Freight Elevator Quartet"

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